[Threshold]

I think you make a good point, and it is unfortunate that one of the few areas where we do have somewhat of a "community" is in an area that we don't need it as badly. Development tools are great, but more, easier to make MUDs is not really what we need most as a gaming genre. In fact, the ability to easily get a mud hosted and started probably did a lot of damage to the genre.

We need more warm bodies - both as a whole and per MUD. More MUDs before we have more players just dilutes the pool and hurts the MUDs we already have.

There have been a few efforts to work as a community on getting the word out, or marketing MUDs to a larger base of people, but they failed almost before they started. That's where a lot of the sniping and "I don't want to help because this will help <insert name of mud they hate> more than it will help my mud."

When you hear fans of other niche forms of entertainment trying to get the word out, they happily tell you about some of the biggest players in their niche. Can you imagine your average MUD player or admin explaining MUDs to someone and being willing to tell them about a really big, popular MUD other than their own? That would practically never happen.

Generalizing here...

If you loved folk art, and you wanted to get someone into it, would you right off the bat show them the most obscure examples? No, you'd show them some of the biggest breakout artists that they are more likely to enjoy, and if it caught on you'd start showing them some of the more unique artists in the genre.

For an example closer to home, if you wanted to get someone into MMOs, would you be more likely to show them World of Warcraft or Dark Age of Camelot? Sure, you can easily argue that DAoC has dramatically superior and more interesting PvP, but is it realistic to expect a total newbie to the genre to understand the deep, challenging gameplay? Or to tolerate getting "pwnt" in PvP as they learn the intricacies of it? Of course not. But showing them WoW is an easy way to get them sucked into the hobby. It is pretty, it is accessible, and it almost plays itself. If they enjoy WoW, then you can show them stuff like EvE Online and DAoC and other far more complicated, niche members of the genre.

The MUD Community has never demonstrated a willingness to promote itself as a hobby regardless of which MUD(s) benefited the most right off the bat in terms of users gained. As a result, every MUD is fighting the entire battle solo in an effort to bring people to the hobby one person at a time. Its definitely a challenge.