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Old 04-11-2008, 08:21 PM   #30
Samson
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: United Socialist States of America
Home MUD: SmaugMuds.org
Home MUD: Arthmoor MUD Hosting
Posts: 249
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Re: What do you think happened to LPmuds?

I'm going to repost this here since the cesspool atmosphere at TMC has made participation there entirely useless:

Threshold,

I think you may well have hit the nail on the head more or less exactly. DIKU based muds tend to be pretty quick an easy to set up, you can get people building areas using OLC within an hour, and there are tons of snippets to be used as add-ons. The ease with which most DIKU bases can be run in Windows also seems to have a big impact.

Many DIKU codebases are still actively maintained with a very public presence from their current stewards. Even if they happen to have taken over a project after the original authors left it behind. From my experience it seems that once an LP project is set aside by the original maintainers, it's a huge undertaking to revive it.

I've also seen a bit of a perception of seclusion among LP maintainers, in that they tend to stick within their own niche and rarely seem to venture out to more general places. This is also true to some extent with some DIKU communities, but not nearly as much.

Cratylus has done a rather amazing job of reviving several old projects that had been laying dormant for awhile. Getting them to work in environments they weren't intended for, offering help where needed, that sort of thing. He's just one man though.

It could also just be that the LPs are the first sign of something more general, such as a shift away from text based games in general. You'd be surprised how many school and college age kids these days have no idea what a MUD even is. Let alone the differences in all the codebases out there.
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