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KaVir · 04-19-2008, 08:08 AM

If you're talking about Gemstone, etc, then I did actually go into that on the other forums as well (it's difficult to summarise a 24-page thread in one post)

"The big pay-to-play text muds are losing popularity, but I see nothing to suggest that the popularity of text muds on the whole has decreased."

"I've not seen many adverts for the pay-to-play text muds, but the largest of them (Gemstone IV and DragonRealms) have fewer players than they did a decade ago. However the big pay-for-perks muds of today either didn't exist or weren't yet making money a decade ago. And there are a larger number a 'big' free muds than there were a decade ago."

It looks like an accurate representation of the number of listings on TMC, but I'm not sure how well it reflects the actual number of muds (back when the number of listings was around the 1800 mark, I recall complaints about how so many of them were unreachable).

Also, as has been pointed out, if the question is the 'health' of muds as a whole, a lower number of muds would probably be preferable. For example, after the original GodWars code was released, new ones kept appearing all the time (and vanishing just as frequently). There were around a hundred of them listed at one point, but even the most popular of them never came close to even half the playerbase of the original mud. When there were only three muds using the codebase, all of them did well - but when there were dozens of them, none of them did well.

04-19-2008, 08:08 AM	#13
KaVir Legend Join Date: Apr 2002 Name: Richard Home MUD: God Wars II Posts: 2,052	Re: The "Health," of Muds If you're talking about Gemstone, etc, then I did actually go into that on the other forums as well (it's difficult to summarise a 24-page thread in one post) "The big pay-to-play text muds are losing popularity, but I see nothing to suggest that the popularity of text muds on the whole has decreased." "I've not seen many adverts for the pay-to-play text muds, but the largest of them (Gemstone IV and DragonRealms) have fewer players than they did a decade ago. However the big pay-for-perks muds of today either didn't exist or weren't yet making money a decade ago. And there are a larger number a 'big' free muds than there were a decade ago." It looks like an accurate representation of the number of listings on TMC, but I'm not sure how well it reflects the actual number of muds (back when the number of listings was around the 1800 mark, I recall complaints about how so many of them were unreachable). Also, as has been pointed out, if the question is the 'health' of muds as a whole, a lower number of muds would probably be preferable. For example, after the original GodWars code was released, new ones kept appearing all the time (and vanishing just as frequently). There were around a hundred of them listed at one point, but even the most popular of them never came close to even half the playerbase of the original mud. When there were only three muds using the codebase, all of them did well - but when there were dozens of them, none of them did well.