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Old 12-29-2007, 11:44 AM   #81
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

I agree with nearly all of this. Forget the client. Make the creation and playability quick and easy. NW is similar to Mina's second paragraph. As an immigrant in the game you start off with a few skills and powers. More things are learned as you go through.

What I don't like about the GUI MUDS I've tried, especially this latest one RUNESCAPE. They make you go through this tutorial that is cumbersome and annoying as hell. As if you are some neophyte to online gaming. This should be opted out of as a choice. Let me play and play now, not spend 12 hours in a newbie area or tutorial.
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Old 12-29-2007, 03:37 PM   #82
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

You're wrong. They've had 10s of millions of registrations. They've currently got over 1 million paying players and another 6.5 million or so that touch the game at least once a month. They peak at about 200,000 simultaneous players incidentally.

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Old 12-29-2007, 03:49 PM   #83
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

Unfortunately I'm not really sure that's true. Most MUD developers and players never use the forums on TMS or Mudconnector and while that's similar to the commercial MMORPG world in as far as there are no forums or whatnot that everybody's on, there's way more private communication in the MMORPG world from what I've seen. There are a lot of private email lists, for instance, where a lot of the commercial MMO devs talk somewhat freely, and there's way more face-to-face communication as text MUD people don't attend many conferences. At GDC (the biggest game dev conference) for instance, I am usually literally the -only- speaker who is actively running text MUDs. It's disappointing though I understand why too: It's expensive to go to conferences if you're running MUDs as a hobby. I think the text MUD world misses out though, as the text MUD world in general would benefit greatly from more exposure to the wider world of development.

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Old 12-29-2007, 03:52 PM   #84
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

Yeah, that is very true.

That's not an advantage. If you want to convince yourself look at the most popular MMOs. Only one of them (WoW) has an upfront fee. The others are all free to play with optional item sales or subscriptions. The boxed sale model is a huge barrier to entry that is only worthwhile if you have the marketing dollars to push people past that hurdle. Games that depend on viral growth (like Runescape or Habbo for instance) are all about lowering the barrier to entry as much as possible, not raising it.

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Old 12-30-2007, 12:39 AM   #85
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

Let me reprhase that. That's not an independent point but rather an extension of the paragraph above it. When we're talking about games that we're willing to learn to play, we're much more willing to learn a game that we've already purchased. You're right in that the initial decision to PURCHASE the game is a very big deterrent for people, but once it's purchased, the people who've actually BOUGHT the game have already made the decision to learn it. Perhaps this is simply a moot point.
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Old 12-30-2007, 04:05 PM   #86
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

Speaking of deterrents for entry, this one is a pretty big one. Why should your game be entitled to get my personal information? Just because I want to try playing it? How do I know that this isn't some hoax? Personally, I think that this is a big turnoff for your players as I personally would never give your game my personal information in that situation and found Imperian's prying for such information somewhat offensive. If a false information wouldn't work (it did though, when I tried Imperian), I would play something else instead. When combined with IRE pay for advanced acceleration business model, which is explained by this stage, the registration gives a very good point to turn away from the game and go do something else. With the registration, you force people to take a risk and trust you, with no good reason given why they should. I claim that a lot of people will choose not to trust you because of the information prying and go away.

Seriously Matt, asking for people's personal information in order to play a MUD is losing you a lot of customers. Runescape doesn't need to know my name to let me play, why does IRE need such information? You are losing a substancial amount of new players due to this (or so I claim), so I'm interested in knowing why the information gathering is so important that you choose to make a sacrifice of this magnitude. I suggest that you test it by removing the registration and rl questions and have some sort creation of game account instead that doesn't ask any extra questions (meaning the personal ones, character creation questions necessary for playing the game are not counted as extra questions) beyond the required account name, password and character name (if different from account name) and see how much does this affect the % of new players who will create an account after logging in and not turn away before this stage. I claim that your % of new accounts will double after the personal questions are removed as people won't feel that your game keeps a some kind of register that contains their personal information.
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Old 12-31-2007, 03:34 AM   #87
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

Once money becomes involved, you need to retain people's real life information in order to deal with things such as chargebacks, bounced checks, etc. You don't need it initially, but if you're playing a game that isn't free, you will need to supply this information sooner or later anyway.
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Old 12-31-2007, 07:10 AM   #88
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

What do you mean by personal questions? Are they asking for things like your favorite sexual position and whether you have any identifying moles or markings on your genitalia?

Or are you simply talking about full name and an email address?

If you mean the former, then I agree, that's too much and will turn a lot of people away.

If you mean the latter, well I don't know of many (or perhaps any) commercial enterprises that are interested in dealing with a customer who is not even willing to provide their real identity.
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Old 12-31-2007, 01:55 PM   #89
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

Interesting point. The main reason we ask for personally identifying info is to help people get back their characters when they forget the password (and sometimes even the character name itself if they are coming back after a long hiatus) and just in general to know our customers a little better. It's nice to be able to see a character and think, "Oh yeah, Pete Jones....cool guy." Of course, people can just lie and put in false info (making it very hard for them to get their character back if they lose the password unfortunately), but most people who fill out the registration appear to fill in legitimate details.

Still, your point is worth considering. I'm going to be pointing one of the guys at this and asking him to try a test where we compare conversion % out of registration with current system vs. one that asks for less info. Thanks for the idea!

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Old 12-31-2007, 09:25 PM   #90
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

I remember I didn't even get past the EULA that was shown on Achaea . I don't know if you still have the user agree to it at login(do you store statistics how many disagree?)?

I dont remember why I didnt agree with it but I think it's because of the user content rule where it states that the user automatically licenses content to the developer by participating in the service. It makes the game like a big bottle where everyone adds content to the bottle but gets nothing back.

What made me disagree especially was that there doesn't seem to be any rock solid explanation what counts as User Content. Might it include private communication in the MUD? I am curious if others have had similar problems with that rule that have forced them to disagree.
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Old 12-31-2007, 09:46 PM   #91
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

Is it possible for you to track the numbers on a certain part of newbie tutorial completed? This would be an interesting data for the purpose of understanding why 96% of people who create a character in your game don't like it enough register to keep playing. If the newbie tutorial is divided in missions or parts, you could keep a track on how many people complete what stage of your tutorial. This way you could locate the stages where the dropdown percentages are the largest and see how you could improve that part of the tutorial. If a lot of people complete the tutorial and still won't register, then the registration process itself is one possible reason. By reliably tracking the the subphases, you can guess the reason to be the previously completed part of the tutorial or the part during which the did eventually quit. The numbers for the substages will help you to locate the potential problem phases and with those, the reasons for the players turning away from the game and their magnitudes could be more reliably determined. Some interesting questions:

-How many people were put off before the tutorial introduces your business model? For these, the likelihood of it being the text-based gaming or some other mechanics of the game they didn't like being the reason for leaving.
-How many people were put off after they learned of your business model? Some of these people could be players who aren't too happy about your business model, but part of this uncertain crowd would probably stay if you wouldn't ask the registration questions, which at that stage might feel like a commitment. This uncertain crowd is not sure whether or not it wants to make this commitment. This is one reason why registration could be such a turnoff. I think that some of this uncertain crowd might stay if you don't ask them questions that make them feel like they have to commit into it right now. Some of these uncertain players might eventually turn into paying customers if they stay (and even if they don't become paying customers, they are still useful to you as the free players make the game more attractive to new players and paying players can feel that they are special), so it would be financially sound not to push them too hard for information early on as this might scare them away. You'd need the substatistics to gauge the magnitude of this effect, though.

As a free to play game, you don't really need any personal information about the player to let him play. If you need some information about him for the payments or the delivery of the purchased product (such as IRE credits), you can ask for such information alongside with the sale when it's relevant.
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Old 01-01-2008, 04:59 AM   #92
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

I personally don't see any big issue with them asking for that information. All they ask for is name, email and birthdate(required due to US laws and protection of minors, anyone under... I think 13 can't play). The other questions are things like, "where did you hear about us?" and what part of the world you come from(USA/Australia/Asia/etc) which is usefull for a business to get an idea of where most of their customers/players come from.

Not like it's hard to write down false information, and remember what it was you used incase you need to get a password back or something.
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Old 01-01-2008, 02:17 PM   #93
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

Very few disagree with it. Our EULA is very standard in online games. You're agreeing to the same thing (phrased differently) when you play WoW, Runescape, etc.

Yes, it includes, of necessity, everything you do in the game. If publishers didn't get a license to all content created (including right down to chat transcripts) in-game, then players could demand that the publishers remove logs of their play from their servers, for instance

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Old 01-01-2008, 02:24 PM   #94
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

Yep, we do that. The biggest drop, by far, happens at the first stage of the tutorial, as that's when people hit a full text environment. That's the rub really and fundamentally there's not much that can be economically done to 'fix' that situation. When we advertise to graphical MMO players it's inevitable that tons of them are going to drop as soon as they hit text.

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Old 01-03-2008, 07:15 PM   #95
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

I think one way MUDs have to attract players is to have clients with maps. Why should someone remember where to go back to? why should someone switch between the game screen and a browser map?

Matt, for your games for example. It is difficult to orient in there.
I have posted many times on your forums asking for you and your guys to recode the Nexus and include an automap.

Each MUD should have an automated mapper.
And please don't tell me that CMUD and ZMUD have one.They do,but do you think that players want to waste time downloading new softwares to just being able to play a MUD?
MUDs need to provide features way above of what is expected or thought expected
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Old 01-03-2008, 08:45 PM   #96
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

Yep, there's no arguing with this. It is flat-out better to have a client for your players rather than making them download 3rd party software, and it is flat-out better for that client to have mapping than not. In any kind of development environment though, whether it's a lone hobbyist or a team of professionals, you have limited human resources and you have to make choices about how to deploy them most effectively. It's sucky that Nexus doesn't have mapping software built-in yet but we have a lot on our plate and haven't gotten to it yet.

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Old 01-03-2008, 08:59 PM   #97
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

One way to deal with it is to make an announcement that you are working on mapping for Nexus and have an estimated date. Then update regularly the progress.
In addition,you can make it as an extra feature available for a one time fee or something
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Old 01-03-2008, 09:25 PM   #98
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

Announcing we're working on something when we're not is not a good idea. As I said, our resources are being put on other things currently. When we have the resources to add mapping to Nexus it'll get added. (and we'd never charge for it either)

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Old 01-04-2008, 09:14 PM   #99
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

Understood.
My point is that you and IRE are the leaders in the MUD community(from what I can tell) and IRE announcing/working on something like that will create a good repercussion throughout the community. Me thinks
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Old 04-01-2008, 07:42 AM   #100
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Re: Reaching out beyond text MUDs

My experience is that the conversion rate is very low when trying to reach out beyond the traditional community sites. Matt, your stats indicate about 19% at the first barrier, fyi the same calculation at the gets about a 30% conversion. Where were those banners run though? Your conversion ratio will always depend on the community you're advertising to.

Anyhow 30% is all well and good, but you're spot on, the huge dropoff happens in the first minute of actually playing - when they discover it's text, when the text whizzes by impossibly fast etc. I completely blame ourselves, we could be so much better at anticipating what problems new users are likely to have and doing something about it. Imo, a which splits the various outputs into several boxes would be the answer, something along these lines or better which Flash and I wanted to develop 5 years ago at wotmud but never had a chance to.

I also understand from some thread I saw elsewhere that you're also in the midst of developing a MUD based on a specific book theme/author. You'll find that helps because there's a base of people who are already interested in that world. There are certain things you should do now to maximise your return from that in a year's time though.

... my request to all you commercial guys would be this. If you could give some GUI based on the standard MUD applet that any MUD could hook up with some minimal config back to the mudding community without strings attached that'd be great. You're all developing these in some shape or form, and whilst it gives you a competitive edge, if the community as a whole doesn't do something to help itself it'll be in deep doodoos sooner or later.

Matt, you're talking a lot of sense in this thread about what works and what doesn't, and although we'll always have our differences because you're commercial, everyone who runs a MUD should be paying attention to this thread. Especially the fact that the data is based on stats rather than gut feeling. What we have are the benefits of analytics and data tracking; I'm also an analytics and data tracking weenie. I'd recommend anyone that doesn't to get interested in this subject and use it to work out how to prioritise your resources (which in the case of us free guys, is time and effort).

Last edited by nass : 04-01-2008 at 09:54 AM. Reason: typo
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