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Old 04-11-2013, 03:36 AM   #21
Threshold
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

camlorn: Wow. You've been playing some crappy muds. You need to expand your horizons. Take the 10 or so "best muds." There are more unique features in those games than in every single MMO ever created - combined.

Your description of MUD combat is worse than MUDs I played 20 years ago. So please: branch out! There are far better muds out there than the ones you described!

Straw man. That isn't what was said.

Forcing/requiring a graphical UI in an existing successful game is a bad move and disrespectful of the loyal gamers responsible for your success.

If someone wants to "go graphical", they really should just make another game to complement their MUD. Forcing players who LIKE a text game to play a graphical game is not a solution.

Another Straw man. Nobody said that and nobody does that.

MUDs change rapidly. That's part of their charm. It is easier and faster to add content to a MUD than to a graphical MMO precisely because you don't need new graphical assets.

Just because people may not agree with the changes YOU want to happen doesn't mean they are opposed to change. There are a lot of MUDs that are very forward thinking both in features and even in accessibility.

is 17 years old and in the last year our usage has increased by about 50%. Our new user creation rate is back to near peak levels.

So I'm going to disagree with you on the basis of both principle and factual data.

Granted, we've done a lot of things to make this happen.

The gaming landscape is very competitive. You have to constantly bust your butt to get people to discover your game.

Trying to be something you aren't isn't a solution. MUDs are text games. Some optional graphical UI bells and whistles can be nice and convenient for some users. But beyond that, you're taking away what actually makes MUDs special and different, while you alienate loyal players.
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Old 04-11-2013, 03:40 AM   #22
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

Funny you should say that. Not only can you play Threshold in a browser:



But you can also play Threshold through Kongregate:



I definitely think giving people more ways to play your game is very important. There are actually quite a few MUDs now that have custom web browser clients. And for those that do not, the TMC browser client can do the job as well as some other options.

And on mobile, Blowtorch for Android is really quite good.
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Old 04-11-2013, 04:04 AM   #23
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

Not really relevant to the point I was making. The post I responded to claimed that "what is really needed is some way to play muds off a browser that non Pay to play mud can access. The biggest barrier in my opinion to increasing a Mud's population is quite simply the inconvenience of having to download a client ... people need to try muds before they have any chance of 'liking' muds. And they are far more likely to try a mud if it doesn't require a prior download."

My point was simply that such an option already exists, and is in use.

Personally I would be more inclined to go with the FMud or DecafMUD web clients, as they support MSDP, which is more clearly defined and more widely and consistently supported (probably because it's available as a snippet). AFAIK there are only about 8-9 GMCP muds in total, most of them owned by the same company, and I think they've all got their own web clients already.

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Old 04-11-2013, 07:11 AM   #24
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

I wouldn't necessarily recommend FMud as it's a Flash app and I think HTML5 would be a better bet going forward. FMud will be 5 years old in a couple of weeks and the technology has definitely moved on.

I've been and while a lot of the code is pretty ugly anyone is welcome to use it in their own projects.

I think people are missing the point with the text vs graphics debate. Lack of graphics is only a small part of what makes MUDs unappealing to modern audiences and while a fancy web client certainly won't hurt, it's not going to change the nature of the beast.

Whether it's Bedlam's client, Batmud's or IRE's new(ish) HTML5 offering, they all look pretty enough but it's still just fancy wrapping around a terminal window. You still type commands at a prompt and the game play still dates from the 1990s.

This isn't a criticism of those games and they all have their market, but it's a mistake to think that lack of graphics is the the reason why MUDs aren't more popular with modern gamers. If you really wanted to bring MUDs into the 21st century you'd need to fundamentally change how users interact with the client and how the text is formatted and presented, as well as the actual game play itself.

is an example of a modern text game that has 20,000 monthly active users. The reason it's more popular than all MUDs combined isn't just because it has graphics as well as text.
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Old 04-11-2013, 10:15 AM   #25
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

Flash is on the decline due to what seems to be a general sense of inevitability that it will never leave the desktop. HTML5 is clearly the way forward, and it can already do all that Flash only could do several years back. I'd venture a guess that more of us know JS + HTML than Flash.

I understand where this comes from but it's not a reason to go Flash. My HTML5 app already can read MSDP, and sending can be added in a matter of minutes. It's pretty trivial to add multiple protocol support once the binary data transfer piece is working.

MSDP may be better-documented, but it is prescriptive and restricted. If the client is MSDP-only, the protocol specs would need to be expanded significantly in the process.

I know for myself that if the UI logic is in JS, GMCP/JSON would be a constant temptation. You can send any kind of information in JSON, and parse it natively.

There's nothing wrong with a cocktail of protocols. That's not something the end user sees or cares about (in the wider world).

There are two points here. One I agree with 100%, that we need something that does away with the terminal window.

The other point I agree with only to a degree. The nature of MUDs does make them hard to adapt to a modern interface, but it's not an impossible task or a foregone conclusion. And I don't think anyone has tried to tackle the challenges with a team.

Some existing MUDs probably lend themselves a lot more to becoming drivers of a graphics-only interface. But you're right that the input/output layer would have to change, in some cases dramatically. I'm not optimistic that I'll find a lot of excitement there. Ours is an enthusiast field, and we pick our battles. We also tend to pick at each other rather than team up, so the chips are not stacked in our favor. But at least we're talking about what I have for a long time considered to be the elephant in the room. Who knows, maybe

Looking at successful browser-based games can be very educational. To me, it helps to think of a MUD as a next-gen server for a browser-based game. It supports real-time communication / push data, and hundreds of commands instead of several dozen. It has an actual "spacial" world to explore, with thousands of entities, and complex systems for questing or crafting etc, each of which will have to be visualized in an organic fashion. These elements make any MUD a big challenge to harness visually, or present in a way that appeals to casual players, but what if it can be? That would be pretty awesome.
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Old 04-11-2013, 05:02 PM   #26
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

Browser-based games are definitely the place to look to see where muds ought to be going. I’ve thought about this a little more, and like most of us, I’m 100% certain the issue isn’t “graphics.” Some people like games with awesome graphics, some people don’t care. You’ll never win a person looking for awe-inspiring CGI movies over to muds.

The issue also isn’t entirely interface. That’s part of it, because as mentioned by someone above, it’s a little inconvenient to download a client. But it’s also “weird” to download a separate program that’s not a game itself, but a program you use to access a bunch of games that fit this strange category. That mentally places muds in this strange, set-apart classification, so that they’re not “normal games.” A lot of mud players like that separation. They don’t equate muds with the type of game, so much as with a telnet interface and a bunch of text. They'll tell you that if it has graphics and isn't text only, it's not really a mud. In their mind, telnet=mud.

But a browser-based way to access your mud, built right into your webpage (while a good start) doesn’t fix what I think the biggest barrier is. Muds are just plain difficult to learn and get into. If you’re not a hardcore gamer looking for the latest title for your PC or console, then odds are you’re looking for a simple game to pass the time. Having to learn a bunch of text commands and type them long-hand into a terminal window (versus clicking on things, typing the first letter of things, moving around with directional keys, etc.) is hard. Chatting with others isn’t so different from a chat room or forum (though it comes across as weird to have to type “say” in front of things), but remaining in character, writing a background and description, and roleplaying with everyone you meet is hard. That’s a huge entry barrier. You can’t just log into a roleplaying mud for a few minutes the same way you can go play a few fun flash games online. Roleplaying muds are something you really have to learn and invest yourself into. If I’m not a former tabletop RP gamer and I’m just looking for a fun game to pass some time on the internet, and you put Threshold on Kongregate next to some Bejeweled clone (just an example – no hate for Threshold here, and definitely no love for Bejeweled), I’m not going to take the time to learn muds and roleplaying. Muds are only appealing to pre-existing roleplayers. Very few casual gamers are going to invest the time to learn, and to play make believe on the internet.

I think there’s a huge opportunity for non-roleplaying muds, though. Especially with a sweet client that lets you click a bunch of things and type one-letter hotkeys, maybe with a built-in minimap. If people will take the time to grow a farm on Facebook, they’ll play around killing and crafting things and chatting with other players in a browser window, as long as it’s easy to learn and they don’t have to do any of that nerdy roleplaying stuff.
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Old 04-11-2013, 06:05 PM   #27
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

I just found out the mud I play is actually on the mudgamers site.




I am actually talking about this with tthe MUD I play on the forum and I got this response

So maybe my statement is actually still valid?

Last edited by Verbannon : 04-11-2013 at 06:11 PM.
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Old 04-11-2013, 06:45 PM   #28
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

Some free (as in beer) web based MUD clients for you to choose from:
I've no idea what that guy is talking about re port 21 and java or flash clients.
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Old 04-11-2013, 06:55 PM   #29
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

Free beer? What does 'free' (As in beer) mean?

Last edited by Verbannon : 04-11-2013 at 08:45 PM.
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Old 04-11-2013, 07:59 PM   #30
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

While I do think that moving muds into the browser is the answer, I don't think it's good enough to just slap a java / flash / websocket telnet client onto a web page as an alternative (and probably inferior to a dedicated telnet client) way to play an existing mud.

I think the legacy of telnet is holding muds back because no matter how many cool things you can do for your browser client users or in your custom client using out of band protocols you're still stuck supporting the lowest common denominator of your telnet users.

I don't think we'll really start to see what's possible with browser-based muds until we build new mud engines specifically for the web and move on from diku / circle / smaug / lp / etc.

The ability to have full control over crafting the user experience of our games is lost if we're trying to have one foot in 2013 and the other in 1996.
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Old 04-11-2013, 10:24 PM   #31
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

@Verbannon,

Shaitan, 'supporting Telnet' is a bit of a illusion I think. Notwithstanding that most muds don't support half of the Telnet protocol anyway, there already are good examples of ways to differentiate the player experience all with the same core mud. Take . It's a Diku, but it'd be hard to tell if you were using the iOS app to play it.

I'm sure many will disagree but I think differentiating the experience -- allowing people to play the game to their taste -- is a strength of muds, not a drawback.
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Old 04-11-2013, 10:48 PM   #32
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

Oh, okay. Thanks!
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Old 04-11-2013, 11:46 PM   #33
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

I can't speak to the quality of the game, but 20,000 monthly active users is maybe the top 3 or 4 muds combined - not all muds combined.
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Old 04-11-2013, 11:52 PM   #34
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

They don't have to be specifically for the web, but its definitely a good idea to start making new mud engines.

Primordiax had a new engine and it was awesome. In fact, it was so awesome, we realized we were wasting it by using it on a "traditional mud." That's part of why we decided to put Primordiax back in development and it is going to re-launch eventually as something extremely different.

All of this is great when applied to NEW games. I'm all for it. There are some people who feel like existing games need to be massively transformed into Facebook games, or graphical games, or graphical browser games, or what have you.

That's what I think is a titanic mistake.

You don't have to rip away something people love in hopes of making something more people will love.

You keep what people love and work on another thing people will love.
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Old 04-12-2013, 05:30 AM   #35
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

I don't think the engine is the limiting factor. A websocket proxy like websockify is all you really need to turn a MUD engine into a browser game engine.
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Old 04-12-2013, 05:42 AM   #36
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

Agreed. It's a purely a technical preference, the player wouldn't see any difference.
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Old 04-12-2013, 06:03 AM   #37
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

Maybe someone should write a websocket snippet?
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Old 04-18-2013, 05:51 PM   #38
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

This is not by any means a new issue, either- way back in 1998, when I started playing Ancient Anguish, my first mud, I used a java web applet to play. I'm not sure I would have made it through the process of downloading and figuring out a client to play initially.

The graphical interface issue is certainly interesting. I enjoyed Thornlands and Primordiax, but both of those games suffered from ease-of-use and approachability issues. Muds, though text based fully, are much more easily used. However, I'm a long-term mudder so this familiarity may be bred from that, and new users may find a graphic-text hybrid interface more user-friendly.

I have always found that no picture or 3D interface can replace my imagination, though, or the depth of autonomy muds give through emotes and commands.
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Old 04-18-2013, 08:55 PM   #39
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

I find this a pretty revealing post. Now imagine that we had a few dozen really strongly promoted "gateway MUDs" that take full advantage of all modern means to promote an online game. And that also present interfaces that "feel like" familiar browser-based games, only they manage to deliver the complexity that only MUDs have reached.

I understand Threshold's reservations fully, but the bottom line is that if you play the 0-sum game of going after MUD vets for your game, then you are not introducing new players to mudding, and so you are effectively contributing to its slow death.

Posting a glorified online telnet window is not likely to bring in anyone except people who have played MUDs in the past. I have yet to see a MUD GUI that doesn't assume, on some level, that the user already knows how to play a MUD. Even my iOS GUI does that when it comes to some sophisticated gameplay actions, just because there are too many commands to pack visually.

But, again, the steepness of the mountain should not deter us. It is do or die.
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Old 04-18-2013, 11:00 PM   #40
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Re: Do MUDs need to be "brought into the 21st century"

Did you miss my earlier post in this thread?

That's not playing a zero sum game at all nor is it simply going after "MUD vets". We are aggressively doing things to bring to people that aren't currently part of the text mud community. It is working extremely well, and it is working without alienating our existing players by warping Threshold into something completely different.

There are other muds doing similar things. I seem to recall a recent bit of news where was pushing their skinned Blowtorch client for Android really hard on the Google Play store and on Google Plus. That's a really smart move.

If you want to make a graphical game, then make a graphical game! That's what we're doing at Frogdice. In May we will publish our 3rd graphical game (Dungeon of Elements) in the last 12 months.

Alienating your existing, happy playerbase by taking the game they have supported and warping it into something completely different is a recipe for disaster and failure.

Ask Star Wars Galaxies players how worked out.
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