[Molly]

I think what should be emphasized as a special quality for all Muds is the sense of community. This has nothing to do with whether the Mud is RP or not, it's just the feeling of being a part of a group that you know well. I would elaborate on it, but I am not quite awake, and I think you all know what I am referring to anyhow.

Most players have this community feeling in the mud they think of as their 'Home Mud'. Heck, that's why they even call it their home mud.

[Fern]

Witness a craggy peak, its granite spires reaching through a blanket of thick roiling fog and stretching into a fire-lit midnight sky. Flashes of lightning torment the darkness, their forks as brilliant as the stream of sparks from a forge. The silhouette of a massive form in flight blackens the tops of the clouds and threatens the churning sea surface far below.  

What do you see when the fog parts as a gust of bitter northern wind pushes it against the knife-sharp cliffs, curling the steely haze away to reveal a tiny spiral of flickering torchlight clinging to the face of the stone.

What do you see? What do you sense; what do you feel within your bones as you watch the torches spiral skyward in their perilous cling to the hair's width of path upon the spire's face?

Does your spine shiver with a thrill of fear at the sudden clatter of gravel across the path, dislodged from above by a careless foot?
Does your mind's eye wince as a blast of icy air grips the hem of your robe and yanks it toward the inky ravine a mere toe's width away?
Do you hear the thin scream of a fellow traveler as he loses his footing, leather soles scrabbling in futile scampers for a long heart-stopping second before he plummets away into the gaping darkness?

What do you see? Would you venture onward? Could you venture onward? Could you break the icy grip of fear upon your throat and follow your companions upward into certain danger?

If so, welcome to the vast universe of the MUD, where your mind collaborates with the MUD's written word to create the most powerful game of all.

: : : : :
There... just one approach to demonstrate to the reader how far into an environment he can take himself.  The person who gains something from a portrayed visual like the described cliff is the person who will 'get it.'  I'm sure better writers than I can come up with better portrayals.

MUDs will die out as a genre when books die out, when the human eye ceases to read and the human mind ceases to imagine.  We provide a service to the gaming community: We empower and embody literacy and the intense potential of the written word, not as a highlight or a book in a dusty library of a graphics game, but as a constant.

A picture may be worth a thousand words to some, but MUDs prove every day that the written word paints that picture, with nuance and detail beyond the brush and camera's power. Count me in - count Legends of Karinth in - put us on the bandwagon as it rolls out to the rest of the world.

[the_logos]

[Molly]

The_logos  Nov. 10 2004,17:12
Perhaps the fact that English is not my first language makes me miss something here.

But what it looks like is, that he wants a number of you to contribute financially to his own ad, and in return you'd get 'a little section '  with a link in a corner somewhere.

Doesn't look like a good deal to me.

[the_logos]

I will chalk this up to ignorance of English colloquial usage. Perhaps the meaning of "footing the bill" doesn't translate well. It means "paying for it."

--matt

[Threshold]

Sheesh Molly. *shakes head*

The saying is true: no good deed goes unpunished.

I'm interested and look forward to discussing it with you further. I wonder how many people are interested to the point of being able to invest real money in the venture?

[Jazuela]

Also Molly, he said "IF" we are footing the bill. This means - IF Iron Realms ends up being the sole sponsor of this project, THEN they will be the primary game advertised.

Think of it as a C-code statement.

IF A = 100%;

PRINT "Visit our game first, but there are some others you can find here: (http..blahblah website for the group..blah blah).";

ELSEIF

something else;

ENDIF;

return 0;


and yeah my C is rusty. Sue me.

[Molly]

I interpreted 'footing the bill' as 'paying the major part of the bill'. It seemed natural, since the thread after all is about a 'joint venture'.

and yeah my English is rusty. Sue me.

Sorry about the semantics, like I pointed out, English isn't my first language.

[Threshold]

You might want to hold back on the flamethrower then.

This makes for a poor excuse when used repeatedly- especially when the same people seem to be the targets of your vitriol. It starts to look like a convenient way to dodge blame when/if your flame is not well received.

[Traithe]

Well... moving slightly back on-topic here...

I probably speak for most non-commercial MU* owners when I say that I'd be happy to help, but that $15k is obviously help on a scale that would not be very plausible for me.

Likely all I could commit to on my budget at present is $500 or so at most - the majority of the help I could offer here would primarily be technical, I think, since I'm relatively so limited in a financial sense (ah, the student life).

Anyway, as I said before, it sounds like a great idea, and I'd be happy to help as I can. Just drop me a line if/when you get this thing sketched out and let me know what I can do.

[the_logos]

Yeah, this is going to take some time to work out in terms of what the arrangements would be. I totally understand that MUDs being run as hobbys are not likely to have owners willing to contribute a lot (or any) money. The trick here is that I really do want to show the outside gaming world that text MUDs generally can offer a lot of great things, but I don't want to do it enough to essentially pay a lot to promote other people's MUDs. Lemme work this through in my mind some more and talk to some more people.

--matt

[tehScarecrow]

Someone might have brought this up in the previous pages, but I think the term "MUD" itself needs to go.

Mud is dirt and water. Hardly exciting. You could play WoW or you could play MuD. Hmmm...

[Tezcatlipoca]

Something I haven't seen in this thread yet, which I think is something everyone either can or has thought of, is maybe a bit of statistical work. I'm not a marketing professional or even a student of one, but economics and marketing usually go hand in hand, and a lot of it is comprised of good old logic and common sense.
Statistically, we need to find out what our current audience is; who plays these games already? Then find out where they are and what the best way to contact them.
Without a real statistical study, my initial guess (from the years I've played and seeing who else is playing, granted on small "local" muds only) would be that the large majority of players are students, mostly collage age students, but with a good dose of high-school students (I think we can chauck up a large percentage of the "problem players" to being high-schoolers).
IF that non-scientific observation is true, then it's reasonable to assume that most of the players that any campaign would target, would be more students. So, it would be best to target them directly.
So, IF the students are the best people to target, then I'm not sure newspaper ads are your best means of communication. As mentioned previously by Matt I believe, online advertising *does* work, but unmentioned is you need to find the right places online. His techTV add worked as he mentioned, but I think probably because it tends to be targeted at younger inquisitive minds.
So, we need to find locations that students frequent in order to maximize our return on that target audience, which is our maxium usage group. So find the locations they frequent the most. Most students end up living/learning/playing at Universities scattered around the county. Fairly cheap flier campaigns at your local University (check the University rules before going at it though) probably can be fairly effective. Again, the majority of mudders may very well be students, so if each posts at their university of choice, we've covered a lot of ground.

There's a lot of assumptions in here, I know. That's why it calls for a fairly decent statistical investigation. I get the impression that most of the people that frequent this board, and even TMC arn't these common-student-players, but instead are more along the lines of the administrative folk, which tend to be post-student hard core gamers that play/run muds as a sideline hobby, and then the few minority that run it as their full time job. So doing a survay on the boards won't tell you much. Doing them on our individual MUDs can. Once we find out who the current target % is, we can start marketing to their peers. Once we've covered that ground, start on the next highest minority group, or start to explore (a more risky venture I think any good marketer will tell you) those that we can't difinitivly say are a good target group, but one we *think* could be. The most obvious here are "gammers" (of all ages) that might not know about MUDs. That in itself will take a larger more expensive statistical campaign to find those more... financially dangerous target groups; ones we arn't too sure of. Then probably another campaign to find out how sure we can be of them.

I applogize for the length.. I tend not to write in short  bursts, but try to explore all aspects that I can at the time.

Note: the "gammer" targeting audience might not yield as much as one might expect. Many of these people have heard/tried MUDs, but are just frankly not interested, since they either don't like to have to work off a computer, or don't like the restricted world they find themselves in (table top is *much* more flexible in terms of what can be done, and always will be until we can interface direectly with human brains. Yes, there are some things a MUD can do that table top games can't--in depth player kill for example--and that in-itself should be a marketing ploy; find the differences and exploit the benifits that can't be executed in table top games.

Note 2: I've made a lot of generalities. I know I have. These are not definitive facts or professional survays. They're "guesses" as to what the outcome might be like, and guesses that disreguard a lot of possibilities. But that's why you do survaying; to generalize the playing field *properly*.

[the_logos]

Hi. Haven't forgotten about this, incidentally. Just looking around at various marketing options. Say, could those of you who were interested email me at:

matt (-at-) ironrealms (-dot-) com?

Thanks!
--matt

[Aloysius]

I think there are three main target audiences for text-based games that are quite large:

1) Fantasy and science-fiction fans/readers/moviegoers
2) Players of traditional "offline" RPGs (AD&D etc.)
3) Existing online gamers (MUD, MMORPG or otherwise)

A large segment of (at least) the first category may be virtually untapped.  And this base is growing all the time with the massive successes that movie series like Lord of the Rings or the Matrix have brought to the general public.  Let's face it:  people who find it interesting to watch a movie or read a book on the theme would probably like to experience "being in" such a world, as it were.  Many of these people are unaware of text-based games or even RPGs in general, and that is perhaps where marketing efforts would be most successful.

I'm willing to contribute my research/design/marketing skills (such as they are) to a group effort.  I don't think this would take a whole lot of money, but perhaps a lot of time from the people willing to promote it (as with MUDs themselves).

-Aloysius
Dark Tower

[the_logos]

I've just finished speaking to a couple of marketing firms about text promotion and unfortunately, doing this as a group effort doesn't seem like it'll work, at least as regards our involvement with said marketing firm.

However, that doesn't mean we can't try to work together in more guerilla ways to promote text. The group of us that pledged to Child's Play is the first act in that direction, I think. Other opportunities will crop up I'm sure.

In any case, thanks for all the interest in this on the forum and via emails but pooling our money together to advertise text generally is probably not the way to go for now.

--matt

[Sinuhe]

Figures.

Can’t say the outcome of this surprises me, I never really could picture the_logos as someone who gives a hoot about the mudding community in general.
To those of you that could, all I can say is:

Oops! He did it again…

Another of his little publicity stunt successfully accomplished.

Some of you must have really short memories. As for me, I clearly recall that thread where he urged everybody on the list to chip in with some cash, so he could sue Medievia for breaking the Diku licence.

Of course that was just before that other thread where he urged everybody on the list to go ahead and break the Diku licence, since according to the gospel of st_logos the wording of the licence wouldn’t stand up in a lawsuit, and to #### with the intent of it.

This guy is obviously interested in one thing only: To get as much space and promotion as possible for his own games. The rest of the mud community is just means to that end to him.

[Dulan]

Sinuhe, that's all well-known to the older posters of the board.

I'd say a good chunk of the older posters just consider him a troll at this point, and handle him as such.

Just a piece of advice there, at least. Handle Achaea as a troll, and he becomes a lot easier to stomach.

[the_logos]

*gasp* Oh my god! I'm so evil for deciding that I'm not going to essentially single-handedly fund promotion of other muds as given the amounts of money involved, that's what it would have involved.

*gasp* I'm so evil for tossing an idea around that turned out not to be workable.

I guess the contributions you and Dulan have made to the MUDs can't be argued with though. Paragons of hope for MUDs, the two of you are. I have little doubt that soon all the world will know of the beauty of text MUDs due to your ceaseless efforts to expand the appeal of text. Way to go guys!

--matt

[the_logos]

On a more serious note, the only people that have any right to complain are the people who pledged to help, like Traithe (Shadows of Isildur), Threshold, Sanvean (Armaggedon), Lanthum, and a few others. However, there is a strong correlation between being willing to engage in a cooperative effort and maintaining an adult attitude about it. I'm willing to bet none of the people who voluntereed to help are going to be flaming me for just seeing if it was feasible or not, because the people who did want to help are, to a man/woman, intelligent, reasonable, and mature.

Funny how neither of you two flamers were among those offering to help, even in non-financial ways.

--matt