Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

I complained about this several years ago when commercial MUDs were pouring thousands of dollars into the MUD community, cannibalizing on the steadily dwindling player base. At one point TMC displayed three large banners and several side banners on each forum page, after which I dubbed it TIC (The IRE Connector) and made fun of the sponsors till I got banned.

Nowadays MUD discussion has moved to other sites and TMC (I assume due to traffic loss) lowered its banner price significantly.

It's however well possible that advertising outside the community is not cost effective (nor is advertising within the community in the long run for that matter), in which case the genre is pretty much doomed.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Not sure how, but in our marketing information on NWA we've had numerous new gamers show up from odd places like google and elsewhere. Not sure how they are finding Ateraan, but they are. Might have something to do with our current campaign to bring in new gamers to Text Roleplaying.

I have none of the same doom and gloom some of you have here. I find our community thriving and growing and we'll continue to try and bring in new players to our Book and perhaps bring some Movie goers in as well.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

This is important. The culture of computers and games, the use of the mouse over the command line, the rise of casual games ('casual' only in the sense of the bits of time devoted to them, I think casual games can be quite 'hardcore' in totality) has completely changed since muds had their heyday in the 90s.

Yet, as browser games attest, text is not itself an impediment to a game's popularity, for example look at Echo Bazaar with 10,000 players. However that game and games like it make good use of text and graphics and a far easier interface than the CLI.

I'm not against the CLI, I use it for daily computing tasks, heck I don't even use the mouse on my desktop. But I know I'm in the minority.

A player may never have heard of muds, but if you sit them in front of one with the current standard of interface, how long are they going to last?

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Depends on the interface and game, I'd guess. We've had 5 new players in the last week that have NEVER played a text MUD before and found our game through other channels besides MUD forums or MUD repositories/locations. All five are still playing and are fascinated by the genre. Small number, yes, compared to likely 500 or 5000 on WoW or Runescape, but still encouraging.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Another issue MUDs might get is that at least some MMOs are changing into "almost-free-to-play"(e.g some use pay for benefits model of some kind). For example LOTRO, Everquest2 Extended, Dungeons & Dragons Online, and more.

The competition for MUDs is definitely increasing.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

As far as the roleplaying encouraged (and up) MUDs go, it seems to me that the segment of the population (out of those that've never tried MUDs before) that would be most receptive to them would be those that love to read. I remember chancing upon DragonRealms back in '99 in what was one of my own first forays online. This long-time reader really appreciated finding what amounted to a multiplayer, choose-your-own-path version of a good fantasy book. ;)

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Generally no it won't just be people who haven't tried MUDs that you want to appeal to. Using the appeal of your particular MUD theme (even if custom) is never a bad thing. If there is a group of people who are more inclined to like it that is a good place to start. However I do think that the general population would be inclined to try MUDs if they knew what they were, how they work, and how they might possibly appeal to that person.

I mean there are thousands and thousands of people spending tons of time in forums who haven't tried MUDs. That's a large time sink in its own right in a mainly text based medium. Of course I know that most of the appeal of forums is casual banter, discussion of specific topics, or community based jokes/experiences. I do think though that in general just like a great number of people still read books that a great number of people could get into MUDs.

It's not good for us to be labeling MUDs ourselves as inferior because of their lack of graphics. I know that's not what you think or wish to imply, but it can reinforce such a thought in the uninformed "graphic whores". MUDs are a totally different medium in my opinion. Look at the craze over retro games. Not everyone out there has to have pretty graphics in order to enjoy a game. I think the same can be said of having any graphics at all. The majority can't be reached but we don't need the majority. We just need a percentage of it as new players that can cause an increase.

Having a new pretty client may in fact do that but I think reaching out more as a community couldn't hurt either.

Yes that is the case with the majority. Most of them haven't really cut their teeth on gaming in general if they are teenagers or younger. They've grown up in the late years of gaming and things are completely different to them than to people from my or earlier generations. However there is still a percentage of them I believe can be reached.

The thing is they don't know enough about it to be reached. They follow the path of least resistance. A lot of them have friends who play game X and so they got into game X. I've talked to a lot of people myself who have played WoW and can't believe they wasted so much time on such a simple game except for the friends they had there. Like I said earlier there is so many people who haven't even heard of MUDs let alone tried them. It's pure folly to assume that the reason is graphics and not just because word of mouth doesn't reach them.

Graphics can be why they enjoy a particular game but it doesn't mean that's the only thing that can appeal to them.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

I hope this won't start a flame war, but what community?

There really hasn't been a MUD community (at least not in a positive sense) for many, many years. Most efforts to do anything for the shared benefit of MUDs as a whole have died in the crib.

The sad truth about our "community" is that many (most?) of its members would rather smash their nuts with a hammer than see someone else's MUD succeed.

Its like a pot of lobsters in a cookpot. If one starts to climb its way out, the others will grab it and drag it down. Not for their own benefit, but just to make sure the other guy isn't doing better than they are.

I could go into specifics, but I think most of the people reading this thread remember countless examples of incidents, flame wars, and controversies from the last 10 years that demonstrate this unfortunate fact. To be honest, I'm not sure if the "MUD community" ever had a true sense of community or a belief in doing things to grow our overall market.

Before we can do anything together as a community we would need to actually forge a viable community. Right now we are like a bitter, hateful married couple that needs massive couples therapy before we even THINK of having kids.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Believe me I know how this community works. I know exactly how bitter, hateful, selfish, and trivial members of it can and have been. My "block" of the community is probably the worst. With thefts, sabotage, flames, etc.

Initiatives have to start somewhere though and what I am talking about wouldn't have to benefit a single MUD anyway. It would be some sort of movement to inform outsiders of MUDs in general. Increase the player pool for all of the "community" to share. If anyone doesn't want to do that for spiteful reasons I don't know what to say.

Usually it takes a problem to bring people together. If everyone is fat and happy on their own then they are usually more free to be assholes to everyone else. I know some people are still optimistic and I know there isn't any real "crisis" going on, but still. While some MUDs may be getting more players (mine being one of them) the player base of the entire "community" is shrinking.

What do businesses do? Even though they directly compete with one another they start associations that help their entire market flourish. It's the smart thing to do.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

True. But I'm all for working with others and Admins that I respect as colleaques. I constantly will promote other viable games on TMS and TMC and even elsewhere. Namely those are Threshold, 4Dimensions, God Wars II, and a few others that have always been cordial and professional. I don't think your comment will start a flame war, but your premise is valid. There is alot of infighting within the "community".

Perhaps one day we'll have some sort of Association. I don't know. The RPMUD network seemed to want to do that, I just found that many of the leaders there were biased, opinionated, and wrong in many assessments, so I never felt a reason to support or be a part of it.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

There always have been (and always will be) some people who are more interested in taking than giving, shamelessly pushing their own agendas at every opportunity, and offering nothing but scorn and insults to the achievements of their competitors.

But equally there are also those who contribute back to the community, whether through advice and suggestions, offering community resources, developing public protocols, sharing design concepts and code, or even releasing fully functional mud servers and clients.

I don't really see any change in that respect, but I have noticed a change in terms of the sort of things the community is working on (and sharing), and overall I think it's pretty positive.

For example, Mudlet and MUSHclient are both actively developed clients that have been made open source, making them more accessable to people who wish to do further customisation - and both clients have been introducing significant support for graphical interfaces.

Then there's MudStandards, which (at least until it was ruined by a couple of bad apples) was making some good progress towards open standards for the benefit of all muds - it looks like development has gone underground, but the end result should still be something that'll benefit the community on the whole, and their wiki may also prove a valuable resource in the future.

Then you could take a look over Tyche's list of , some of which are pretty young. These have avoided the restrictive licences of the past, and at least one of them has been used as the basis for rather nice-looking commercial mud.

And of course there are things like the Intermud chat networks, which improve communication between mud owners, allowing them to better interact and share ideas.

Then of course there are newer sites such as WGFriends, which attempts to bring together different genres of online game, and is even working on a browser client that mud owners can customise to their individual games - once it's complete I think this'll be a great way for muds to offer a download-free graphical interface to new players, and it could even help push muds into the browser market.

Overall I'd say I've got a pretty positive feeling about the direction muds (in general) are heading. Competition may be stiff, but muds as a whole seem to be adapting and evolving, and I'm really excited about some of the things I'm seeing.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Now that's a lot of exciting things to hear about.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Disclaimer: The following is a rant based in large part on frustration and is the opinion of myself only, and not the other Lithmerian staff or Lithmeria as a whole.

It is, but I can't help but feel that the biggest threat to the 'health' of MUDs isn't a lack of developers/developer tools but a lack of players and lower tier staff. Thousands of MUDs open up every year, each draining players and talent out of the common pool from which they all draw. My concern is that many of these MUDs are created and run by people who want to try MUD administration but don't fully comprehend the level of commitment required to make a real go of it. They play around with a stock codebase, change a few things, goof around with the OLC, change a few room names and declare their MUD open for business. Players enter (and I fear) become disillusioned with the genre as they are met with a lack of professionalism, dedication and innovation.

I can't help but feel that if every 10 MUDs out there consolidated into one, pooling their staff and combining their talents and resources, the hobby as a whole would be in much better shape. It reminds me of being a kid and playing Battlefield: 1942 with my friends, watching as every single person on a team swarmed toward the 2-3 planes/tanks in an effort to get there first, only to eventually lose the game because no one wanted to be an unglamorous (but indispensable) infantryman.

What makes this issue especially significant for me is the snowball effect the size of a playerbase has on a MUD. I can't speak for anyone else, but I personally would have absolutely no interest in playing even the very best MUD in the world if it had no player base. The PvE could be a rollercoaster ride of adventure that makes raiding 25 man heroics for the achievements in WoW seem like a nice relaxing afternoon of casual gaming... and I still wouldn't play if there were only 6 people online at a time. Similarly, I know I lingered at my previous MUD home for far longer than I probably should have because I'd built up a whole slew of connections and relationships, possible only in a MUD with a significant playerbase. My fear is that MUDs have spread themselves so thin that quality games are wallowing in obscurity, unable to pick up the initial playerbase required to build up a true following.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Well there is no solution to that unless you increase the player pool significantly or make requirements for being listed far more stringent (sort of blacklisting those with a certain percentage of stock in their codebase).

The community effort idea I have could potentially increase the player pool, but it is a fact that all the dead listings and nearly stock listings do give players a bad impression. I do think there should be higher standards for listings in general like a minimum time frame from when a listing is added until it is displayed for others to see. I'm all for giving anyone the opportunity to make a MUD, I just don't agree that a slew of dead or carbon copy MUDs should be cluttering up the main listings.

That may make me sound like an asshole and I really don't want to come off that way. It's just the way I see it. TMS lists tons of MUDs for example that I know are dead and have been for years. I'm sure the same can be said for other listings.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

I don't see why saying that makes you a jerk. Games like God Wars II, Threshold, IRE, Lithmeria, Armageddon and so on have thousands of man hours invested in them. They have original descriptions, unique code, new lore and so on and so forth. Yet, on a listing, they get exactly as much space as some stock-trash anime clone MUD someone threw together in 4 hours by replacing the word "rogue" with "ninja" in 12 places. That damages the community.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

I think you make a good point, and it is unfortunate that one of the few areas where we do have somewhat of a "community" is in an area that we don't need it as badly. Development tools are great, but more, easier to make MUDs is not really what we need most as a gaming genre. In fact, the ability to easily get a mud hosted and started probably did a lot of damage to the genre.

We need more warm bodies - both as a whole and per MUD. More MUDs before we have more players just dilutes the pool and hurts the MUDs we already have.

There have been a few efforts to work as a community on getting the word out, or marketing MUDs to a larger base of people, but they failed almost before they started. That's where a lot of the sniping and "I don't want to help because this will help <insert name of mud they hate> more than it will help my mud."

When you hear fans of other niche forms of entertainment trying to get the word out, they happily tell you about some of the biggest players in their niche. Can you imagine your average MUD player or admin explaining MUDs to someone and being willing to tell them about a really big, popular MUD other than their own? That would practically never happen.

Generalizing here...

If you loved folk art, and you wanted to get someone into it, would you right off the bat show them the most obscure examples? No, you'd show them some of the biggest breakout artists that they are more likely to enjoy, and if it caught on you'd start showing them some of the more unique artists in the genre.

For an example closer to home, if you wanted to get someone into MMOs, would you be more likely to show them World of Warcraft or Dark Age of Camelot? Sure, you can easily argue that DAoC has dramatically superior and more interesting PvP, but is it realistic to expect a total newbie to the genre to understand the deep, challenging gameplay? Or to tolerate getting "pwnt" in PvP as they learn the intricacies of it? Of course not. But showing them WoW is an easy way to get them sucked into the hobby. It is pretty, it is accessible, and it almost plays itself. If they enjoy WoW, then you can show them stuff like EvE Online and DAoC and other far more complicated, niche members of the genre.

The MUD Community has never demonstrated a willingness to promote itself as a hobby regardless of which MUD(s) benefited the most right off the bat in terms of users gained. As a result, every MUD is fighting the entire battle solo in an effort to bring people to the hobby one person at a time. Its definitely a challenge.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

I agree with everything you said, but this is the point that stands out most in my mind. Earlier in this thread, people cited statistics to the effect of 1000+ new MUDs opening every year. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that we're not getting 50,000 new MUD gamers in the same time frame. This means that many of these MUDs will be ghost towns, clogging up the lists and turning off players.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

What do the client developers have to say about MUDs/MUSHes/Mu*s in general? It might seem that those folks who write clients could provide some input into download statistics and trends -- those metrics might help... Most of what I've read about MUD health comes from the Admin/Server Developer's perspectives. Are there any client developers that read these forums?

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

I've heard that sort of view quite a few times over the years. The problem is that nobody really starts up a mud with the intention of creating a stock clone - everyone thinks that they are special, that their game offers (or will offer) something new and innovative.

Of course you could argue that it's the same with browser games and graphical MMOs - but they have a far larger crowd of players to draw from. That's part of the reason why I'm so interested in community advancements in the areas of protocols and clients...it makes it easier for muds to start nibbling at the edges of those other markets - and in those markets, we're far more likely to stand out from the competition.

Raph Koster wrote an interesting article about back in 2007, and it's well worth a read.

According to figures posted by the client developers on , the annual downloads per client are:

MUSHclient: 56,438
CMUD: 53,922
zMUD: 52,962
Tintin: 20,000
MUDlet: 12,000

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

The problem is, you need to nail both of these things, and the latter is not as much of a problem as the former.

My MUD (Abattoir) is pretty moribund. Hardly anybody plays on there now, yet there is still a steady trickle of new players. And when I watch those new players, some leave because they see the game is empty, but more often than not they struggle with the interface. They don't get as far as realising they're alone because they're too busy trying to work out what to do when the room description has scrolled off the top, they have no help button to click for a list of commands, there are some cryptic numbers that appear before each thing they type, and so on.

If we were able to keep 30% of our current newbies up to level 10 rather than 1% of them, we'd be as busy as we were in our heyday 10 years ago. In our case at least, it's not a lack of interest, just a lack of retention. And I think it would be both easier and more productive to improve the interface than to try and increase the number of incoming newbies by a factor of 30.

It isn't really about text per se; as several people have stated, most internet users spend most of their lives working with text these days. And many popular games on Facebook and the like are almost entirely text-based. It's just about how we present that text, and a typical telnet window is a pretty poor way of doing that.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Why would you need multiple servers?

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

However, as I mentioned before, clients have come quite a long way in the last few years. These days it's pretty quick and easy to create a graphical front-end, and if you browse the MUSHclient and Mudlet forums you'll see players designing some really nice-looking custom interfaces for their favourite muds.

Sadly the interest from mud owners often seems to be rather luke-warm, but there is still some definite progress being made by a number of the larger muds in terms of improving communication with the client.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Well yeah, it's not just the client that needs to be good but also the way that the mud uses it. For example, the fact that you typically see the prompt data over and over again, yet a room description scrolls off the top of the screen, is pretty unforgivable in accessibility terms. In no time your screen is covered with outdated data and the relevant context has disappeared.

I think all this was potentially solved by MXP a long time ago (at least as far as you could say MXP solved anything, awful half-baked protocol that it is - there may be better alternatives), so it would be great to see some further standardisation on this front.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

As long as there's some way to identify the start and end of a room description, it's pretty easy to divert it to another window. Personally I'm not bothered by scrolling descriptions, but I do think it's nice to have a fixed-position map.

You could use MXP tags, but the current trend is to move that sort of thing to an out-of-band protocol.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

A better interface can help a lot but I don't think its the main issue. Quite a few newbies that leave real quick are frequent MUD players who just weren't satisfied. I think bringing in more players to the community and informing them simply of what MUDs are and how they work could go a long way.

Having nice clients and interfaces to go along with that certainly couldn't hurt. However having a fancy interface isn't going to make much of a dent if most of the people seeing it are already still inside the MUD community instead of being a new face. It's just batting around the same people as usual.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Hrm but surely the idea is to bring in new mudders, and not just bat around the same people as usual?

A fancy interface means pretty screenshots, which you can use in your adverts on other gaming forums.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

This was a question related to my post quite aways down. It asks, why do you need multiple servers when you have large playerbases.

Answer: Game servers can only handle a set number of connections. This is due in part to memory, in part to speed, and in part to the basic internet limitations. A game server can handle (at last research) about 750 to 1000 players at a time. Once you get that high you have to have another server for the next group. It is simply the nature of the beast. Hence the reason WoW and Runescape have 100's of servers for 1000's of players.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Of course that's the idea. I just don't think having a fancy house (client, interface) in the middle of nowhere (MUD community) will cause party guests (players) to show up for the fancy party (the MUD) without first receiving some sort of invitation.

There may be some strangers who stumble upon this free party for anyone who wants to come but the vast majority of people who may have enjoyed it are ignorant to its existence.

Like I said a couple times before though I am all for you and others working on better clients and such. I'm not trying to rain on that at all. I am just saying there needs to be more done in general to bring players to the community.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

I thought you were referring to a game design issue. In fact you can easily handle several thousand mud players on one server. You may have to change a couple of OS parameters to allow over 1024, and it's cheaper to scale with UDP rather than TCP, but you can certainly run thousands of connections on one box. CPU, memory, and bandwidth resources aren't an issue - muds use barely anything in this regard.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

On Abattoir at least, I'm surprised at how many people who log on are apparently new to MUDs (or at least to Diku-derivatives). You can tell them apart by the way they use (or fail to use) the commands.

Indeed. I stick by my assessment that practically, you need both. More people is great, but don't underestimate the pain that a poor interface causes among the wider population. (And as you broaden appeal beyond the existing hardcore of mud players, that problem will be exacerbated.)

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

There's also a third major factor.

Imagine someone knows how to read, but doesn't read novels for fun. You say "Hey, dude, read a book. It's awesome fun!" and then you hand them your favourite book.

What book is that? The bible? Tale of two cities? Neitzsche? Animorphs? Lord of the Rings? - all great stories, for their appropriate target audience, and all really terrible choices for the wrong audience.

So even if you *can* get someone to try a mud, and even if they can get past the hurdle of the new, often clumsy, interface, you still need to hope they "hit on" a mud that they are going to enjoy. For me, it doesn't matter how great the hack & slash is, if a mud doesn't enforce roleplaying, I'm not going to stay. For most players, enforced roleplaying is something new, and probably daunting.

The difference between MUDs and books is that, as has been pointed out, we use our first long-term mud as a measuring stick. I'm not properly able to give advice about which muds are good, because I haven't truly experienced them to the same degree that I've experienced my own mud.

Maybe we need some sort of "choose your own adventure" type of selection tree. A new player finds a mud, and we can have a handy warning: "Various games can be very different to each other. Follow this link to answer some questions, and we'll recommend a game you might like." - we could then get some idea of the new player's tastes. Direct them towards a more graphical game if that's important to them. Towards a fantasy or sci-fi game if setting makes a difference. Towards PVP, PVE, or socializing games.

For that to work, we'd need participating muds to quite actively direct players *away* from their own mud. Which is a hard thing to ask. New arrivals to my mud would be told "Hey, we might recommend a different mud. One you might not even have to pay for. Why would you stay here?" - in the long term, any player losses would be more than made up for with a larger mud playerbase. And player tastes do change.

In Skotos, we have a collection of affiliated muds, one account gets you access to all the games. I notice that players regularly get "burnt out" on one game, and move to another game. They'll stick around for a few months, then usually go back to their original game. Sometimes they'll stay at the new game. It seems that this "set of games" effect helps keep players. Instead of a player being so burnt out or frustrated that they leave, they stay as part of the same community and focus their efforts elsewhere.

Of course, I can't see the behavior outside of the skotos community - for all I know the people who leave skotos keep playing other muds elsewhere.

But even so - I don't *want* the players who don't suit my mud. Players who are looking for something different might contribute to the game, but are also going to pull it in an undesirable direction. They're going to actively work against the goals staff are trying to achieve. I'd much rather direct those players to a mud that suits them, and if that mud does the same, directing players that suit my game to me, then we're both winning. And most importantly, the player is winning, by finding a game that is more likely to be enjoyable for them.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

I get the feeling that the TMS community, mostly made up of developers, is sort of missing the point here, and I think it's related to an observation you could make about the mudding community. Namely, where are the sites/forums where players talk about muds they play?

In every other game community you'll find developers talking about making games, and players talking about games they play, specific games. But apart from the usual advertisements, recruiting ads, and flamewars, I can't even think of one forum thread where I've seen a player post up with something like, 'hey, Achaea, let's talk about it. Who's playing it?' etcetera.

These are the kinds of things, in my opinion, that would get other players -- both veteran mudders and people coming in off a Google search -- interested in checking out a game.

Sure, you have your forums for specific games, and you'll find this in other game genres as well. But there's always player forums in other genres where the focus is on what are you playing, what's new, what should I try.

Why is this so? Is it related to the strong community focus of most muds? Does this make each individual mud community more insular? There are plenty of online multiplayer graphical games with strong communities, but still general sites where players will talk about all FPSs, or all RTSs, etcetera.

Is it the low number of players not being able to support the forum activity? Mud developers have at least three forums, and surely the players outnumber the developers (or do they...;) ).

Are mud players, for some reason, simply not interested in talking about muds? Maybe this does tie back into the first question, about the strong community focus of muds. If someone is happy in a community, maybe they're just not interested in other communities. But I think you see many players hopping from one game to another or trying a new place out (this especially seems popular with the IRE players, but IRE has wisely captured this migratory instinct by consistently rolling out new games).

In any case, something to think about.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Ide, I was thinking of this very concept today. Ultimately, I think MUDs reached a "community critical mass" long ago... and that critical mass has cooled ever since. Perhaps "cooled" not by its own entropy, but instead cooled by the fact that more and more folks were hopping on to the internet and building communities around other games -- and those communities have ultimately drowned the voice of this relatively small group.

I don't know of too many games out there that have communities of players spouting said game's benefits outside of the game's own supporting website. I believe that games that have reached such a status are newsworthy --- they are newsworthy simply because they have a tremendous and somewhat passionate playerbase - one that is large enough that it can expand into the far reaches of the internet and STILL find other players with which to exchange ideas. MUDs as a whole aren't there any more - they are no longer newsworthy to anyone outside of the development circle.

This is not to say, though, that the MUD community is not still "growing" --- its growth is simply not keeping up with the growth of other online game genres, however - especially in comparison to the overall growth of potential players.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Those forums are found at each individual game.

I think this speaks to the diversity of muds, and longevity of player retention.
I might play a FPS, and then move on to another FPS in two weeks time. Thus, my "gears of war" community is going to overlap with my "battlefield 1942" community, and so on. It's worth talking to the "broader FPS community" about what games sport which features.

With muds, I might play one mud for five years. I won't have enough spare time to give any other muds a serious attempt, and if I do hop muds I'll loose the community that I've become part of. I'm only likely to leave due to real life pressures that stop me from playing, or due to being so annoyed at that specific game that I stop playing it, and sacrifice my involvement in the community. Unlike a FPS, where I can play battlefield for a few weeks then go back to gears of war.

The differences between the games also means that cross-game player communities are hard to build. Can I talk to you, player-to-player, about my opinions on the noble house of Bisclavret? Or even the game mechanics to do with social advancement? No. It won't make any sense unless you've played my mud. I can tell you about an exciting new feature, but unless the feature is really exciting enough to make you try out my mud, it's not going to be a very meaningful conversation. So why bother? I'll just go to my mud's forum, and talk player-to-player with others that know what I'm talking about. You knowing about the feature isn't going to help you out, best case you might be able to tap an admin and suggest they add the feature. Knowing about a cool new feature in an upcoming FPS might convince you to try out that game. The "cool new feature" in the FPS will also make sense to someone that hasn't played, because they have a similar enough shared expectation. "This game has grenades that suck opponents into a black hole" - that makes sense to you. You know what I'm describing. "This game has a hunger system that modifies your ability to resist disease modifiers" - that sentence makes sense, but what does it *mean*? What it means will depend on the type of mud, whether it's PVE or PVP, how diseases work, etc. - implement that same system in different muds and it will have wildly different effects. Implement that grenade, and it'll essentially do the same thing in any FPS. Without this shared experience, a wider player-to-player discussion is mostly meaningless.

The mud developers, on the other hand, tend to be a special case. They're actively seeking out new ideas. They may not have the shared experience, and may not truly know how the ideas would work (just look at the thread where I made comments about Ironclaw's prison system, which gave an extremely misrepresentative impression because I hadn't explained other systems that help balance the system) - but we can still discuss ideas. And we are still interested in discussing ideas - because we're in a position to take those ideas, modify them for our games, and implement the interesting ones. An average player isn't in a position to do anything with this information.

In fact, an average player interested in the wider mud community is likely to discover a whole lot of fun-sounding features and gimmicks that their preferred game is missing, and that is likely to motivate them into creating yet-another-mud to add to the list. At which point they would continue to participate in the discussion, but would be considered "a mud admin."

Yes. Partly.

They do outnumber the players. But they are also more motivated to participate in "external" discussions. They're intentionally looking outwards.
Players who want to discuss their game are going to want to find other players that know what they're talking about. So those players will look inwards, to their own game's forum.

Judging by Ironclaw, players are very interested in talking about the game.
Some players are so interested in the game mechanics that, just from testing, they have a better idea of the balance and hidden dice rolling than most of the staff. I shudder to think of the amount of time they spent testing.

I think this is true.

This also happens, but when they migrate, I think players leave their previous community behind. I think they would like to take the community with them, but it's just not practical. Instead, they'll keep in contact with their friends through IM, and the like, or they'll continue to post on the old game's forum. (We have many ex-players who still participate in the forums)

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Your kidding right? What would design have to do with anything? You ever run a game with over 100 players, let alone a 1000? You can't take the resources a game has with 10 people and multiply it by 100 and get the CPU/Memory/bandwidth cost for 1000 players. Doesn't work that way. When you are running a game with several thousand players on one server gimme a shout out with your specs.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

I work for a company that makes MMOs, so yes.

I know. This is why you have to manage areas of interest and do level of detail management. But even so, the bandwidth for a typical mud player is about 1/10th of the bandwidth that you use on an MMO.

I don't know the hardware specs - I just write the software. It's a quad core Dell blade, I think. But there is just one game server process on one physical game server.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

I've stumbled across the occasional general gaming site where people start threads on muds, asking for suggestions and offering advice. You usually get a few former mudders who talk about the games they used to play, and a few current mudders who promote their current favourite.

But the community is small enough that whenever someone starts up a dedicated mud site, you'll get admin and developers joining in.

The most I know of was Kingdom of the Winds, which peaked at 12,263 simultaneous players in a single world - I don't know their server specs, but as this was in 1999 I imagine they weren't too impressive by today's standards.

More relevant for us would be Gemstone, which used to have over 3,000 simultaneous players during peak hours. Once again this was quite some time ago - they've been leaking players for years now.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

That is impressive. This was the era I was on the building team for an MMO graphic game similar to WoW but inline with Meridian 59 (frontal view 3d rather than birdseye). We found that we topped out at around 1000 players at at the time all the big boys like Ultima Online only ran between 500 and 1200 players per server. I'm guessing Kingdom of Winds were using a daisy chain and I'm betting Gemstone was too.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

I think they're on the general gaming sites where they talk about all the games they play including muds. I see a lot of posts about muds on places like Reddit, PvP, and even IGN. It's all hidden in there with talk about the triple-A titles and the Plants vs. Zombies posts. They talk about muds where they talk about all their games, and it's a larger community. Most of the mentions, though, seem to be "Oh, yeah. I used to play those kinds of games."

TMS is mostly made of developers because MUDs are the most important type of games to us. We think about them all the time, and we like to talk about them all the time. I think for most players, muds are just another type of game they play.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Not to mention the fact that every other MUDder thinks he/she can make their own MUD. This happens especially often once they venture off to a site like TMC/TMS, start reading about development, and get intrigued. Furthermore, if they are already comfortable PLAYING a game at a command line, moving into a *nix interface is less intimidating.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

This is true and is similar to anyone thinking they can write a book or in our day of HD Cameras for mere thousands, every college student thinks they can make a movie. Unfortunately, thinking you can make a movie or write a book and actually making a good movie or book are hugely different as shown in a review of any film festival and the millions of books rejected by publishers.

Just go see "The American" for an example of complete crap produced by a big production company and an A-list actor.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Yes, except the difference is:

Imagine if when you rocked up to your local cinema, every wannabe college student could put up a poster for their movie alongside the Hollywood blockbusters and screen it.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

I haven't seen the movie but it seems to get decent score on .

Does getting a book rejected by a publisher actually suggest the book is bad? Would e.g EA reject one of the top MUDs if it tried to be published?

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

EA would definitely reject one of the top MUDs if it tried to get published simply because the numbers aren't there. Even with EA's marketing power, I'm not sure that a mud could pull more than a couple thousand players at a time. (Unfortunately, you gotta know how to read to play MUDs.)

And some of the top authors have had their first books rejected over 100 times before they get published because the publishing world operates in a very specific way. Most manuscripts are rejected without ever having been read. This creates the necessity for agents who represent good manuscripts and go to the publishers to get them published. It's a pretty inefficient way of doing things, and of course, the person who loses out on their cut to the agent is the author, not the publisher.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Go see it. You will laugh (because you think it's a comedy), cry (because you find out it's not), and hurl (because you wasted 10 bucks).

Yes. At least bad for marketing. Won't bring the numbers, uninteresting to the market at the present time.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

It seems I need to clarify my post about books and movie production and how it relates to MUD creation. My point was not that only professionals can write a book or create a movie. My point is that it takes a lot of commitment, experience, and talent to do so with quality.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

So MUDs have more developers than the graphical RPGs. Sounds like a good thing. Not everyone has to be at the top of the skill level.

I think what should be worried about more than low quality MUDs is how projects like MudStandards break down. It is projects like that that move the games forward.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

This is true. Having a standard and minimum quality is a good thing. As for more developers, I would say not, but probably more singular projects, yes.

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

Jagex (the makers of Runescape) approached EA and other large publishers and didn't get very far:

Re: The "Health," of Muds
 

If you want to get technical, the facts can't and don't lie, unless someone is doing something stupid, like collecting them wrong. Most polls are a bit like this, intentionally creating ambiguity with the answer they *don't* want, then presenting it, when ever possible, to people in areas where they feel that its likely to a) get responders with the *right* answer, and b) little or no responders who are willing to give the ambiguous one. This is often seen either in a skewing of the poll in favor of the *right* answer, or a large number of people in the "I don't know" category, due to it being the least offensive response, for anyone not already biased towards giving a thumbs up to the poller's intentional distortion on the issue. Its also why online polls are completely idiotic, since you can't, usually, prevent people you *don't* want to have answer it showing up in huge numbers to screw up your pre-intended result. lol

That said.. What you are dealing with is a bit like Books vs. TV vs. videos, with obvious differences. Used to be, a lot of people owned a few favorite books, you went to very specific places to find them, and wanting something obscure was a good thing. More to the point, you didn't rely on some "top 20" book shelf in Walmart to pick a good book. TV came on the scene and "everyone" bought TVs, though many people also still read books. However, at the same time, you started getting "top 20" lists/shelves in pretty much any store big enough to also have a magazine rack, and true enthusiasts **don't buy from those**. Everyone else... picks up the latest bit of drivel from the "big names". Muds have such "lists", but they don't have their product scattered every damn place people look, trying to "sell" those. So, unlike books, you don't see a whole lot of people running around looking to pick up some "light mudding". lol WOW is the TV of the game world. Its accessible to every one, you don't really need to spend anything, other than time, on it, and a lot of people that would never spend the basic time needed to do newbie quests in a mud *will* play WOW. Some of the newer ones get more like the video store. You buy what you want, when you want, how you want, and you are not semi-passively leveling to the max over 48 hours, like you have in WOW. Heck, ones like Eve Online, you can't do much more than get shot flying through a bad neighborhood in 48 hours. ;)

Then you have things like SL, when it worked well, or when you are on a grid that manages better than Linden does. You get to write the story, design the theme, dress up any way you want, etc. Its books + TV + video store + amateur pron, all rolled into one, and the fact that it does the first "a lot" more poorly, due to lack of resources going to helping do that, than any mud can, its **still** going to be more accessible than looking for the 1942 edition of "Some book I want", written by Somedude, of which only one copy is known to exist, in Stix, Middleofnowhere, Zimbabway. Unfortunately, for most people, muds *are* that book, and its not going to change when the next generation of virtual worlds comes out, and that turns out to *include* something like MUD/MUSH code, as a means to do the thing SL, and the like, do only barely, right now. Why spend time looking for a good book, if you can buy a bad one easier, or join up with like minded people and write one? Better yet, why read, if you can watch the video, as almost ever high school student has almost always thought, every time they got an assignment. lol

I am not sure how you solve the problem, without getting people in the industry to admit it hasn't become some fringe at this point, or giving up on pure text, and making WOW II, instead.