There's a somewhat similar post out there with statistics, but I'm interested in seeing if people could help give a little advice. I help run a MUD that has a very fluctuating pbase. Over the years I have seen it go from averaging 15+ to averaging 1 or 0...though the vast majority seems to be the latter. What's curious to me is that the vast majority of people who login and stay for a while say they absolutely love our MUD....and then eventually they too disappear.
A little background:
We're a RP MUD,
We're Smaug,
We're theme based,
and we've tried to have some clever options that nobody else in the theme seems to have.
The curse seems to be that you need players to GET players. So how do you get out of this awful loop?
Word of mouth seems for us to be the best way to get people that stay around for a while, but in these days where more and more people are switching from text based games to things like EverCrack, or other MMORPGs, or just don't have time...it's getting harder and harder to find people.
People will occasionally show up from Mudconnector, and we've gotten a few from TMS here over the couple year's we've had a listing. Without having a lot of consistant people for them to interact with, they tend to not necessarily stay long.
I suppose it's tough being a RP MUD out there when your main focus lies there. We've recently tried shifting to give a better balance between the code people and the RP people but...well I suppose it's too early to tell there.
So, I ask you people who run successful MU*'s, how do you do it? I don't want to steal trade secrets or your players or anything, I'm just curious about how successful places get successful and stay successful.
Cheers,
-Luthien
tsos.rarcoa.com
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