01 Apr, 2007, Brinson wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
Inspired by a post on mudconnect (but the posting system annoy me too much to put a post I want to visit alot there), I wonder to myself if he's right and the mud community is dying. I think the mud community is merely underrepresented. Most of the people I know don't know what a "mud" is much less how to connect to one.

We should do some kind of advertising sweep. Come up with a cryptic domain name, print up crytpic ads. Something intriguing that will make people think about the site wondering what it is. Maybe something like "got mud?" or "Don't Do drack. Do mud." or something just odd enough to make people look at it. Then we make signs and we all print them up and put them random places.

The website would basically be an unbiased a link dump with some basic resources. Links to mudconnect, topmudsites, mudbytes, maybe some other places. We could make up some default forum sigs bunches of people could use with the same message to pull people in.

What do you guys think. Is it possible? Would it be the most efficient way?
01 Apr, 2007, syn wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
/sign

*Votes for MUD - The other white meat - *

-Syn
01 Apr, 2007, Scandum wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
Everquest pretty much decimated the MUD community back in 99. World of Warcraft dealt another heavy blow. Whenever a graphical Tolkien mud is released it'll be over and done with.
01 Apr, 2007, Cratylus wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
"Everquest pretty much decimated the MUD community back in 99. World of Warcraft dealt another heavy blow. Whenever a graphical Tolkien mud is released it'll be over and done with."

Right, because movies, TV, and radio have basically abolished the publishing industry,
making books and newspapers obsolete. If ever an electronic print medium is invented
that lets people communicate around the world in printed form, print on paper will be
over and done with.

…Or not.

The argument that MMORPG's killed muds makes a set of assumptions based on the following:
People playing muds were marking time, playing something that didn't
really satisfy them, waiting for their real hope, graphical stuff, and now that there are
MMORPG's, new players have no incentive to play muds instead.

This is, as I've alluded, equivalent to saying that people reading books
were just biding their time til movies came out, and once they did, they
had no reason to go back to their primitive "reading".

In my opinion, this "muds are dying" business is an annoying perennial canard on
the order of Diku license disputes. Every few months someone pops up (usually
a newbie. Shame on you, Brin!) and says "Muds are dying. Discuss." and people
posit the same tired old argument: WoW and Evercrack kilt my mud!

I'm here to wake y'all up.

Muds are not dead. Mud quality has simply diluted over the past 15 years.
There are fewer players per mud, and fewer loyal players because they
keep running into crappy muds.

Remember the old days? It used to be that stable boxes on static IP's were
worth their weight in mithril. Mudding platforms were the province of
technically proficient people who were either rich or in an organization
(such as a university) that indulged them with casual access to their servers.

Now any chump with a shake-and-bake codebase (yes, I accept blame) and a cable modem
can throw his halfassed orc treadmill into existence. It used to tbe that
players had a choice of a couple dozen muds, each one a concentrated
ecosystem of motivated people there because they couldn't run their own muds.
I remember trying to get hired as a creator on muds back then, and it
was a right pain in the butt. It was an admin's market. When a player went to such a mud,
they got a rich, detailed experience put together by lots of experts.

What do they get now? The regurgitated soup of same-old-crap that
is Joe Schmoe's "highly customized practically-custom ultra-original" mud
which is generally indistinguishable from stock+published areas except
perhaps for class names.

Have you ever heard the movie industry moan about the declining ticket
sales? The music industry?

They consistently bitch and moan about pirates being the #1 enemy of
society. Common sense and research demonstrates that pirates constitute a
a serious loss of revenue, and that is a valid complaint.

But that's not the #1 reason people don't plunk down $9 a pop for a movie
ticket or $15 for a CD. The #1 reason is that people simply don't see the
value in paying exorbitant fees for substandard entertainment. If you
put out crappy movies as a rule, do you really, really expect people to
keep showing up and rendering tribute? If you manufacture artists and engineer
"albums" with just one worthwhile song on it, are you being reasonable to
assume your business model will grow in the long term?

In my mind, the "MMORPGs kilt muds" are a variation of this situation.
MMORPGs are a scapegoat. What's kilt muds is a loss of value. A kajillion
low quality muds killed muds. The cable modem in the den with the candlestick.
Most muds may be payment free, but they aren't cost-free to players. Players still
spend a precious resource when playing: their time. If they keep
spending their most valuable asset on games that simply suck, can you really
expect them to keep trying?

Muds aren't dying. There is simply a boom of crappy muds that obscure the
field and discourage new players. There's a definite slump in progress, but
don't blame Hollywood for lower book sales. Fix the books.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net
01 Apr, 2007, Omega wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
muds have great potential to live, the problem is the vast amount. Try finding a good one, randomly, your luck won't work out that well.

the variety is great, but the mere fact that there are so many, hurts the community aswell, there are more muds every-day, and less players, because sooner or later, most players think they can run a better mud then the one they played, and they go download some stock mud, fill it with snippets, and then they think they are cool.

And then they may get afew players and imms, and the cycle starts all over again.

And you know what the sick part of that is. Graphical MMO's are becoming easier to find with source, free to download, and people are making more of them, so if you think about it, mmo's are going to head down the same track as muds.

I feel though that sooner or later, things will all balance out, but both communities will take a major hit and drop in games. But hey, it happens, so may the best mud win.

Please note..

The Sandstorm is Coming…. Can you Survive it!?
01 Apr, 2007, KaVir wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
Cratylus said:
Muds are not dead. Mud quality has simply diluted over the past 15 years. There are fewer players per mud, and fewer loyal players because they keep running into crappy muds.


On average perhaps, but there are far far more muds today than there were 15 years ago, and the 'big' muds of today have considerably more players than the 'big' muds of yesteryear.

I would say that text-based muds are more popular today than they were in the past, but that the number of new muds has far outgrown the number of new players. The whole "text is dead" rant has been going longer than almost every modern mud.

"I don't think there is much interest in adventure games anymore. Everyone wants graphical interfaces without text input…basically TEXT ADVENTURES ARE DEAD".
– Colin Adams, 1st October 1990.
01 Apr, 2007, Vladaar wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
Muds won't vanish off the earth instantly, however…..

I agree muds are dead, unless you have money to advertise, or ban together a couple good muds, to make one really good one. IRE, and a few others have taken the remainder of players out there. I remember getting players to log onto my mud a few years ago just to check out new muds, and the last year before I stopped mudding there was no wandering players, just people you happened to already have, or someone that came by from word of mouth.

If you are going to put quality real life time into creating a mud now it wouldn't be because you expect to have a 100 player base, but just because you love doing it.

I predict our kids will have a virtual MMORPG game community where you have whole suits, and create medieval worlds, etc. MMORPG full body Nintendoish Wii is coming, heh.

Vladaar
01 Apr, 2007, Scandum wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
Cratylus said:
Muds aren't dying. There is simply a boom of crappy muds that obscure the
field and discourage new players. There's a definite slump in progress, but
don't blame Hollywood for lower book sales. Fix the books.

You're romanticizing the past. Back in the days most muds sucked. A stock rom, godwars, or smaug mud is 5 times better than a stock MERC. Muds aren't declining because modern Muds suck, but because it's an outdated concept few people are interested in, just like few people are interested in writing on vellum with a fountain pen when they can use a stick on note and a ballpoint.

Anyways, the Tolkien MMORPG is launching April 24th, from what I gathered they're expecting over 1 million players.
01 Apr, 2007, syn wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
Firstly LotR:O is being developed by turbine, which if you hadnt noticed hasnt made anything good since the Early days of AC1. DDO was supposed to be the best thing ever, it was the next great MUD killer. Oops I forgot, it was a turbine production, and tanked really really badly.

Second, it's not antiquated. Crat mentioned the book industry compared to TV and Radio. Are Books antiquated? I don't think so. It's simply a format to present a story, be it real or imaginative, fictional or factual. Books are like MUDs, adaptive, things that (should anyway) force you to use your imagination. A MUD involves you more then almost any graphical game.

I just think its rediculous to look at this situation as MUDs dying, they arent. Even if they were you would see a huge drop on people trying to make them and all the major commercial MUDs would close. If there is still a very strong commercial interest, there are bound to be just as many, if not more, people looking for the same things for free.

If you simply take message boards and player bases in the 10s as proof, then your really not looking. MUDs are the books of the gaming field, were not going anywhere.

-Syn
01 Apr, 2007, Tyche wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
There are probably just as many players around than there were 10 years ago. However other internet activities have grown far far faster than muds though.

I think one technology that has the best potential for increasing muds' popularity is to interface them to cellular phones.
02 Apr, 2007, Conner wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
You'd better hope that your cell company isn't charging you per text message, data block, or whatever then…
02 Apr, 2007, Brinson wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
*runs off to lobby the idea to sprint pcs*
  • 02 Apr, 2007, Sandi wrote in the 13th comment:
    Votes: 0
    Graphic MMORPGs?!? Naw…. no way.

    Everybody knows text-based MUD's biggest competition is internet forums.
    02 Apr, 2007, Scandum wrote in the 14th comment:
    Votes: 0
    syn said:
    Second, it's not antiquated. Crat mentioned the book industry compared to TV and Radio. Are Books antiquated? I don't think so.

    You're comparing apples to oranges. If MUDs had been uncontested by MMORPGs and other games for perhaps another decade the mud population could have been 10 million instead of getting stuck somewhere between 50 and 100K. MUDs are dead because not even 1 out of every 100 people will be able to tell you what a MUD is, while only the occasional retard will frown if you ask what a book is.
    02 Apr, 2007, Guest wrote in the 15th comment:
    Votes: 0
    Scandum said:
    syn said:
    Second, it's not antiquated. Crat mentioned the book industry compared to TV and Radio. Are Books antiquated? I don't think so.

    You're comparing apples to oranges. If MUDs had been uncontested by MMORPGs and other games for perhaps another decade the mud population could have been 10 million instead of getting stuck somewhere between 50 and 100K. MUDs are dead because not even 1 out of every 100 people will be able to tell you what a MUD is, while only the occasional retard will frown if you ask what a book is.


    Much as I'd like to think otherwise, Scandum has a very good point here. MUDs never really had long enough to entrench themselves with the population in the same way books had 300 years to do so. Even among IT people who should have heard of them you'll find that often they don't know what they are, or think that only those crazy D&D type people they shunned in college play them. Getting them to even take notice is hard enough, and when someone does, the first thing they ask is "when do we get to the game?" thinking that perhaps the telnet stuff is just some kind of bizarre preregistration process.

    The fact that only a few of the more well known games still have players is also a pretty good indicator that things have taken a major downswing. Especially in the last 5 years with things like Everquest, UO, and WoW rising up. MUDs may not ever die, but they're going to remain an extremely small niche market. I think Scandum's estimate of 50,000 players is optimistic at best.
    02 Apr, 2007, Kelvin wrote in the 16th comment:
    Votes: 0
    I don't think 50,000 players is unreasonable, when the Frontier has seen 5,000-7,500 registrations over its three years. This is only one game out of hundreds, I figure between the smattering of other games out there, there's probably quite a bit more than one would think. It's just that a lot of the collective MU* playerbase doesn't get involved with community sites like this.
    02 Apr, 2007, Omega wrote in the 17th comment:
    Votes: 0
    50,000, theres like, 200,000 muds running on the net at the moment, some publicaly, some not.

    this is the problem, too many muds, not enough players, and when players can't find a good mud, they try to start one, and they just dilute the population more. Down with publicaly released mudbases! I mean, Uhh, down with retards that don't know how to code who want to make better muds and continue to dilute the already overpopulated mud market. Yeah, thats what i mean :P

    oi.
    02 Apr, 2007, KaVir wrote in the 18th comment:
    Votes: 0
    Scandum said:
    If MUDs had been uncontested by MMORPGs and other games for perhaps another decade the mud population could have been 10 million instead of getting stuck somewhere between 50 and 100K. MUDs are dead because not even 1 out of every 100 people will be able to tell you what a MUD is, while only the occasional retard will frown if you ask what a book is.


    Barring an unusually high rate of death or amnesia among ex-mudders, I can't see how fewer people today would know about muds than in the past. The graphical muds (or MMORPGs, MMOs, or whatever else you want to call them) have certainly become far better known, but in doing so have also helped bring more attention to text-based muds. The fact that text-based muds are growing much more slowly than graphical muds doesn't make them 'dead', though.

    If text-based muds had been uncontested by graphical muds for another ten years, I'm not convinced that they would be more popular today. Without major commercial backing they lack the advertising budget to draw serious public attention to themselves, and without eye-candy they're not pretty enough to draw the attention of magazines.

    Samson said:
    The fact that only a few of the more well known games still have players is also a pretty good indicator that things have taken a major downswing.


    The more well known muds don't just "still have players" - they have more players than they had in the past. It's like a tube of toothpaste, with all the players being squeezed to one end, and the admin of muds in the middle of the tube complaining about text-based muds being dead.



    And on a related note, here's a random fact of the day: According to the American Federation for the Blind, over 1.5 million blind and visually impaired Americans use the internet.

    Blind players can't play graphical muds, but they can certainly play text-based muds. I've got a few blind players on my game, and some of them had never even tried a mud before playing GW2. Who else has added features to their muds to make them more accessable to this relatively untapped source of players?
    02 Apr, 2007, Scandum wrote in the 19th comment:
    Votes: 0
    KaVir said:
    The fact that text-based muds are growing much more slowly than graphical muds doesn't make them 'dead', though.

    I don't think they're growing at all. The Zmud sales speak for themselves with Zugg needing to auction advertisement rights to Iron realms, Medievia, and whoever else squeezes money out of their playerbase as sales continued to decrease.

    KaVir said:
    If text-based muds had been uncontested by graphical muds for another ten years, I'm not convinced that they would be more popular today.

    Word of mouth is enough, especially when something is free.

    KaVir said:
    The more well known muds don't just "still have players" - they have more players than they had in the past. It's like a tube of toothpaste, with all the players being squeezed to one end, and the admin of muds in the middle of the tube complaining about text-based muds being dead.

    Naturally with most of the advertisement of the commercial muds being inward instead of outward. It's called targeted advertising and is generally used for a product that is difficult to sell. How difficult you can see on TMC, where the owner has to bend over backward and falsify the search results to get his monthly check from IRE.

    Kavir said:
    And on a related note, here's a random fact of the day: According to the American Federation for the Blind, over 1.5 million blind and visually impaired Americans use the internet.

    I find 'visually impaired' too much of a generalization. Fortunately you gave a link:
    Quote
    The number of people ages 15 and older, with a limitation in seeing, who use a computer regularly is a bit under 1 million (979,000). Of those, about 196,000 people with a "severe" limitation in seeing have access to the Internet, and about 102,000 persons with a severe limitation in seeing use a computer on a regular basis.

    So you have 200K possible blind mudders just in the US alone that can be turned into cute little mud addicts.

    Quote
    Blind players can't play graphical muds, but they can certainly play text-based muds. I've got a few blind players on my game, and some of them had never even tried a mud before playing GW2. Who else has added features to their muds to make them more accessable to this relatively untapped source of players?

    You're so wrong, blind people can play graphical muds easily, just imagine a somewhat shrieking voice coming out of the loud speakers, "left left left left right right forward forward stop slash slash slash slash up left down left up click corpse left up up up up loot corpse - warning there's a pink giant chasing you - run run left left run run jump jump run run! run!!".

    Okay, perhaps graphical muds aren't that good an idea. But first someone will have to write a mud client for blind people which comes with a list of muds for blind people. Pricing it at 30 dollars with a 3 months trial, limited upgrades, and the right advertisement might allow making a living out of it while at it.
    02 Apr, 2007, syn wrote in the 20th comment:
    Votes: 0
    You know, some of you have been mudding for longer then I, but in the 12 years Ive been playing MUDs I have only seen the number of players (and also MUDs in general) explode.

    The real testament to a particular MUD is keeping players, and drawing new ones in past the initial 'Is this MUD any good?' bump at the beginning. Pretty much any new MUD that comes out and I log onto has people on it. Sure some have as few as 2, others 10-20. So what?

    It's pretty obvious that MUDs are really not dying. The pool of MUDs has exploded and diluted the choices, though I don't know anyone who has specifically quit mudding because of this. I know people from 8 years ago that are still mudding, and turned their friends onto it, and so on and so forth.

    You can bring up commercial products like Zmud all you want, but people are still paying for those ad slots, if the community was dying no one would buy them. Hes been seeling slots for years so I dont really see the point in bringing that up. Does Zugg himself struggle? Apparently so, but most of the people I know who MUD dont see the point in paying for a client when the game itself is free. Some people prefer freeware, or even simple telnet or console sessions.

    When I was still playing wow one of the guilds I was in had over 200 people and more then half played MUDs actively. Alot of people I met on wow and other MMOs did, the common response as to why? 'I just cant seem to stay away from MUDs, Im not sure why I just always feel like I want to.'

    That doesnt speak to a dying or transient thing either.

    I think this argument or debate is pretty silly, Its quite obvious that MUDs are not dying, theres simply a massive amount now compared to even 5 years ago, thats all.

    -Syn
    0.0/32