14 May, 2013, Lograk wrote in the 1st comment:
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What's happened over the last few years for everything to just, dwindle away? Not much discussion, no updates to anything, nothing, anywhere. I mean, there a few every now and again, but seems like everything came to a halt. Just curious, and thought maybe I missed the memo somewhere.
14 May, 2013, Zeno wrote in the 2nd comment:
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Where? On MudBytes? I see a considerable amount of new topics here.
14 May, 2013, Lograk wrote in the 3rd comment:
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Not like it used to, I suppose. Most of the MUDs I've tried to look at, even in the banner rotations, are all gone. Don't get me wrong, there are a few that work. But it just seems like everything hit a wall, and only a few MUDs/people have trickled through over the past few years. But, eh, I could be wrong.
14 May, 2013, Zeno wrote in the 4th comment:
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MUDs come and go, always been like that. I haven't seen much of a change on my MUD in terms of playerbase.
14 May, 2013, Lograk wrote in the 5th comment:
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Yeah, always known that. I don't know, maybe I'm just out of the loop now. Just seems like things were different 7 years ago.
14 May, 2013, Davenge wrote in the 6th comment:
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Lograk said:
Yeah, always known that. I don't know, maybe I'm just out of the loop now. Just seems like things were different 7 years ago.


Seven years is a long time… lol
14 May, 2013, Lograk wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
Davenge said:
Seven years is a long time… lol


Could be, lol. Just trying to show activity range I'm talking about, 7 years ago, there was a new MUD seeking staff everyday, builders looking to build, and so on. Now, your lucky to see one once a week, if one a month it looks like.
15 May, 2013, arholly wrote in the 8th comment:
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7 years is two generations of college kids basically. That is a very long time.
15 May, 2013, Lyanic wrote in the 9th comment:
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Lograk said:
7 years ago, there was a new MUD seeking staff everyday

Regrettably, that's still true today. You must not be looking in the right places - consider yourself lucky.
15 May, 2013, Cratylus wrote in the 10th comment:
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In The Godfather pt II, someone tries to dissuade Michael Corleone from assassinating an adversary by citing the opponent's age and ill health. Michael snarls:

"Hyman Roth has been dying from the same heart attack for the last twenty years."
15 May, 2013, quixadhal wrote in the 11th comment:
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MUD's used to attract poor college students. The rise of the free-to-play MMO has removed the monetary barrier, and the fact that most MMO's run on cheap hardware has moved graphical MMO's away from the geek/gamer desktops to pretty much anyone's laptop or even tablet. Add to that the plethera of easy facebook games and iPhone/android games, and what are you left with?

The target audience now consists of the blind (who can't play graphical games), old farts (who played MUD's in college or earlier, and still do for some reason), and a very tiny number of others who actually like text games. Slim pickin's my friends.
15 May, 2013, Idealiad wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
You're not seeing the forest for the trees. Most people don't know muds exist. Granted, many people don't know that MMOs exist. I'd be surprised if my mom and dad know what they are. However, when the average person goes to play a game, they do not see:

World of Warcraft: Buy Now
Everquest 2: Free to Play
God Wars 2: Free

It's very likely that a tiny number of people are interested in text games in the first place. But tiny relative to what? All people interested in MMO-like games? Or all people who have heard of muds? I suspect the former is a rather large number compared to the latter.
16 May, 2013, Lograk wrote in the 13th comment:
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quixadhal said:
MUD's used to attract poor college students. The rise of the free-to-play MMO has removed the monetary barrier, and the fact that most MMO's run on cheap hardware has moved graphical MMO's away from the geek/gamer desktops to pretty much anyone's laptop or even tablet. Add to that the plethera of easy facebook games and iPhone/android games, and what are you left with?

The target audience now consists of the blind (who can't play graphical games), old farts (who played MUD's in college or earlier, and still do for some reason), and a very tiny number of others who actually like text games. Slim pickin's my friends.

Idealiad said:
You're not seeing the forest for the trees. Most people don't know muds exist. Granted, many people don't know that MMOs exist. I'd be surprised if my mom and dad know what they are. However, when the average person goes to play a game, they do not see:

World of Warcraft: Buy Now
Everquest 2: Free to Play
God Wars 2: Free

It's very likely that a tiny number of people are interested in text games in the first place. But tiny relative to what? All people interested in MMO-like games? Or all people who have heard of muds? I suspect the former is a rather large number compared to the latter.

So, with this said, what does that hold for the future of MUDs? Do we develop a Facebook telnet client so players can login using Facebook accounts? Do we rally as a community and focus efforts on major advertising? Honestly, I can say MUDs kept me out of trouble in my teen years, and I gained a lot of good friends from them. I don't like to think that in 10 years, they could very well be gone forever unless the MUD was made by Iron Realms Entertainment. Or do we just let it keep dying down, till there are only a few of us left?
16 May, 2013, Lyanic wrote in the 14th comment:
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Lograk said:
Do we develop a Facebook telnet client so players can login using Facebook accounts?

People are already doing that, as well as developing mobile apps, and graphical plugins for MUD clients. I wouldn't say any of those efforts are widespread, but they're definitely gaining traction.
16 May, 2013, arholly wrote in the 15th comment:
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I think the problem is that people do not want to share ideas. I know a number of people have been burned by people stealing code and thus are protective of their ideas. The other problem, as I see it, is that hobbyist (like myself), have a difficult time working with one language, let alone more than one in order to get their game on Facebook, or Kongregate, or whatever. I think the aggregate effect, when combined with graphical MMO's is that MUD's are taking a beating. I think the community needs to do a better job of promoting MUD's overall, not just specific ones.
16 May, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
arholly said:
I think the problem is that people do not want to share ideas. I know a number of people have been burned by people stealing code and thus are protective of their ideas.


This may be true but it hasn't been my experience (I've shared a lot of code, and offered to share even more, with very few takers). What's far more prevalent is people resisting other people's ideas, especially in clinging to old-fashioned notions of "what a real MUD is". The net result seems to be that traditionalists form the core of the dev community, and people trying something different eventually leave for other forums because they are no longer "real enough" to be here.

arholly said:
The other problem, as I see it, is that hobbyist (like myself), have a difficult time working with one language, let alone more than one in order to get their game on Facebook, or Kongregate, or whatever.


The problem of human resources would not loom so large if we didn't also have the problem of "everyone wants to run their own game." Part of the issue is that we are very short on commercial projects, and money is a powerful incentive forcing people into teamwork. Without monetary incentive to join forces, most of us are focused on indulging our God Complex as hobbyists.

arholly said:
I think the aggregate effect, when combined with graphical MMO's is that MUD's are taking a beating. I think the community needs to do a better job of promoting MUD's overall, not just specific ones.


One of the things I suggested on TMS recently was a game portal that we can all work on and promote together, paired with a solid HTML5 client for which I am willing to donate most of the code (see this). I also offered to host the portal and help with the web design as much as time permits. I got exactly 0 interest. And I am getting the feeling that if I get >0 interest, I may still get 0 help.
16 May, 2013, quixadhal wrote in the 17th comment:
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This nonsense about being protective of ideas is a great laugh. While I understand people not wanting to hand over their code (despite it not involving profit), ideas are no longer "secret" as soon as you let the public play your game. Modern games have to deal with such things all the time, and it's called competition. I suspect that concept has been forgotten in the MUD community. :)

In the MMO subset of computer games, about the last dozen MMO's to launch have been labeled as "WoW clones", because the general UI and overall combat mechanics have been very similar. Does that mean they've failed? Does that mean WoW has died each time one of them launched? No. It means people who play, or have played, WoW will not have much of a learning curve to try them… and maybe they'll play them for a while or maybe they won't… mostly depending on how bored they are of WoW itself.

When graphical muds first came out, I remember the mud community laughing at them. When Everquest became a success and really nailed the genre, they still pooh-pooh'd it as "simplistic", and claimed text muds were way more advanced. Fourteen years have passed. Text muds are still pretty much EXACTLY the same as they were back then. In fact, many of the codebases you can download were written back then. During that time, graphical muds (now called MMO's because MUD's are forgotten) have continued to evolve and are a billion dollar industry with tens of millions of players.

What do we have?

A few hundred servers running idle, acting as glorified chat lines? A dozen active muds, most of which were created 20 years ago during the golden age, and which run mostly on loyalty and nostalgia of players who also played back then? The majority of admins, jealously hoarding their precious code, cackling with glee each time they implement a feature that's already been done?

I have no doubt that muds will survive. The question is, do we want them to continue on at a subsistence level, as they are now? Or do we want them to grow? If they're to grow, they MUST evolve. The only real evolution that's happening seems to be in the semi-graphical client world, and because muds flat-out refuse to adopt any standards, that's limited and clunky.

I've said before, I think the only chance of getting out of the pit we've dug is to switch from pre-rendered TELNET to a packaged data stream, like JSON, so that clients can stop relying on fragile regular expressions to identify and re-parse content. A few people agreed, many more laughed, but nobody is willing to put in the time to work out a basic system. This isn't a new idea, BTW…. Beek wrote up a skeleton for LPMUD's to do this back in 1995. Nobody listened to him either. :)

Here's to another ten years of death and decay! Cheers!
/drink
20 May, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 18th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
I've said before, I think the only chance of getting out of the pit we've dug is to switch from pre-rendered TELNET to a packaged data stream, like JSON, so that clients can stop relying on fragile regular expressions to identify and re-parse content.


To that effect, I'm getting pretty excited about my new node.js codebase experiment. My new player 'score/stat' command:

score: function(s) {
JSON.stringify(s.ch);
}
0.0/18