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Starting a mud: worthwhile or not?
Camlorn:
Hello,
So, as some of you know on the i3 network, I'm trying to start a mud. This post isn't an advertisement, it's a question of is it worth it?
Someone pointed out to me that there's a critical mass of sorts with players; you won't get newbies to stay unless you have players on, but you need newbies in the first place to be those players. I don't foresee any coding problems that would cause me to outright abandon this, but I will if my chances of getting more than a couple players are very, very low.
Which is sad, because I have a lot of ideas, including nonstandard nonautomnated combat, and I think I could do a good job. I'd be interested to see what your thoughts are on this, and any numbers if anyone has them for recent muds.
drakkos:
It depends entirely on what you want out of the experience.
Most MUDs are going to end up as a 'ship in a bottle'. They're a thing you pick at in your spare time, and after a few years you realise that you're never going to open for players. There's nothing wrong with that - some people build elaborate model railways in their basement, others construct imaginary virtual worlds. It's a perfectly valid way to spend your time, provided that the experience of building the world is enough for you.
If at the end of it you want players, it becomes a little trickier. Text games have always been a hard sell, and they're a harder sell now than they've ever been. I don't believe it's futile, but I think you need to be realistic. Have a look at mudstats - the numbers are somewhat sobering. Of 739 MUDs registered, less than 200 have a 30-day average of more than 10 players. Well over that number have no players at all. You can get players, even nowadays, but the question is - how many players are enough for you? Realistically, you need to be thinking in terms of tens of players rather than the hundreds that the 'big MUDs' can draw in. Is that enough?
It's not all doom and gloom though. The pool of mudders is diminishing every year, but that doesn't mean that new ones aren't out there. Back in the heyday of MUDs, you didn't have things like almost ubiquitous social networking on which to piggy back. I don't believe that there is viability in mudding when everyone is still recruiting via the same MUD sites. I think the only way a new MUD will be viable nowadays is if they can crack the puzzle of getting non-mudders to try it out and stick with it for long enough to appreciate the format. Nobody has cracked that yet, but my belief is that it'll happen eventually. Maybe text games will only appeal to one percent of one percent of game players, but that's actually a substantial market if you can get them to try it out long enough to become hooked. :-P
As I say, nobody has cracked that puzzle yet, and if you feel that you *need* players for your investment of time to have been worth it, there are other ways to build games in this day and age that can achieve market viability without the extra baggage associated with text gaming. I think you need to want to build a *MUD* for it to be worth your time, not just want to build a game. I also think that the MUD that does crack the puzzle isn't going to be a mud as purists define it. Personally though, I wouldn't have started Epitaph if I didn't believe that I could build a player-base around it.
Drakkos.
quixadhal:
I have a couple of suggestions that might (or might not) help. :)
Totally aside from gameplay, interface, quality, whatever... Drakkos mentioned the idea that muds are no longer the platform of choice for social networking.
That's worth looking into.
If you were to allow people to hook text feeds from twitter/facebook/etc into in-game channels, and give them a way to post back to these things, it might both give them a reason/excuse to sit around in your MUD and socialize... AND it would perhaps get their friends to wonder what "FooMUD" is.
People love collections and achievements too. If you make systems where you can collect bits of things and turn them in for credit and/or earn achievements for doing certain things, AND have that auto-post to their twitter/facebook/etc, it also counts as a plus for most people.
Nulvect:
--- Quote from: quixadhal on September 26, 2011, 03:35:46 PM ---If you were to allow people to hook text feeds from twitter/facebook/etc into in-game channels, and give them a way to post back to these things, it might both give them a reason/excuse to sit around in your MUD and socialize... AND it would perhaps get their friends to wonder what "FooMUD" is.
--- End quote ---
This. A million times this.
I am going to look into this myself. Now the question is - handle it with LPC sockets and write my own code from scratch, or try to interface with an external python/perl/pike/etc script that uses libraries for the specific protocols. Hmm.
Camlorn:
Ok, so mostly agreeing with drakkos's model train/whatever comment; I may just puick at it for fun, in that case. It's good practice for dealing with large systems and starting from scratch does provide a lot of insights, and no-one's used dgd persistence in an actual production game I can find; who knows, the mudlib might eventually be releasable.
As for facebook and twitter, I didn't know there's even a protocol for that; I don't have an account on either because I can start a blog and have the same functionality if I decide I want. Also, I'm visually impaired, and their site design drives me nuts.
Still, it's an avenue for players if I ever get to a releasable point; does anyone know how to find out more about those protocols?
Also, don't use an external script for interface, in my opinion. You can use the libraries provided by i.e. python, but then you have to write your own protocol to interface with that. And, it's another thing that can break along the way, and you'd probably never know that it wasn't working.
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