Member Discussions

This post I'm sure has been done in many other forms over and over again. I think it is prudent to keep it fresh though, as people tend to change opinions over time.

My question that pose to all of you as designers and hopefully players at one point in time... What features, service, look to a mud would keep you interested enough to come back and try it again? Heaps of muds out there have great features, but few of them attract players, and many get visited and left behind.

What are there some key things that you would look for if you were looking for a mud to call a home?

Thanks,

Vladaar

(Comment added by Vladaar on Sat Feb 2 2:20:09 2008)

Please be as indepth as you have time to be.

* Is it customer service that you look for in a game?
* Is it mandatory to see other players online? If so how many?
* Can the game have any stock areas, or is that a no go?
* How indepth should the game story line already be?

Just tossing out some ideas to get the ball rolling. Feel free to put more in there, if I am missing some things that would be important to you if you were thinking of trying a game out.

Community, basically that is the main requirement that i look for as a player. Fun and interesting people to talk to.

There are 2 games that i go back to every now and again even tho i no longer play, Sentience, a mud and Conquer Online an MMO. In both games i have reach the end game and they no longer have anything that interests me as a player so i return now and again and talk to some of the friends i have made.

For me, i find most games are like books, you read them once and the sit collecting dust on the shelf. Sometimes you might re-read one, but ultimately they no longer hold the spark that drives you to want to read them fully.

During the time i was auditing muds for TMC, i found lots of absolutely brilliant muds out there, fully original worlds, great features and not a single player in sight. It was in may respects rather sad to see such great muds without anyone on them at all. Why were they empty? well maybe there are a lot of other players out there who, like me read a book once and leave it on the shelf. Its speculation, i really don't have a clue.

As got your mud Vlad, i have played it, i think its awesome,well coded well designed and written, and you have a good team of friendly immortals, i just could not get past the perma death thing in the early levels to get much past level 10.

eldhamud05
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Community, basically that is the main requirement that i look for as a player. Fun and interesting people to talk to.

As got your mud Vlad, i have played it, i think its awesome,well coded well designed and written, and you have a good team of friendly immortals, i just could not get past the perma death thing in the early levels to get much past level 10.
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I think you maybe right about the community. I think it may take some advertising to reach that point. Thank you for the nice things you said about my mud. Perma Death only happens to advanced races though and up to level 10 like you noted. After level 10, you no longer have to recreate if you die for advanced races. I probably do miss some players here and there, because they do advanced races as their first player, and quit because of perma death.

Vladaar


(Comment added by Vladaar on Sat Feb 2 4:47:55 2008)

Matter fact, because of your input on the perma death, I am running it by my players and staff. Maybe, I can alter this to have advanced races only being able to be chosen after you have played the mud a bit. Thus, attempt to take the new player away from perma death till they get more accustomed with the game.

Matter fact, because of your input on the perma death, I am running it by my players and staff. Maybe, I can alter this to have advanced races only being able to be chosen after you have played the mud a bit. Thus, attempt to take the new player away from perma death till they get more accustomed with the game.

While not a player at your mud (so heh, no opinion on how that exactly works out with your mud), I rather like the approach you propose.

My mud has permadeath now, but only in specific cases, which you will never get to without having played for a fair amount of time, and only if you want to take the chance (it gets you a reward and 'reputation' that you can't get otherwise, but that is nowehere needed for nice gameplay)

At any rate, I agree about the community aspect, its to me the most important for being able to call a mud 'home'.

Community, both OOCly and In Character.

I prefer hack n slash MUDs, as I like being able to do stuff outside of just roleplaying with other people, but a good roleplay atmosphere (encouraged, not enforced) is one of my biggest things.

I've been on MUDs that were really quite TERRIBLE when it came to features, the code, bugs, etc. The areas weren't that great either, but I had a lot of people I considered friends and we had a ton of good roleplay and I called that MUD home until it went down, after which a group of us created our own with the same theme to try to keep together the group that we had formed on the other one. That's actually still the codebase I'm working on now, even though most of us went our separate ways.

The most well coded MUD with the best, deepest areas will hold no interest for me if I can't get along with the players or if the immortals are jerks.

Hades_Kane
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The most well coded MUD with the best, deepest areas will hold no interest for me if I can't get along with the players or if the immortals are jerks.
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Yah that is quite a turn off for new players. When you have volunteers for staff though it is hard to get the best all the time. I currently have a room that trains Staff on different scenarios with trouble players and tells them the best way to deal with them. Which for me, is in the most professional manner possible.

I also think your game tutorial is very important. I spent many days ironing ours out, so it is still fun, teaches new players, and yet doesn't loose the fun aspect.

Vladaar

I agree about the game tutorial and I think it's the most overlooked part of
muds. The irony is that many of these muds are desperately trying to get new
players but they keep adding end-game content instead of catering to
newbies. To call a mud a home you first have to get to the end-game. Hell I
haven't played EoT (hades kane's mud) in a year but in a way it's still home
and I plan to check back there one day.

As for staff perhaps you could try to ask for references as what they have
done earlier in life and aim at recruiting people who have work(ed) in
helpdesks or software support?

Just my 5 pences,

I think that by far the most important aspect of a mud is the community.

I'll be frank about this, unless the mud is evidently head and shoulders above most others, I'll just log off when I see that there's only a one person online, if there is a handful online, we'll see how it turns out. I want to have a fun, exciting experience and I want to share it with other people.

The second most important thing to me is that the admins actually care. Nothing will jade me more than being glossed over by an administration, learning of your latest feat of favoritism or feeling like I'm talking to a brick wall.

Just my opinion, but I think that these are at the very least extremely important factors for deciding if I'll stay in a mud.