Does top 10 on TMS = more new players?

[Gimfalisette]

Hi folks. I just was looking over my ARM data (yes, the data that I keep so obsessively!), and I noticed that last week while we were in the top 10 on TMS, we had 93 character applications and 260 unique logins. That's more character applications than we've had any week since November 6th, 2006; and more unique logins than we've had in any week since February 19th of this year.

So I went to look through my data a bit more for a pattern, and I'm seeing that in weeks when we are in the top 10 on TMS, it appears we possibly have consistent spiking in character applications and unique logins.

:arrow: 8/27/07 - 22% more applications over average of four previous weeks, 8% more unique logins
:arrow: 3/5/07 - 18% more applications over average of four previous non-TMS-top-10 weeks, approximately the same unique logins
:arrow: 2/5/07 - 32% more applications over average of four previous weeks, 7% more unique logins

Unfortunately, we're in the top 10 on TMS so infrequently, there's really not a lot of data to go on. It's a bit of food for thought, though.

Also, help the research, go vote

[Is Friday]

Voting for Arm is my religion.

[Maso]

Want Graphs plz. Showing direct correlation.

[Gunnerblaster]

In my opinion, being in the top 10 shouldn't be a really good reason to get more folks to play ARM. I mean, we're getting good roleplayers through word of mouth / email to email / etc. If we're on top 10 for long, we may get kids who think this is one of those hack and slash roleplays.

Ugh. Call me old school, but that's just how I view it.

Who knows? Maybe that same reason of being in the top 10 will spike interest in new, literate and eager to learn roleplayers.

[Gunnerblaster]

-delete-

[Belenos]

We actually have the statistics based on people's answers as to where they heard about us.  I'll see if I can get that into some kind of acceptable form.  The results may or may not surprise you.

[Gimfalisette]

Send them to me, Belenos, I crunch data for a living! I would be happy to help out!

[Gunnerblaster]

-delete-

[Gimfalisette]

In my opinion, being in the top 10 shouldn't be a really good reason to get more folks to play ARM. I mean, we're getting good roleplayers through word of mouth / email to email / etc. If we're on top 10 for long, we may get kids who think this is one of those hack and slash roleplays.

We don't get those already?

Being on TMS at all is a form of marketing. Marketing is necessary for finding new customers. The vast majority of ARM's playerbase played some other MUD before they came to ARM; our target market is MUDders. Not striving to advertise as widely as possible to that particular target market (i.e., people looking for a MUD on TMS) would be akin to McDonald's advertising hamburgers to vegetarians.

[Reiloth]

I agree with Gimf. Even John Lennon thought of advertising Peace as one would advertise War, as a product. Advertising for Armageddon, in any form, will bring in new players. Albeit, I agree that on TMS, it would bring in people who may be looking for somthing not as roleplay intensive...But Armageddon very well may change how they look at MUDs....For all time.

[Cale_Knight]

If TMS only brings in one dedicated RPer for every 20 hack an' slashers, it's still 100% worth it.

MUDs as a genre are dying and we need to claw and scrape for every single player we can get.

[Mood]

I discovered Arm through TMS.

[Shiroi Tsuki]

Also discovered Arm through TMS!

[WWYD]

Ditto the last two posts.

[FuSoYa]

I did as well, and I've been making an effort to vote every twelve or so hours.

Brandon

[Doppelganger]

We are not in top 10 because we don't get new players, not the other way around. We have lost quarter of playerbase over the year, from ~320 to ~240, it's clearly a sign that something is wrong with the MUD, not with the voting frequency.

I clean my appartments before inviting guests in. Likewise, I don't believe it's good time to advertise your asses off. Game is still okay if you already have invested lots of time and know ways to entertain yourself, but I don't think it's still appealing to newbies.

About statistic itself. Number of applications alone is the way to figure average lifespan of our PCs and not so important with regard to popularity. Unique accounts is a key number indeed, but I don't see much difference. Not in the long run at least, if people come for one week and then leave never to return, I don't think it's an acceptable result.

[Dresan]

I don't think anything is wrong with the MUD.

Playing during and after the copper wars was such a treat, it seems most places were packed. I remember going around Tuluk a RL month or two after the HRPT had ended  and the tavern were full of people, you couldn't even find a seat at the bar in one of them. Its was just a regular day aswell no RPT or anything. Good times, damn good times....during that whole time it seems like the population was slowly growing with more people joining or returning each day and actually staying. The mud honestly seem to be prospering, reaching 100 people a night prime time didn't seem like a dream.

Then the announcement came and a 'end of times' date was given. I mean no offense to the staff but their estimate showed their enthusiasm more then their experience at building a mud from scratch. I'm glad they stopped giving estimates because besides being wrong and stressing themselves with deadlines, they also just hurt the current mud.

And hurt the mud it did, people began rolling magicker (eventually special apps or so i've heard since i've returned) to prepare for the end, others just didn't think they had enough time to spend making another character and other were angry...those people just left the mud. The fact that you couldn't go down north road without bumping into a magicker and that the taverns were becoming emptier didn't help matters at all. The 'end of days' announcement and the player's reaction to it was what caused the massive population decrease. It really wasn't that anything was actually wrong with the mud.

I think right now the mud is recovering from that, most people are beginning to realize that the new mud isn't going to be done anytime soon. Again no offense to the staff, i believe you'll finish and do a great job, its just its a ton of time consuming work. I think alot of magick loving players have either died, learn to intergrated them into society properly or just figured out that its impossible to max them in 5 days unless (or even if) your powergaming twink. At any rate they aren't as obvious as they were  soon after the announcement (at least to me).

I really think people have calmed down and things are returning to normal more or less. Personally i've been hoping that karma 2+ level people will be allowed to play 20 day old mudane character from creation (still keeping the option to start from scratch of course). I think that will help the mud greatly in getting more mundane plots rolling but then i've been begging for that like two week after i started playing this game. You can trust people with the potential of magick but you can't trust them with a mundane character they didn't have to spend 6 month of their real lives training just to make them decent.  :evil:

/derail and rant (Sorry :cry: )

Btw to actually type something relevant to the thread  i too found this game from Top Muds Site and i do think voting helps bring people in.  Though i've seen obvious newbies link dead in the taverns recently, most of them don't stay long if they don't get some interaction and help before they get fustrated.  Unfortunately in some places starting tavern are still often empty whether there is an RPT in another city or not.  

[Tulana]

MUDs as a genre are dying and we need to claw and scrape for every single player we can get.

I  hope you don't really mean that.

[Dalmeth]

MUDs as a genre are dying and we need to claw and scrape for every single player we can get.

I  hope you don't really mean that.

It's true.  MUDs evolved into MMORPGs, and now there's a big market with more instant gratification.  There's just less people interested in text nowadays.

[Malken]

MUDs as a genre are dying and we need to claw and scrape for every single player we can get.

I  hope you don't really mean that.

You seriously think that we get more new players than we lose them to MMORPGs, console games, etc...?

[Angela Christine]

MUDs have been dying for 10+ years, and they are still dying strong.  Does Arm have fewer players than it had 5 years ago, or 10 years ago, or 15 years ago?  I don't think so.  I've been playing since 2001, and the prime time Who has almost always shown 30-50 players connected.

[Dresan]

I've generally always believed  that MUDs as a genre was dying however that might not techically be true. The fact of the matter is muds began at a time where mostly geeky university students would be able to access the internet. Therefore there were really never that many people to lose to mmo or consoles.


I think a better phrase would be that muds are a niche genre that was never truely popular to begin with, sure at one point anyone with a computer and internet access would have tried and played one however back then those were fewer people then the number that are actually playing muds now. By the time the internet became popular graphical games were already way better at introducing people to gaming then muds ever were.  I think the fact is that muds steal players MMOs, its not always the other way, how many people here played or still play an MMO before finding this MUD? I know i did, i really didn't even know what a  MUD really was.

With more and more people becoming computer savy and games like WoW, Starwar Galaxies, Eve Online becoming mainstream and introducing the average folk to gaming, chances are a small percentage of them (and even if its in .0 percentage) will stumble across a mud, find it enjoyable and begin play. I think it pretty well might be that the overall MUD population has been steadily growing, however compared to the growth of MMOs and other online gaming, it only seems like MUDs dying.

Just look at the population of this game and a few other MUDS, they have slowly grown since they began, and some of us around here are still quite young and started playing when they were even younger.  If tommorrow we advertised on World of Warcraft website the site(not the best people to be bringing in this game though), Arm's site and server would probably crash to the people visiting due to curiousity. Sure alot of people wouldn't like it but the small percentage that will would probably send the Pop. skyrocketting. Not to mention that game is small so at i don't think it after 150-200 people it would really start suffer not by lag but just space and emote spam. It really would only take a small percentage of the millions of people that play MMOs to make Ginka cry for mercy.

I think the biggest problem that plagues muds as a genre is that they don't advertise in the right places. TMS and other mud sites are great when someone is actively looking for a MUD but a better (though probably more expensive) place to advertise would be any popular gaming site (IGN, Gamespot. MMORPG.com might be good) though that might not be a healthy thing to do for Arm. If only sites like TMS would go out and make themselves known to the mainstream audience MUD player populations would rise....but alas...

[Malken]

With more and more people becoming computer savy and games like WoW, Starwar Galaxies, Eve Online becoming mainstream and introducing the average folk to gaming, chances are a small percentage of them (and even if its in .0 percentage) will stumble across a mud, find it enjoyable and begin play. I think it pretty well might be that the overall MUD population has been steadily growing, however compared to the growth of MMOs and other online gaming, it only seems like MUDs dying.

Hmm, I'm still not convinced at all.. I agree that we probably get a tiny minus percentage of Armageddon players from MMOs, but my point is that I'm willing to bet that we probably lose way more to the newest ones out there than we gain. And with the growing complexity of MMORPGs (We're still at the very basic hack n' slashy era of them, but at some point they will offer different flavors for different players, just like muds did) I think we're just going to keep losing more to them than we might gain players from them.

I also don't think that muds are getting more popular, the majority of our players are coming from pay-to-play #1's topmudsite muds, growing tired of them and being told by other players there about Armageddon, we are gaining players because our reputation as a great roleplaying mud is only growing as well, but we're just grabbing players from other muds more than grabbing them from elsewhere, and elsewhere is stealing more mudders than it's giving back to the community, that's my opinion, at least..

Proof of that is that muds like Armageddon, SoI and Harshlands don't have a 100% different playerbase from each other, I'm willing to bet that at least 60% of our players are playing one of these two other muds and vice versa, that's why you always hear, "I'm sick of Armageddon, I'm going to SoI, or, I'm sick of SoI, I'm going to Armageddon.." We're just trading players back and forth instead of having three muds with 100% different players there.

But Armageddon is certainly not dying, I don't think at this point that we'll ever get over 100 players at a time, though, our chance for that was in the mid 90's early 2000's, now there's just too many other options for gamers to go to, and mudding is just a tiny tiny fraction of it all.

But as long as us old players are still playing and not growing too old or moving on, I'd say that Armageddon will always remain steady at 55-75 players on any giving nights, until, of course, a MMORPGs come out and offers what we all love about Armageddon.

[Angela Christine]

Part of the problem with graphical rpgs is that, in the end, the graphics always suck.  They look shiny when you first see them, but before too long they start to let you down.  When I tried Neverwinter Nights I found the bobbing heads and blank, mask-like faces of the characters to be unpleasantly creepy if I zoomed in too close on them.  Maybe it was that uncanny valley effect, I dunno.



I was taking a look at Zugg's blog, http://forums.zuggsoft.com/forums/weblog_entry.php?e=21619 , and found this:

I guess I'll go back to WoW and see if I can find a way to make it fun again. Maybe someday someone will release a game that is fun instead of just tedious.

My question is: is this even possible? Are MMORPGs doomed to be boring level grinding treadmills? Will companies continue to make the game tedious just to force you to subscribe longer in order to make any progress in the game? Are their any other games out there that do it better that I should be trying? (I've already played the "big names" like EQ, DAoC, EQ2, AC, AC2, UO, AO).

Am I forced to conclude that MUDs are still better? Hasn't *anyone* taken a proven MUD game-play system and adapted it for a MMORPG?

I think this is a pretty common feeling.  Not all the time, but sometimes.  It happens here too, there is a slow but steady stream of players who get tired of Arm and say goodbye, and a slow but steady stream of players announcing that they are back from a long hiatus and want to know what's new.

Many players play more than one game.  Many of us have played other MUDs, sometimes for years.  Many play a graphical game like WoW or Eve Online in addition to Arm, not instead of Arm.  Most of the players that have been around for 10 or 15 years haven't actually been playing continuously for all that time.



MUDs will never die because they can be maintained by a few dedicated people in their spare time, and so they can be offered for free.  Monthly fees have replaced the hourly fees of yesteryear, but I doubt that the newest, cutting edge MMORPGs will ever be able to be free, because it simply takes too many people too much time to get one running and keep it running.  People like things that are free.

[Shiroi Tsuki]

When you take away the imagination and the feeling that anything is possible, you really loose out with a lot of people.  MUDs are able to offer that - MMOs are not, especially not the really massive ones.  At Arm, I can be involved in a plot actually tailored to my character.  Ever gonna see that on WoW?  ... yeah.  I'm sure that MMORPGs will get more complex and the graphics will get better and so on as time goes on, but it will never match the level of small-community anything is possible feeling or the total immersion you can get with a MUD.

After all, I play MUDs to create stories.  It's hard to do that in an MMO setting where your character can only do the same things that any other character can do.

[Malken]

I'm seeing a lot of that good stuff in Tabula Rasa, the new MMORPG by Lord British.