Slashdot Mirror
Saving MUDs?
chewedtoothpick asks: "My absolute favorite game of all-time, Exile [Archive.org mirror], is a MUD that is about to be shut down, and I've noticed that MUDs have been diminishing in number, especially lately. Why are they all quitting, and what does it take to resurrect them? Is it a matter of buying the code off the creator? Is it a matter of making your own and hope it comes close to the one you want it to be like? Is there nothing we can do to save the classics that define multi-player games?"
Forgive me if I make any outrageous errors in my comment as I never took much interest in the MUD world BUT is a MUD any different at this point than, say, Everquest? As far as I know, the basic ideas are the same and your experience is still up to you - whether you want to use it just to chat with new people or actually go on adventures. MUDs are probably easier to modify and add items and such to for the end user, as Sony dictates most of the Everquest world but that seems like a small sacrifice to make in favor of a ton more eye candy.
DID YOUR MOM SERVE YOU AN EXTRA HELPING OF DUMB TONIGHT?
Isn't there a big difference of price; MUDs are free and Everquest is very expensive?
MUDs are essentially MMORPGs without graphics. MUDs allow for greater developer depth (the Avatar MUD has 23 races which can be mixed with around 10 classes, and a huge world to explore) and player depth (you can be a lot more creative in a game with text instead of graphics), but it's not easy to go up against the fancy graphics and content factories of big companies like Sony Online. It's not just fun to look at better graphics, but can be easier on the eyes, and a lot easier for people with mild dyslexia (a surprisingly common problem). I think a lot of MUDs are going to dissapear, but I also think that they'll be around for a lot longer, and maybe never fully dissapear.
Blatant self-promotion: Jerek.net
Having had some experience on both sides of a MUD (both playing and running) I can say that no single factor kills a mud, or keeps it alive besides the actual people who are running it. Usually it is a small group of people who have been working together for years, and eventually decide that it is just enough. They grow up, have a family, have other interests, or just realize that they can not devote the amount of time necessary to run it to the level that they would like. Sure some admins are willing to let other people take over, but how many are capable and have the experience? Generally it's better to just take it down.
I work on a fairly old DIKU/VieMUD based mud called NCMUD (www.ncmud.org). The way we keep it running (11 years and counting now) is that when the current implementors get bored we just promote two more implementors from the immortal ranks to add new features and run the game. That's how we have kept going this long.
Some problems I have had with running a mud:
A) Hosting... I'm a broke college student and so are the other implementors of NC(at least the ones who currently run it). So we really can't pay much for hosting. When it comes to hosting a mud as large as NC, we transfer about 11 gig up and downstream a month, take up about 2 gigs of harddrive space, and chew up and spit out memory, it's hard to find anyone willing to host us. Right now we might be going off line for the first time in 11 years because we are about to lose our free hosting and can't find another.
B) Player Base... The player base is aging we aren't getting as many young players any more. Most of the people who start NCMUD are old verterns of muds or foreign teenagers. Seems like Everquest is kicking the mud communities ass in this area for sure. Eye candy seems to make up for a lot.
C) Implementors... Most MUDs are started by high school or college students who want to play around. This leads to an inflation of shitty muds. It's extremely hard to find a good mud, and even harder to find a great mud to play out there anymore. Everyone is using a codebase and adding patching, not a whole lot of people are doing their own thing.
That's a few thoughts from me.
- John
Honestly, I don't see any way to "save" MUD's when they don't have a wide enough player base to support them.
If we go off the base assumption that people are lazy, then the biggest problem with getting people to play MUD's instead of MMORPG's is that an MMORPG is more intuitive for new users, because of their graphical interface. If you're a younger player who just wants to jump into a game, are you going to learn a new style of language just to be able to move around, or are you going to go for the game that actually has graphics and a control scheme that anyone who's played an FPS can figure out?
And honestly, if MUD's are doing so poorly, than how are they going to get the support to add even rudimentary 2D graphics? You also lose the ability to easily drop new stuff into the game when you add graphics.
IMHO, it's best to just let MUD's continue as they are. Sure, some will be lost, but since when has the MUD world ever been particularly static? They'll still be around.
We don't want graphics. If we did, we're be working on some of the open-source MMORPG engines at SourceForge.
Part of the point of a MUD is that it is in text. Yes, when MUDs first began that was about the only choice. Now it's part of the charm for those who still play. The graphics are limited by the video card of your mind and the people who build for the MUD, not by the hardware of your system.
We don't want graphics.
If you exclude the majority of the game playing world, then don't complain when your player base slowly evaporates and nobody wants to subsidize your bandwidth needs. MUDs are dying because of the kind of attitude that doesn't listen to what people want.
A better solution is to make a game in which graphics are optional. They don't have to be cutting edge graphics either. A simple 2D map with tiles for players, NPCs, and objects would bring a whole lot of people in.