[MUD-Dev] mud vs. mush membership

[Adam Wiggins]

On Fri, 23 Jul 1999, Matthew Mihaly wrote:
> I don't think there can be much question that MUD membership vastly
> outnumbers MUSH. Someone was talking about the largest MUSHs having a
> couple hundred people online at once, which is fairly puny compared to the
> major MUDs, with thousands online at once (and I don't mean graphical
> games like UO. I'm talking about Gemstone II, Dragonrealms, and their
> ilk).

Well, I *somewhat* agree with you, but it has nothing to do with those
"big" muds.  It has to do with the huge volume of ROMs and other
super-simple diku derivitives put up by kids that want to have their
own mud.

Here's my informal poll from the mud connector.  (BTW if your favorite
mud isn't listed on the mud connector, or is out of date, bug the admin -
especially if YOU are the admin. :) This thing has been a great resource to
the mud community for a long time.)

The following codebases comprise:

MUSH         115
MOO           34
MUCK          35
MUX           60
MUSE           1
-----------------
             245

A "complete" listing (which includes the codebases above, plus ACKmud, AberMUD,
Circle, Diku, Diku II, DUM, EmberMUD, EmlenMUD, Eye of the Storm, LP, Merc,
Mordor, Oblivion, ROM, ROT, Silly, and SMAUG) turns up 1408 listings.
Minus 245 that's 1163.

245 is a little less than 20% of 1408.  I believe that arguing about size
is probably somewhat pointless; there are litteraly hundreds of little stock
mercs which rarely have a single player on them running.  I would say that,
if anything, the social muds are more likely to have a very steady playerbase.
The exception is on the high end: high-quality, long running GoP muds like
Arctic, BatMUD, or the Sojurn derivitives often have steady player bases of
several thousand players.  (Meaning 100-400 online at a time.)

Adam W.





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