[MUD-Dev] Minimum community sizes

[David Bennett]

On 2/28/00, at 6:39 PM, Matthew Mihaly wrote: 

>Yes, now that's always a somewhat puzzling problem to deal with in terms
>of things like running game-wide plots. I'm not actually sure how big our
>active player base is (upwards of 400 I'd say, given that we peak at about
>130 online simultaneously currently), but there is definitely two groups
>of players. They aren't completely discrete, but a lot of players from one
>never see players from the other. You get the American and european group,
>who tend to be active from about 5 pm GMT to about 8 am GMT. Around 9 am
>GMT, the HK and Aussie players start filtering in (5 pm their time). The
>world feels very different during the daytime, GMT, due to a much smaller
>population (maybe 30 online or so). There's a lot of bleeding over the

Interesting.  Discworld gets a constant login count pretty much.  Around
130 all the time.  We never had such high swings in terms of online
population as you are mentioning.  Is it easier to pay to play your mud
from the US maybe?

I wonder if this is just due to different targeted demographics?

As for populations falling into discrete areas where they start to break
up.  Some of our players definately miss the more social atmophere from
when we were smaller (around 40 people online at a time).  Becoming larger
means that people tend to fragment up into cliques, and this has happened.
Players did their own seperating up (writing web pages and things) and then
when I added clubs and families into the system, they started to use that
as a break up instead.

The global channels have not changed that much in content, although a lot
smaller percentage of the player base listens to the global chat channels
than used to.

We grew pretty quickly from 40 odd to 140 odd so I didn't really see the
effects very well.  We did have effects in terms of creator stress though.
During our period of high growth all the creators felt under quite a bit of
pressure and made some hasty (and bad) decisions.  Controlled growth seems
like a better option, allows people to build the world to handle the new
influx of players as well.

Good luck!
David.



_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev maillist  -  MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev