[MUD-Dev] Addressing newbies (was: attracting players)

[adam at treyarch.com]

On Wed, 26 Apr 2000, Jerry Hill wrote:
> There's one other issue I haven't seen discussed directly,
> which is the presentation to the player -before- they log
> in.  I know that the very first thing I do before logging on 
> to a mud is to look at thier web page.

Actually, I think Raph has brought this up before, although just in passing.

In fact, I think that was what caused me to redesign my own pages (which
were basically nonexistent before).  Even though they are still very basic,
I experienced a HUGE surge in new players as a direct result.

Back when I was mudding heavily, I did so from a text VT-100 terminal
(the only 24/365 lab in the building), and the WWW didn't really exist
anyways.  Certainly no muds I knew of had a web page.  So it's easy for
administrators like myself to overlook this important point.

> I want to be able to learn about the world, character creation,
> anything that makes your mud unique.  Specifically I expect at 
> least the following:
> 
> - Character creation
>   - Race options
>   - Class options
>   - Advancement procedures
> 
> - Style
>   - Are you a PK / non-PK / optional-PK mud
>   - Is roleplaying encouraged / discouraged / required
> 
> There's lots of other material that is good as well.  Especially
> history (both real life and in-game), a discusion of the world, 
> and links to player run pages.  Access to the actual mud help files
> is grand, though not always practical.  

Agreed with all of this.  I also have a FAQ, which has cut down on the
number of repeated questions to the admin, an (incomplete) list of locations,
an overview of the mechanics for the skill system, combat, craftsmanship,
and just about anything else that will both intruige and educate potential
players.

> Basically, for a lot of people this is the first exposure they have
> to your world, and these first impressions count for a lot.

Yep.  A color scheme and a few images for sparkle can go a long way to put
them in the proper mood.

> On a related note, has anyone ever tried to correlate web page hits
> to people logging in?  I.e., how many IP addresses hit your web pages
> and never log in, how many log in without seeing the pages, etc.

The mud connector statistics page achieves basically this effect.  In my
case, the number of telnet connections is roughly equivilent to the number of
web connections.  Of course, I think that the first number is probably half
of what it might otherwise be, because people want to use their own telnet
client, not the one the browser invokes.

> PS: Though it's not perfect, http://retromud.org has a good set of 
> web pages.  I'm sure there are others that are as good/better, this
> just happens to be the only one I'm active on at the moment.  

Pretty nice, although a bit ametureish.  I've always been impressed by
Legend MUD's pages:

http://www.legendmud.org

Arctic's are nice, although a bit utilitarian:

http://www.arctic.org

Mine are probably about the minimum that you can get away with.  I also
realized (much later) that the graphics look great on my ultra-high-res,
ultra-high-contrast monitor, but not so good on your average 800x600 or
1024x768 screen with the brightness cranked up and the contrast turned
down (which seems to be rather popular).  Oh well, I'll fix 'em one of
these days:

http://dusk.org/BloodDusk

Adam





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