[MUD-Dev] Addressing newbies

[adam at treyarch.com]

On Thu, 11 May 2000 stoddart at slip.net wrote:
> > From: "Johan J Ingles-le Nobel" <xvf61 at dial.pipex.com>
> > I redesigned the wotmud.org/ website last October. Whilst it was "fair"
> > [...]
> > Go have a look at the pages - there's a lot of work to do yet, but they
> > work for us... They suck on Unix and Macs I'm told, but for the other 97%
> > of WWW users who have 800x600 resolution they're quite nice...
> 
> It seemed to work alright on my Mac, apart from the left/right page arrow
> things which scroll too far.

For what it's worth, they work beautifully on Netscape/Linux/x86.
The little sideways-scrolling-thingy is quite nice.

It's probably always worth making sure that your pages show up well on
everyone's computer.  Mine tend to have two problems after I've first
created them: they are almost unviewable at any res below 1024x768 (since I
run my desktop machine at very high res), and usually look bad on monitors
with high brightness and low contrast (since I keep mine high contrast and
low brightness).  I usually make the effort to modify them to be viewable at
lower res, and then make my monitor look crappy for a while and adjust the
br/con on the images.

I also try to test them on every platform I can find, including text browsers
like Lynx.  It's rather difficult to track down a Windows/Internet Explorer
system in these parts, but if I didn't make the effort to do so, I'd probably
be cutting out a good chunk of my potential "market".

> Out of curiosity, do you know how new players are discovering your web
> pages?

It's just like marketing anything: getting yourself listed in as many locations
as possible, and then making sure that you "capture" as many potential
audience members with your material as possible.

There are many places to list.  The most signifigant, of course, is the
mud connector:

http://www.mudconnector.com

This should also (eventually) get you listed in Zmud's database, which is
probably the largest group likely to play your game that you can reach.
(Whether this group represent your ideal players is up for debate, of course.)

Many search services have mud categories:

http://search.netscape.com/Games/Internet/MUDs?cp=srpmatcat
http://dir.yahoo.com/Recreation/Games/Computer_Games/Internet_Games/MUDs__MUSHes__MOOs__etc_/

Getting yourself listed apparently takes some serious bribery.  I have
submitted my entry twice on each of these (the first many months ago) and
it still hasn't shown up.

I suppose all that one needs in order to get listed on most search engines
is to get yourself into the loop of the web crawlers.  Get a link to your
main page from some site that is already included, and yours should show up
in a few weeks.

Somewhat cheesy due to the advertising loop they require of listed muds, but
still a resource nonetheless:

http://www.topmudsites.com/


Any other suggestions?

Adam





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