[MUD-Dev] Relaunching a MUD?

[Matt Mihaly]

On Sat, 15 Jun 2002, Kent Peterson wrote:

> I recently rejoined an old mud hangout of mine as an elder, only
> to find that with its ninth year in operation had come complete
> stagnation, losing all but about five players and a half-dozen
> login/chat/logout wizards - on average one person at most will be
> logged in at any given time.  I'm thinking of this a challenge.
> There are a number of things that have needed doing; this is a
> good opportunity to do them while pissing off a minimum of
> players.  What I'm wondering is, once the re-engineering is done,
> does anyone out there have suggestions for how to best recruit a
> new playerbase?

  1. Get rid of all the useless admins (wizards as you call
  them). If they're not doing anything to improve the world, they
  don't deserve the power.

  2. Find some competent and dedicated volunteers.

  3. Lead by example. It is crucial to imbue the general
  administrative atmosphere with a hard-working and responsible
  ethic.

  4. Throw out as much stock areas/skills/systems/etc as you
  can. They're generally bad to begin with, and in any case, if
  someone can get the same content somewhere else, you've already
  got a situation where it's easier for them to leave your game once
  there.

  5. Develop new content and systems. The more the better, and to
  some extent, it doesn't matter what they are. Most text MUDers are
  happy just to see anything that isn't the standard stock garbage.

  6. Advertise. If your MUD matters to you, drop a couple hundred on
  some ads.

It's really not that hard to get players when you're free. The bar
is set extremely low by the general text MUD community, due to the
amateurness of most of them. (Bit of a different story when you
charge money of course, but I didn't think you were planning on
that.)

--matt

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