[MUD-Dev] The Future of MMOGs... what's next? (fwd)

[Matt Mihaly]

On Thu, 20 Jun 2002, Brian Lindahl wrote:

>   2) deep seated roleplaying, where hack 'n slash and combat isn't
>   the center, but rather the roles of the players in the theme,
>   whether it be politics, guilds, crafts, etc.

That fits Achaea. You CAN monster bash, but the meat of the game is
in politics, guilds, PvP PK and group vs. group action. Our monster
bashing is really quite crap compared to Everquest or what not,
because we're just not tryng to compete with it. I don't think
monster bashing is the way to go for text games.

> I think I should mention that graphical is in no way a requirement
> for the genre I'm talking about.

*smooch*
 
> These two are the requirements that I'm talking about. Not the
> other two. 500+ was just a number, I'd probably call large at
> about 100+, huge at 250+ and massive at 500+. Average seems to be
> around 30-40.

Call us huge then, and likely to be massive given our steady growth
over the last few years. We have over 250 online nearly every day,
and have hit 340.
 
> I think to get numbers of 500+, or even 250+ requires sufficient
> funds for a modest amount of advertising. Something that cannot be
> generated by word of mouth alone, in the intensive/heavy
> roleplaying genre, I believe.

That depends on what you mean by a modest amount of
advertising. When Achaea started, our advertising consisted of
listing ourselves on Mudconnector, and then running some banner ads
there. We don't do much more than that now, though we own the front
page now. We sometimes advertise on Google or through Overture, and
recently ran a month-long campaign on PvPOnline which worked out
quite well for us.

And actually, more than half our revenue is generated from people
who say they heard about Achaea from a friend. Word of mouth is
-extremely- powerful, and it's not limited to text. We've never
borrowed money or took investment to advertise. We started off
completely on word-of-mouth and advertised as and when we could
afford to.

My point is there's no reason it cannot be done, and if things go as
planned, and as they have been going for a few years now, we will
reach your (somewhat arbitrary I have to say) definition of massive,
and without focusing strongly at all on monster bashing (which in
Achaea, you only get xp from, and xp isn't that important. A level
80 person is maybe 10% more powerful than a level 70 person, based
on level alone. Equipment is obtained other ways.)

--matt


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