[MUD-Dev] Greetings from Habbo Hotel

[Sulka Haro]

Hi!

At 04:50 +0000 31.1.2003, Matt Mihaly wrote:

> Counting registered players is a silly way of claiming to be a
> certain size, and is blatantly misleading.

Sorry for writing in a confusing way, my writing definitely sounded
different from what I meant. :)

Basically I think there's a few different meters for comparing the
relative "sizes" of MUDs. Off the top of my head I'd define at least
the following:

  - Eyeball meter
  - Hands on user meter
  - Active user base meter
  - Peak user meter
  - Activity level meter

Eyeball meter means how many people in the target group have know
the MUD. There's multiple formulas for calculating this in the
marketing world, most of which are defined about like

(number of customers/users) * (word of mouth constant) + (marketing
activity + publicity eyeball estimate) * (target group match in
viewer profile %) - (estimated overlap in the two groups) = total
eyeballs.

Obviously if you shell out gazillion dollars into an ad campaign,
you get lots of eyeballs. Alternatively if you get lucky, you might
hit a positive influx of word of mouth and get quite well known.

Hands on meter = the number of people who've actually tried out your
product. Yes, this doesn't tell too much BUT gives an important
distinction from the eyeball meter and the following meters. Also
comparing the ratio of eyeballs versus hands on users is interesting
as the big players are often not doing that well in this regard.

Active user base meter = number of people who've played the MUD
during the last 30 days.  Peak users = monthly average of daily peak
logged in users Activity level meter = the last 30 day average of
combined of daily man-hours spent playing the MUD

Comparing various MUDs with the different meters isn't comparing
apples to oranges as long as everyone knows what meter has been
used. If MUD X has 10 million eyeballs, 800k hands on users, 200k
active users and 70k peak users while MUD Y has 200k eyeballs, 50k
hands on users, 10k active users and 400 peak users, it's useful to
think why the ratios are different the way they are.

Apparently EQ is close to about 25% of active users being logged on
during peak times (500k-ish / 110k). Our ratio is much, much lower -
our peak is at about 10k users but our active user base is much
higher than the 40k users the EQ ratio would imply. For the sake of
fairness I'll ask if I can publicize the exact numbers.

sulka

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