[MUD-DEV] a shrinking pool of players?

[Johan J Ingles-le Nobel]

On Tuesday, February 15, 2000 11:56 PM, Mike Sellers wrote:

> Or they
> could all be cannibalizing off of the same shrinking pool of players.

I see this point referred to time and time again: a shrinking pool of
players. Is this
list absolutely convinced that the pool is shrinking, because (and I may
very well be wrong), to me the sums just don't add up. Ten years ago, for
example, we had what, 100 muds or so, with 100-300 patrons at peak times.
Now we have 3,000+. Sure, a lot of muds have a  negligable playerbase, but
even of these, most seem to manage 10-20 at peak times, with the top 5-10%
making 100-300 - do the sums, they speak for themselves.

For one, the mud I work at has never had higher, and since I've focussed our
website a bit, we're attracting a *lot* of first time mud players... and
they stay and become part of our community. I've spoken to other mud admins
who say the same thing... might it just be that yes, mud player numbers are
actually rising, albeit slower than the spectacular rise of the Internet as
a whole, that muds as a whole do a rather bad job of promoting themselves
(the first-timers are all amazed that such thing as muds actually exist,
free online worlds created by volunteers) or is this just an example of the
waxing and waning fortunes of a particular mud, as it falls in and out of
favour?

Nass
http://wotmud.org/

(For an example of the sort of publicity that muds *should* be getting, see
http://wotmud.org/game/awards.html) - in today's commercial internet driven
by greed and commerce, free muds are a pretty amazing thing...





_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev maillist  -  MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev