How did you discover your last three MU* ?
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@sunny said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
I feel like it's unfair to ask how we can make the hobby more appealing to new people / how we can bring new people in, and note that we're not talking about X, Y, or Z -- when X, Y, and Z are the biggest issues surrounding bringing new folks in. I don't see how a constructive discussion that could actually accomplish anything is possible without breaking into things that are specifically noted as outside of the scope of conversation.
Oh you are right about how a conversation would need to tackle those other, more important issues as well. All I'm saying is that it's outside the scope of this thread.
We did have threads in the past, and we can have have one again at any time someone feels like making it, to discuss how interfaces would need to be designed, which clients or protocols would best achieve the goal of attracting newbies, how we can write helpfiles better (rather than just write better helpfiles, which refines, and thus maintains, the existing paradigm).
I would just rather we didn't try to do it all in a single thread since it's going to be all over the place as it is.
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A new social gaming mush would be nice, but I wonder if it will turn out the same. If I log on at PennMUSH, Puggy, Brazil, RhostDev Site or any of the other social ones, its basically nearly the same dozen people or so. That said, I do think a common one that is popular and supported by more folks could be of great benefit. I still swing by OGR from time to time. But a community supported by the community would be good, just throwing in with the thought, I like it.
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@lotherio said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
If I log on at PennMUSH, Puggy, Brazil, RhostDev Site or any of the other social ones
That's the other thing... marketing! I mean RhostDev and PennMUSH aren't great names if you're trying to attract a demographic who don't know what the game type even is.
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I think there's a pretty significant difference between social sites / sites set to support a particular codebase, and actual whole-community hubs. Beyond that, ACTIVE is important, SUPPORTED is important, and OUTREACH is important. All of these things need to be happening/need to happen regularly, content needs to be getting created, etc. There has to be a significant community buy in hobby wide. OGR was a ridiculous amount of work for the time I was involved as staff there; when Siobhan retired, nobody really realized just how MUCH work was involved. It is not for the faint of heart.
ETA: Honestly. It was as much work if not more than Ashes was, because it was a TON more moderation required than an RP game ever thought of needing. our hobby is kind of snarky, and it takes something special to keep people from going there and yet still coming back
ETA2: A site devoted to the support of a particular codebase is not a community hub. A social site is not a community hub. These are apples and oranges. Yes, it's all fruit, but that's where the comparison ends. I am not talking about a social site, nor am I talking about a site to support a particular codebase. I said community hub, and I meant community hub.
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Here's a wayback snapshot of Electric Soup -- you can get a sort of idea as to what I am talking about by looking at this. It's not exactly what I'm talking about, as I think that a vital component of the success was the partnership with Gateway/OGR, but:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080321194939/http://www.electricsoup.net:80/?q=taxonomy/term/18
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Game ad, word of mouth, word of mouth.
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When it hasn't been games I've run, it's most often been a combination of ad + word of mouth. Or ad + "hey roz we're gonna try this game if you wanna try with us."
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A combination of someone asking me to join a game, and having spotted them on MSB.
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@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
This is interesting. I mean it's hardly surprising this forum is being used as a game-finding resource when the poll is specifically addressed to MSB users, but it at least proves the ad threads here are being used for their original purpose.
Word of mouth is the strongest resource (as it should be) and I'm wondering how this applies, or can be applied, to recruiting people not for a MUSH but for MUSHing in general.
In other words other than systemic and technical changes we've discussed before, and which would be out of this thread's scope so let's please minimize that part of the conversation, what's a good way to bring potential new players to the hobby itself? How do we approach them? How do we sell what we do?
So i have gor years tried to recruit those around me into the text based genre. People not familiar with rp, rpgs, tabeltops, people tgat are etc. I have had some success with getting them logged in amd starting stuff up making a character but it just kinda phases out. Here are the major hurdles ai hit in this process.
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Client: it can be confusing for them to run a client for the first time. Admittedly bc I know MUSHclient that is the one I direct them to bc I can directly help then with it. But having this software that doesn't hold your hand and direct you into a game by itself can be a problem (I know a lot of recent clients and revamped clients actually have a default list in them of popular MUs now but MUSH doesnt.)
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Time investment. When I explain the time scales for scenes that is a huge turn off across the spectrum.
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Lack of engagement: because of how most folks consume game media these days when you tell someone its a game but the "engagement" factor is other people not a system or actual "game" their interest can sharply decline.
I was a bit more successful in getting people started in a MUD first off since these are more text based mmos, but it always boils down to that even if they have fun and enjoy it they would rather spend their media time on a video game.
In the end I think we just have to keep reaching out keep pushing that we exist. This is a niche hobby that is only going to stick with certain folks and there is very little I feel we can do at this juncture to make MUing more appealing to a wider base audience. Tbh if the medium changed in a drastic enough way to merit a wider general appeal it might rob enough of the specific reasons I love MUs and make me walk away from the genre
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Re: recruiting new people, I think it's easier if they've already had their "gateway drug" to the realms of text-based multiplayer RP. I went from playing Infocom games to playing in the old AOL Red Dragon Inn chat rooms to someone then recruiting me to try a MUD. I ran from that, but was curious if there was more, maybe better? So then I searched and found non-MUD MU*s and, well, 13 years later, here we are. These days I'd guess maybe the gateway drug would be play by post? IRC? ... I'm so out of the loop.
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@kay said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
Re: recruiting new people, I think it's easier if they've already had their "gateway drug" to the realms of text-based multiplayer RP. I went from playing Infocom games to playing in the old AOL Red Dragon Inn chat rooms to someone then recruiting me to try a MUD. I ran from that, but was curious if there was more, maybe better? So then I searched and found non-MUD MU*s and, well, 13 years later, here we are. These days I'd guess maybe the gateway drug would be play by post? IRC? ... I'm so out of the loop.
Possibly by I doubt it, since there are no gateway games any more for MU*.
Back in the day chat and text-based games were really all we had so there was always some degree of familiarity with telnet'ing to some weird port somewhere, or using a command line IRC client or... something. Our expectations were also pretty low since even if we had some experience with rudimentary web pages whistling over our modems to Mosaic it was infrequent, and never that far from some black window somewhere that we had to open and use for almost everything else.
I'm not a 17 year old kid about to hit college but those used to be MU*'s bread and butter; young folks going to college where they had internet access for the first time and a lot of time to use it which they really couldn't do in that many different, fun ways; we grabbed ton of those - many of us are among those who were grabbed back then.
But now gaming is different. We are not gonna be taking players from Fortnight, you know? Hell, I don't even think we can lure them from Snapchat. I don't know there is any gateway services remotely relevant to young folks and MU* - the way MU* look and feel right now - at the same time.
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@Cobaltasaurus put an ad on WORA for an OTT.
The Cobalt pretty much for every one after, except Eldritch, that was here.
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Mudconnect, and Musoapbox. Though honestly I think I need a better system.
I've applied on a couple of games but they seem mostly dead. I've been really disappointed in Let Freedom Ring.I applied on the 29th. Got a reply on the 30'th. Fixed the issue the same day aaaaand I'm still waiting. On a normal game with lots of apps to process this would be fine but there are like 4 people applying and as far as I can tell I'm the only one in my sphere.
They need faster turn over if they want the place to get off the ground. I really hope it picks up. It's pretty much a blank slate right now so if people join they have the chance to get in on the ground floor.
(Shameless plug: portent.genesismuds.com 8020)I think that's the thing Darkmetal did right. You could just zip out a character and go without needing to wait. No characters were very special to start with but little was lost if you were ganked.
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@faraday said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
Let's pretend you had some writer and/or gamer friends. Would you really feel comfortable inviting them to play MUSHes? Would you be confident that other players would treat them well and actually help them learn to play? Do you think they'd actually have fun?
As someone who has done exactly that, I can answer yes to every one of those questions with ease.
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@ixokai said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
@faraday said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
Let's pretend you had some writer and/or gamer friends. Would you really feel comfortable inviting them to play MUSHes? Would you be confident that other players would treat them well and actually help them learn to play? Do you think they'd actually have fun?
As someone who has done exactly that, I can answer yes to every one of those questions with ease.
That's great. I'm genuinely glad it worked out. For me personally - I would only be comfortable inviting a new player to someplace I ran or played on, or where I had friends who could serve as mentors. I think the barrier is just too high if you have someone brand new to MUSHing and you just dump them onto some random MU with no support.
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Basically any game I ever played for an extended period of time back in the day, I found on OGR. I weirdly enough found myself sort of repeating the behavior later with the Reach and then Fallcoast since they were so enormous, I'd just log a guest bit in, check their ad bb, then log out.
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Re: attracting new people, I'm going on a nostalgic trip down memory lane about Crucible City MUX right now, and I found an ad I'd posted way back when on atomicthinktank, the old Mutants and Masterminds board, and I realized we did actually successfully recruit people who had never MU*d that way. At least for that one game. So that might be an approach, putting up ads on the forums for the specific system one's using? https://atomicthinktank.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=482&sid=5442578c00a7ec8d88ae2fd25e8b5ef3
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OGR/Gateway's still up (I just checked! connect.mu-gateway.net port 6700) and up until...I want to say maybe a couple years ago? I still checked it for ads (and MUS*H, which is better-maintained). Hell, there's an ad post up from last month, and who knows how many have timed out in the past years, heh. No reason something like it couldn't thrive again, just needs someone willing to maintain it (and not be crazy, the 'maintain this consistently while not being crazy' is always kind of the rub').
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@faraday said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
@ixokai said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
@faraday said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
Let's pretend you had some writer and/or gamer friends. Would you really feel comfortable inviting them to play MUSHes? Would you be confident that other players would treat them well and actually help them learn to play? Do you think they'd actually have fun?
As someone who has done exactly that, I can answer yes to every one of those questions with ease.
That's great. I'm genuinely glad it worked out. For me personally - I would only be comfortable inviting a new player to someplace I ran or played on, or where I had friends who could serve as mentors. I think the barrier is just too high if you have someone brand new to MUSHing and you just dump them onto some random MU with no support.
What's this 'no support thing'? I find people on the games I play are incredibly supportive of new players. I find that when I invite someone to a game, I support them.
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@ixokai said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:
What's this 'no support thing'? I find people on the games I play are incredibly supportive of new players. I find that when I invite someone to a game, I support them.
I don't know what to tell you other than we've apparently had vastly different experiences.
People on games are incredibly helpful to people who already know MUSHing, yes. Trying out a BSG game but don't really know Battlestar? Sure, there's probably a theme file to give you the gist of it and people helpfully steering you towards YouTube clips or whatnot. First time on FS3? No problem - here's the tutorial about how the system works, and a slew of people on the Questions channel to help you out. Having trouble with the scene system code?
Absolutely someone will chime in to steer you in the right direction.But going out of their way to actually hand-hold some stranger who wandered in off the street and wants to learn how to MUSH? No, I haven't seen that. What I have seen is a lot of eye-rolling and general impatience/intolerance/avoidance towards people who don't know what they're doing.
Also, looking at the game wiki/help/etc., most games are centered around the assumption that the people coming to it already know how to MUSH and just need to know the specifics of how this particular MUSH operates. Even someplace like Arx, which someone mentioned as being particularly open to other online gaming styles, is still geared this way.
I'm going to put myself in the shoes of somebody who's never played a MUSH before and doesn't have a buddy who invited me and is showing me the ropes. I've googled "Pendragon Online RPG" and somehow stumbled onto Valorous Dominion's website.
OK umm... now what? It says it's an online roleplaying experience, which sounds cool, but I don't see any clue as to how to actually play. There's a cryptic IP address, which I don't know what to do with. There are some policies and world articles and characters pages but how do I play?! ... oh, wait, down at the bottom there's a cryptic link titled "What is MUSH", I wonder what that's all about. Okay that tells me about MU clients and connecting and whatnot, so I manage to find and install Atlantis, connect to the game and get a welcome screen. It says 'create <name> <password>' ... okay, easy enough. Woohoo I have a character. I get spammed with a Great Wall of Text including a room description (but I don't really know what rooms are), a MOTD with a list of BBS posts. It does say (+bbread) after it and I'm smart enough to guess that I'm supposed to type +bbread to read messages. But all that does is give me a list of subjects. Where are the posts? Now I see someone say
<Newbie> RandomPerson says, "Hello Guest!"
Are they talking to me? How do I talk back?I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty overwhelmed at that point.
And even if by some miracle I figure out help/+help and start to learn commands, I still really don't know how to play -- the nuts and bolts of how you find RP and how stories are told in this medium. Once I figure that out, I run into the clique issue. Most folks are OOCly chatting or in private rooms doing plotfoo or relationshipfoo. Won't someone please play with me?!
(I hope @Lotherio doesn't mind me using their game as an example... it sounds like it's a great place and this really isn't meant to be a criticism of that game in particular. It's just a commentary on the New MUSHer Experience overall.)
Some of this we can fix with system changes: better help files, built-in web clients, "MUSH 101" tutorials right from the wiki landing page / telnet welcome screen ... that sort of thing. This is the sort of thing I've been working on with Ares and my MUSH 101 tutorial. But a lot of it is cultural, and as others have said it requires a community that's really dedicated to not just tolerating newbies but actually reaching out and welcoming them and integrating them into the community. That takes real work, and people willing to do that work seem to be in short supply.