How did you discover your last three MU* ?

[Cobalt]

Uh.

Arx - MSB/Word of Mouth (I'd heard of it here, but didn't start playing until @Sunny told me she was playing).
Elua's Percept - Direct Word of Mouth.
Valorous Dominion - MSB.

[Kay]

Darkwater - Word of mouth.
Valorous Dominion - MSB.
Fallcoast (Not actually playing but waiting for the Miami reboot because PEPPER MUST LIVE) - MSB.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

X-Factor: Recommended by players I knew/liked

BSU: Also nudged toward it by players I knew/liked and @faraday's general awesomeness

Arx: Honestly, probably MSB, though not by itself. I had friends who played there but I was resistant for a long time for various sundry of reasons. I think it was @cupcake's Deepwood recruiting post (with a character I really liked attached to it) that finally nudged me over the edge to try it. It had a certain critical mass (that wasn't unreservedly positive, I mistrust too much they honeymoon enthusiam period for games) and I figured I'd give it a go.

[Wretched]

Mostly word of mouth/Other?

TR i knew about because of WORA/MSB, and I wasn't into this hippy dippy 'allow everyone to have everything they want' nonsense that was new at the time. But later a friend dragged me to it.

Fallcoast was a direct followup to TR and Sonder bullied me to staff.

Fates harvest because Annapurna is a BFF4EVAR and I watched her build it from the ground up.

[magee101]

@surreality was that the OC spaceopera one?

[magee101]

DoD was word of mouth. I found The Reach way back in the day with google XD google was my secondary topmudsites for finding mushes back then. Any other games were ads here on MSB

[surreality]

@magee101 The only space opera place I was playing on was Otherspace, well over a decade ago. Recently (like, the last two years or more), only WoD, that teen place for one scene, and pirates.

[magee101]

@surreality oh there was a "teen" place in a d6 system but it was an original concept spaceopera was thinking it was the same one with that other persons comment about there only being like 4 people lol

[Arkandel]

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?

[faraday]

@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

what's a good way to bring potential new players to the hobby itself?

I don't think you can make meaningful progress on that front without addressing the systemic, technical and cultural issues that would be (rightly) out of scope for this thread. People finding games is seriously the least of our problems.

[Arkandel]

@faraday said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

what's a good way to bring potential new players to the hobby itself?

I don't think you can make meaningful progress on that front without addressing the systemic, technical and cultural issues that would be (rightly) out of scope for this thread. People finding games is seriously the least of our problems.

Be that as it may, it could be a problem we can at least try to tackle. Obviously as long as what we are presenting newcomers is a black telnet screen we can't expect to go mainstream, but let's assume there are some suckers out there working on solving this problem.

So let's say we do have a clean, friendlier interface between our nameless newbie and our game. Even then how do we sell MU*ing? How do we even explain what it is to someone who might have some casual idea of what table-top is? It's not a 'virtual table-top game' in almost any conceivable way - the absence of a persistent GM guarantees the experience will be completely different. There's no one hand-feeding you roleplay when there's a lull. You might very easily (and in fact that's the default) find yourself getting out of CGen without any idea of 'what to do next'.

How do you bring a person into that fold?

[faraday]

@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

How do you bring a person into that fold?

Even setting aside the Technical (black telnet screen with obscure commands and clunky accessory wikis) and Advertising (good luck finding games) issues, there are huge hurdles on several fronts:

Stylistic -- MUSHing is not friendly to casual players. People leave you out of plots if you're not around. You quickly lose track of what's going on. And even just a single scene requires a 3-4 hour chunk of continuous time. It's very demanding. Also, it falls into a weird void between writing and gaming, and even within MUSHing people are very polarized about where on that spectrum it falls.

Cultural -- let's face it, we're really not a very welcoming community. We stick to our cliques. We turn our noses up at people who don't play by our definition of "right" (their poses aren't the right length, they do too much or too little metaposing, they don't page before entering a public scene, they want control over their characters, they're too powergamey, etc.) And many games are frighteningly toxic in their culture or staff abuse.

Most of us play because we've been doing it for decades and we've got friends who play. But I'll turn your question around and ask: 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?

If the answer to any of those questions is 'no', then those are the questions we should be addressing before we even think about advertising.

[Arkandel]

@faraday said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

Stylistic -- MUSHing is not friendly to casual players. People leave you out of plots if you're not around. You quickly lose track of what's going on. And even just a single scene requires a 3-4 hour chunk of continuous time. It's very demanding. Also, it falls into a weird void between writing and gaming, and even within MUSHing people are very polarized about where on that spectrum it falls.

Yeah, that's one of the biggest hurdles - in fact it's one of the reasons I got out of raiding on WoW, since I could/would no longer handle 4-hour blocks of focusing on gaming. MUSHing does have the turn-based element working in its favor (you have a good 5-10 minutes between poses to take care of your dog or do things around the house) but it's still a hefty requirement.

Cultural -- let's face it, we're really not a very welcoming community. We stick to our cliques. We turn our noses up at people who don't play by our definition of "right" (their poses aren't the right length, they do too much or too little metaposing, they don't page before entering a public scene, they want control over their characters, they're too powergamey, etc.) And many games are frighteningly toxic in their culture or staff abuse.

Aside from behavioral culture issues which I'm hoping can be tackled through staffing to the degree any other kind of game can, we also carrying a lot of jargon new players need to swim through.

Did I say new players? I meant all. I've been MU*ing for twenty years and I still don't know wtf MUX, MOO, etc all mean.

Most of us play because we've been doing it for decades and we've got friends who play. But I'll turn your question around and ask: 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?

I think they wouldn't do it, not so much because they'd be mistreated but because they'd be sooo lost. That's an interface thing and I promised/asked to not go into it, but yeah... that'd be the first major hurdle.

Then finding RP would be the second one. The process of finding it isn't easy and many games are simply not frequented enough around the clock - and the etiquette of entering RP isn't obvious, either. I'd not be surprised if a newbie friend of mine entered a scene by talking about his background story for example ("Hello friends! I am a traveller beset by orcs who killed my family and...") and you can imagine how well that would go over. I don't know that there's a way to learn these things without making every mistake in the book and getting corrected, though.

But yeah, I do think other players would treat newbies well and help them out. Come on, we're not all assholes. I've had a lot of help before offered by people who didn't know me - that's not the problem. Few people will be mean to you until your presence costs them something - until they're competing with you for a rank or some shit - at which point you're probably self sufficient enough.

[Apos]

I think it might be fair to say that a large percentage of players join a game because they have friends there that also help them get acclimated to a game and provide them a foundation of RP that they can then develop from.

I don't think that varies too much whether someone is very experienced or brand new to the hobby.

[faraday]

@arkandel said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

But yeah, I do think other players would treat newbies well and help them out. Come on, we're not all assholes. I've had a lot of help before offered by people who didn't know me - that's not the problem.

That's not been my experience, sadly - or the experience of a few other folks I know who were new to MUSHing. MUSHers often offer help to other MUSHers, sure, in terms of theme or code questions specific to a given game. But I haven't seen that extend to hand-holding brand new players.

I'm not saying people will start screaming in their face or anything, but I've seen a lot of intolerance to little stuff - like you said, the newbie who enters a scene all "Hello friends!", or who forgot to page before entering a private room, or who asked too many MU-101 type questions on the public channel and got snippy responses. These are the things that swiftly turn into active or passive avoidance, which makes it that much harder to actually find RP.

@apos said in How did you discover your last three MU* ?:

I think it might be fair to say that a large percentage of players join a game because they have friends there that also help them get acclimated to a game and provide them a foundation of RP that they can then develop from.

Agreed. The only people who have a prayer of getting over these barriers are the ones who have existing relationships to help them. But I thought Ark was asking about bringing in people who didn't necessarily have that life preserver.

[Roz]

If you want to convert non-MU* players into MU* players you have to make it a gamewide priority. Like, staff overall has to decide that this is a Thing The Game Is Doing and make a particular effort at it. Write up helpfiles meant to help educate people brand new to MU*s, be conscious of common jargon and try to record translation for newcomers, set the example on channels, etc. It's far from impossible, it's just that our cultural habits are, as has been said, unwelcoming. You can absolutely change it, and there are games that are successful in being welcoming to people new to the medium. But the thing that those games have in common is that they've made a particular push to be.

[Sunny]

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. Like, the issues are systemic, technical, and cultural. Addressing anything else is like putting a new coat of paint on a rustbucket. Great, the paint is pretty, but...

[Sunny]

Doubleposting because this doesn't belong in an edit:

1. Community Resource
   We need something like OGR, IGU, or STC. These things are a LOT of work. They need to be community focused, kept positive, and they need to be active. Hosting classes, discussions, and talks, having somewhere to post actual articles and resources all collected together. Moderated heavily. The embassies and advertising and so on is vital because that gives game runners incentive to actually participate in these places. Links to the different clients, how to get support for them (if you can), etc.

1 is required because of step 2:

2. Publicize community resource. Do community outreach. Go to places like WoW's RP forums, the tumbler RP communities, whatever. Put up ads for the hobby as a whole, with introductions and explanations and so on. Be ready to be flamed, and be ready to answer questions. A LOT of questions. Make sure that the community resource is READY for the influx of people that come from this, with introductory OTT sessions or something

---

These two steps are what is required to start down this road of bringing new folks into the hobby. There might be other ways to go about it, but this would have the highest success rate with the largest chance of actual retention. I used to participate very heavily in OGR. It was a LOT of work.

ETA: MSB does not and will never qualify as #1. It has a higher chance of turning people away from the hobby than bringing them in.

[Roz]

@sunny I am dumb -- can you explain what OGR, IGU, and STC stand for?

[Sunny]

@roz

They were community hub places. IGU was a forum like this one, but moderated heavily and kept focused on positive things. Idealistic Gamers Unite. STC was Storyteller's Circle, and OGR was Online Gaming Resource, which was created because STC started allowing nasty/negative crap and was focused primarily on WoD. OGR also had Electric Soup attached to or associated with it for a while, which was a website that had the articles / talks / forums. Again, heavily moderated and curated. Both OGR and STC had embassies and code support for OTT games.