Is this hobby on it's last legs?

Darren

@faraday said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

MUSHes historically don't get a lot of traffic from MUDConnector

That simply isn't true. Until the site died earlier this year, it was, hands down, the best place to advertise your MUSH.

While it's true that most of the discourse there was MUD related, a good many MUSHers frequented the site as well. An ad on TMC was pretty much guaranteed to bring a flood of new traffic to your game.

L. B. Heuschkel

@Darren Except it literally didn't for us. I can only speak from personal experience. We got no traffic from there, ever.

faraday

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

@Darren Except it literally didn't for us. I can only speak from personal experience. We got no traffic from there, ever.

Same. And I'm not just talking about recently - this has been my experience running games since the early 90's.

@Darren - your experience may well be different. I'm guessing it probably depends on the game. Something like Arx or Firan has more in common with RPI MUDs than something like a consent-based Western, and would likely get more recruits through MUDConnector. But for myself and the games I've been on? It's been a non-starter. Nevertheless, as LB and I said, nothing stops someone from still listing there.

Three-Eyed Crow

This is all anecdotal, but Spirit Lake got a pretty sizeable uptick in Guest logins and newbs after its MUDConnector listing went up. I was legit surprised at the extent of it.

Tat

Spirit Lake has had a fair amount of MUDConnector traffic (like, way more than I would have guessed), and I don't think we're very MUD-like.

Other games I've run have had less. I couldn't tell you why one and not the other, but there are definitely people using it and looking at MUSHes there. I've done it myself, when looking for a game.

There are also lots of games out there between 'Arx-sized' and '10 players'. A fair number of the Ares games look like they're living between 20-30 players each, which is my personal preferred game-size.

Ghost

This hobby is continued and maintained by the same playerbase that has been involved for over 10-20 years and the same "coders/game developers" that have been coding for the last 10-25 years.

With 90% of the playerbase being consumers (as opposed to producers) and regular talks about how hard it can be to "sell" someone on the hobby, I think it's fairly realistic to assume that there will not likely be a torch-passing to some following generation of future coders/game owners once the current 10% of producers ages out, get old, or turns to dust.

But I'm pretty sure Shang and pedo havens like PenDes will thrive because they're speakeasies.

faraday

@Ghost said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

With 90% of the playerbase being consumers (as opposed to producers) and regular talks about how hard it can be to "sell" someone on the hobby, I think it's fairly realistic to assume that there will not likely be a torch-passing to some following generation of future coders/game owners once the current 10% of producers ages out, get old, or turns to dust.

You seem to be assuming that there's no way to make it easier to be a producer, or to make it easier to 'sell' someone on the hobby. I would argue that the development of new platforms like Ares and Evennia have the potential to change both of these foundational assumptions.

Will they? Only time will tell.

Ghost

@faraday said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

@Ghost said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

With 90% of the playerbase being consumers (as opposed to producers) and regular talks about how hard it can be to "sell" someone on the hobby, I think it's fairly realistic to assume that there will not likely be a torch-passing to some following generation of future coders/game owners once the current 10% of producers ages out, get old, or turns to dust.

You seem to be assuming that there's no way to make it easier to be a producer, or to make it easier to 'sell' someone on the hobby. I would argue that the development of new platforms like Ares and Evennia have the potential to change both of these foundational assumptions.

Will they? Only time will tell.

I think that from within the hobby there's definitely a desire to promote it, and I don't think you're wrong that time will tell. I just think that there are some logical places where I find it to be likely that the platform won't pass this current "generation" of players.

Logically excluding one's current love for the hobby...

The overall population per game has dropped significantly since 1995/2000 (excluding Shang/pendes)
The community isnt known for its friendliness or lack of judgmental power figures. Weird politics.
The time sink required to run a game, let alone a free one, and even PLAY a game requires a lot of investment including paying for cloud-spun servers.
The number of people willing to invest time into game ownership is heavily overshadowed by the people that dont want to do those things.

Even if hardware can be used to make spinning up a server easier, MU existed in the 80s/90s because there were no MMORPGs or services like Roll20/FG. What's left is a number of die-hards who have been doing it since then, 2-3 people who were coding back then, and yourself and maybe 1 other who are coding games using something other than an antiquated code base that they know how to modify but dont understand the actual guts of the code.

So I figure, what, the average age of the "coder" in the hobby is currently somewhere between 35-50, and the average player age is sitting somewhere around 35-45?

Not trying to attack the hobby, I'm just sharing where I think it's highly probably that the "average age" will continue to go up, where the # of people willing to own/run/code games will remain the same. A couple of new players trickle in here and a few of them may stay, but unless there's some kind of cultural boom where "retro unix-based BBS systems reappropriated into online real-time pseudo-novelist slash rpg" becomes a fad, I see 10 years from now it's still gonna be the same people.

In the end, I feel it's logical to assume that when THIS crowd and the MUDder crowd dont have a younger generation to pass the torch down to, the speakeasy factor of places like PenDes will be the main core of people running server games (and attracting high numbers) like these (look at the numbers difference; it's already happening).

Point in case: Mudstats

Filter by 30 day average. Furry, Shang, PenDes are all pulling in numbers in the 500-600 range. Then some MUDs. This crowd doesnt appear until Arx/CoH show up around 125. Then more MUDs and Furry games until Heroes Assemble clocks in at 90. The 30-day average quickly hangs to between 20-40 shortly thereafter, which tells me two things:

The story-driven lit-rpg crowd is a niche crowd in a hobby currently known for furries, sex, and gemstone 4.
Despite what people assume the number of players may be in the story-driven-lit-rpg crowd is, it isnt enough to fill 2 school buses and I place the # of people willing to run/own games to be less than 20 (and that number hasnt shifted much, nor have the identities of those people, in the last 15 years). Most games in this crowd are jazzed if they have 20 active players.

Anyway, time will tell and thanks for coming to my TED talk apparently. Holy shit I typed one out, here.

faraday

All your points are valid, and you may well be right. That said...

@Ghost said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

In the end, I feel it's logical to assume that when THIS crowd and the MUDder crowd dont have a younger generation to pass the torch down to

I've heard anecdotal stories of younger folks new to MUSHing being drawn into Ares games. My kids have played on my test game on the web portal and dug it. Storium seems to have a younger playerbase than MUSHes, and Storium.Edu specifically recruits kids. I wouldn't count the younger generation out completely.

bear_necessities

The popularity of Arx really just proves there's a high demand for games like it, not that the HOBBY WOULD DIE OMG without it.

Firan had a similiar sized playerbase. When it closed down, the hobby didn't die. Arx opened up eventually and people came. If Arx closed down tomorrow, someone somewhere would build a similar style game and people will come and 2 years from now we'll have the same discussion about how the hobby will DIE if SheepGoatSimulatorMU closed down.

If you build it, they will come.

Most of us are quite happy with games that have a 10-20 active sized playerbase and would like more of those.

ETA: I think there's a huge untapped potential in original themed L&L MUSHes with low fantasy elements like Arx. I would argue that adding another game like that to the queue would be immensely popular and you wouldn't even need anywhere near the amount of systems that Arx has. People just want to play that genre.

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Ghost

@bear_necessities said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

Firan had a similiar sized playerbase.

To be fair, Firan had all kinds of coded/creep bizarre to it that made it more a product of the Shang/PenDes crowd than the "lit-rpg" crowd. Arx is the first non-wod/non-kink game in a while to organically draw in more than, what, 60 unique ips?

The mudstats numbers are a bit misleading because it doesnt take alts into account.

L. B. Heuschkel

@faraday said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

I've heard anecdotal stories of younger folks new to MUSHing being drawn into Ares games.

Allow me to make that less anecdotal, then. Ares is what allowed me to join this hobby last year, after giving up on MUDs a decade ago because I could no longer sit up all night.

bear_necessities

@Ghost said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

To be fair, Firan had all kinds of coded/creep bizarre

I mean, to be fair, I played Firan for 3 years and was never aware of the 'secret game within the game' and I know a lot of people who were not aware of it either until after the game was already closed.

That's still not the point. Arx filled the hole that Firan left in the community. Another game would fill the hole left by Arx. The hobby is not dying.

SixRegrets

There's also a ton of people RPing on Discord servers these days, and they can get more complex than you might think with bots and such.

With MUSHes finally starting to embrace modern things like, say, functional websites, and programming languages that people actually use, I think a lot of the existing player base has to consider what they want the future to be. Keep on what you've been doing for decades with Penn and static webpages at best, or evolve along with the pace of modern technology to make the hobby more inclusive and welcoming.

The kids are not going to be starting telnet.exe.

faraday

@bear_necessities said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

The hobby is not dying.

I think part of the problem is we all have a different definition of "dying".

What metric is being used? Total number of players playing any game? Total number of public games? Average number of players per game? Activity (measured in scenes/logs maybe) on different games? Average age of player?

Over what time period are we comparing? The past year? 3 years? 30 years?

There are probably a dozen different ways to potentially measure this, and we don't have solid historical numbers for most of them. All we have are subjective memories and opinions.

But let's talk about the numbers we do have. Bear in mind this is just for the Ares community.

Games

64 total games
14 games open to public, plus another 9 that were open/active but have since closed
5 games in public dev
18 private games (in dev or sandbox)
18 games closed without ever going public (probably never got off the ground)

Players

594 unique player handles

Scenes (for the top few most active games)

Spirit Lake: 6900+ scenes in 2 years
Gray Harbor: 6000+ scenes in a little under 2 years
Savage Skies: 1700+ scenes in 1 year
The Network: 1000+ scenes in 6 months

(*) Scenes counts total scenes started, some of which were certainly aborted midstream, but that's still a crap-ton of RP.

I mean... everyone's entitled to their own opinions and definitions, but that certainly doesn't seem like a dead hobby to me. ETA: Sure, it's no Fortnite or WoW with multiple millions of people, but do we really want to be?

tek

@faraday I wonder if the hobby ever was that much bigger than this, population-wise. I wish there was a way to track demographics.

Sunny

ROFL.

silverfox

Ngl. Since pre-arx my Mu experience was Ansible and the 4 pern games avaliable at the time (NorCon, Harper's Tale, Pern World, and whatever the last one was), the hobby seems pretty large to me. Large enough I CAN'T play all the games.

Auspice

so drunk from the Nth iteration of this discussion