In a day and age where gorgeous graphics draw in the big crowds, one journalist asks the question, "What keeps people coming back to text based MUDs after all this time. Those that still play, what are your thoughts?

http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/13506/avalon-neverending-mud/

Good to see there is still life out there.
=

Great to see Avalon getting some mileage for all its age! Definitely an interesting look at the motivations behind players and Agarwain is a champ.

Quote from: aryianna;838660In a day and age where gorgeous graphics draw in the big crowds, one journalist asks the question, "What keeps people coming back to text based MUDs after all this time. Those that still play, what are your thoughts?

http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/13506/avalon-neverending-mud/

I still MUD once in a while, though it's more like a couple-weeks-a-year nostalgia thing if I'm honest.  I think the article hit some legit points.

MUDs aren't limited to mass-market atmospheres, they can do things like be super-high difficulty, and competing in that environment is naturally more rewarding than grinding five-mans.  MUDs are more technically accessible, minimal hardware requirements that don't go up, and because everything is text the user can massage that data into a format that suits them, whether that's text-to-speech as in the article, or highly curated zmud/cmud multi-window deals.

MUDs can have twitch based combat, but as long as you don't mind your character's actions being programmatically determined, you can set up triggers/macros/aliases/etc to bridge the gap if your reflexes suck.

In contrast to MMOs which can present beautiful pictures and sounds, MUDs are well-equipped to present beautiful literature.  Being volunteer efforts, I think it's fair to say that few meet that standard (mine surely did not) but those who are so inclined can do a lot with a stock codebase and some serious area-building effort.

MUD pvp remains the high point of PvP gaming in my experience.  In a lot of ways it's very stylized.. the typical MUD mechanic of having the player move between "rooms" that could better be described as single points where everyone is equidistant to everyone, is kind of weird compared to reality.  Three second combat rounds (typical of the diku/merc/rom MUDs I played the most) are similarly artificial.  But, because there are typically no profit motives or need to cater to mass market desires, the game can be set up to maximize things other than pbase size.

It's a good point to make yet the MUD community seems unreasonably obsessed over player-base numbers. As if having 100 online comprised of 50 idling, 25 mudsexxing and 25 doing varying degrees of activity is somehow more impacting than having a core, busy playerbase of 40+.

An interesting phenomenon where numbers seem to shape one's expectations.

Funny that a month later this article is still getting hits (We see where people register from in Avalon). I find it quite funny that people are so amused in particular (not amused ha ha but baffled / amazed) that blind players can so effectively play MUDs yet Agarwain as the #1 ranked fighter right now is basically a living legend.

Quote from: Elsalvador;841628It's a good point to make yet the MUD community seems unreasonably obsessed over player-base numbers. As if having 100 online comprised of 50 idling, 25 mudsexxing and 25 doing varying degrees of activity is somehow more impacting than having a core, busy playerbase of 40+.

An interesting phenomenon where numbers seem to shape one's expectations.

Seen that too. People who look only at the total number rather than the activity.

Quote from: Omega;855022Seen that too. People who look only at the total number rather than the activity.

It's rife. Thousands of people doing nothing doesn't make a world fun or busy really yet it seems to punctuate as some sort of quality benchmark. I realise this isn't the same thing yet it's funny that some of the greatest games in the world (Zelda for instance) are single player!

"Avalon shouldn't be popular; it shouldn't have an active, committed core of players"

Oh really? Maybe it's the writer's thinking that's obsolete. Or is he playing dumb?

Seems pretty obvious to me that a committed core of players can be the reason why a game continues to have interest and a committed core, especially when they are generating the content.

"How can a virtual world persist for more than 25 years? How does it compete with other, newer options?"

Really? Maybe because built-in obsolescence  and "new and improved" are artificial thought patterns of industrial thinking? It's about the same as expecting everyone to stop playing tabletop roleplaying games, or stop reading physical books, or stop making their own music, because corporate technological offering X Y and Z are so shiny.

In other types of computer games, too, generally the smaller indie offerings, and older commercial games that get old and abandoned but supported or at least played by long-term fans, are the ones that had something worth sticking around for (replay value, for one), and often the barriers to entry by oceans of lowbrow scum is actually good for the quality of the community and the resulting play experience.

The reason most games don't have much replay value is because they're designed inside the industrial mindset where they don't _want_ to provide replay value, because they're thinking that's incompatible with the (screwy) idea of built-in obsolescence. Or just because most of the design is derivative and not particularly interesting, and includes typical ideas about "completing" the game and then having done everything there is to do with it.

So just from Skarg's comments it looks like a revision of "Why do you play OD&D, old man, 3E/3.5/4E/5E is OBVIOUSLY so much better."

Why is the notion that different games provide different experiences, and that some people want the particular experience an older game provides, so hard to grasp?

Oh really? Maybe it's the writer's thinking that's obsolete. Or is he playing dumb?
sbobet update

Not even sure its "why are you playing that "old school" game when you could be playing iteration X?". It is more like they cannot comprehend someone playing the same game for years, decades (some day I will be able to add centuries to this) at all.

Though from experience it could be that the writer was wondering how a MUD could survive so long when very often they end up succombing to Admin decay. Sometimes catastrophically. Three I used to play on went straight to hell. Went from active populations of a hundred or more to maybe active populations countable on one hand. And yet they are still around serving as deathtraps for the unsuspecting.