My thoughts

[Ahvandahla]

...Having been gone for the last 18 months from FL I came back the other night and from logging in and reading the forums I noticed a lot of changes some good some bad. Reading the fiction and fact post and Despisers farewell thread gave me a bit to ponder on. The thing that struck me most is the player base being way down but with what is out there online now Muds are gonna be at the bottom of the food chain in getting new players WoW, SWG etc. for online graphic gaming, PS2 and the other games of that ilk are gonna be hard to beat for a mud. I remember on AR the night we hit 100 people online as Stryth blasted in big red letters what had been accomplished. I can also recall 100 people on FL, last night 20-24 I think was the max and you cant have a growing thriving mud with numbers that small. You get stagnat as a small number of players dominate the player base with cabaled, quest characters and various combos of them. Quest classes are fine and cabals are fine but when you start mixing the 2 it is gonna cause problems down the line as you start losing part of your player base who get tired of being whacked by these juggernauts. I thought it was wrong from the start when Viri started with a conclave Vamp but it was his mud and he could do what he wanted but if you have someone that is an elite player giving him even more powerfull a character with little to no weakness doesnt help the situation.

[Pali]

First, as I'm sure Raar will mention, the playerbase has been steadily growing back up from a low months back.

Second, games like WoW, SWG, etc. will never provide the same experience as MUDs, particularly RP-enforced ones like FL. I don't play here just to kill people, I could do that in WoW and watch all the pretty spell effects. I play here because I love the RP. Games like WoW will NEVER have a standard of RP anywhere near to that achieved in MUDs, and that will keep people playing them. Plus, MUDs being free also attracts players.

Third, I don't care what qrace/cabal combo you have, YOU CAN DIE. YOU CAN BE PKED. Marty (as the most recent complained about quest caballed char) was pretty damned tough. As well he should have been. Yet he didn't end up with 0 deaths. Not even close. Multiple people beat him, multiple people (myself included) fought to a draw many times. Compared to how things were balanced in 1.0, things are much, much more balanced now. I, for one, appreciate it.

[WarriorCleric]

... giving him even more powerfull a character with little to no weakness doesnt help the situation.

Yeah, because vamps have little to no weakness.

Anyways, nothing new in this thread, it's all been said over and over and over...

WC

[F-3000]

What about then when the minimum is two, Ahvandahla? And it's day time for me.

[Merriwren]

As much as I love that graphic (and WC man, I really do) I'm getting a bit tired of seeing it.

We get it people.. move along.

[Fīv]

Games like WoW will NEVER have a standard of RP anywhere near to that achieved in MUDs' date=' and that will keep people playing them.[/quote']

I would like to point out that while graphic MMO's like WoW will never have the same standard of RP, for many people they surpass this mud, or muds in general, in fun. Some people play games to win, others to have a good time. You can have the most badass rp mud in the world, but in the end if it isn't fun it's just that: not fun.

- grannyman

[Kyzarius]

My wife and i play Coh, have our own supergroup with 60+ active members....yet i put in over a hundred hours a week here.

go figure

Mudding is a habit, and cheap college students get into it and are stuck for life. You can do it anywhere, you can do it on a crappy connection, and its free. sorry cant beat that.

[Pali]

Oh, I'm in no way denying that tons of people play MMOs and love them. That'd be just kinda stupid. What I'm saying is that people who DO want RP (like myself) will always revert back to MUDs, because they won't find the RP elsewhere.

[WarriorCleric]

As much as I love that graphic (and WC man' date=' I really do) I'm getting a bit tired of seeing it.[/quote'] Sorta like me seeing the same **** being said over and over again. And I've only posted the picture twice, don't like seeing what I post, scroll past it. I do it to a lot of people, works wonders.

But how about a different picture for the people who keep crying about FL dying:

It couldn't be that in six years the average age of a 15-18 year old core playerbase changed to 21-24, and that couldn't possibly mean something, like perhaps that last night when he logged in it was a weeknight? And those people that made up the bulk of the playerbase over the last six years aged six years as well? And now maybe have to be at work the next morning? No, not at all, clearly FL is dieing.

WC

[Acerbity]

As much as I love that graphic (and WC man, I really do) I'm getting a bit tired of seeing it.

We get it people.. move along.

How many times did you read that other thread?

[CruelEdict]

It couldn't be that in six years the average age of a 15-18 year old core playerbase changed to 21-24' date=' and that couldn't possibly mean something, like perhaps that last night when he logged in it was a weeknight? And those people that made up the bulk of the playerbase over the last six years aged six years as well? And now maybe have to be at work the next morning? No, not at all, clearly FL is dieing.[/quote']

Exactly! When I was first playing, my biggest concern was going to High School, not paying bills, working a crap job, and going to college (not to mention having a life as well, though that is still lower on my list than FL).

[Merriwren]

Sorta like me seeing the same **** being said over and over again. And I've only posted the picture twice, don't like seeing what I post, scroll past it. I do it to a lot of people, works wonders.

But how about a different picture for the people who keep crying about FL dying:

It couldn't be that in six years the average age of a 15-18 year old core playerbase changed to 21-24, and that couldn't possibly mean something, like perhaps that last night when he logged in it was a weeknight? And those people that made up the bulk of the playerbase over the last six years aged six years as well? And now maybe have to be at work the next morning? No, not at all, clearly FL is dieing.

WC

This wasn't against you WC... I love the picture... I laugh every time I see it. (Did you make it?)

What I'm getting tired of is reading this stuff over again. Y'know, the beating... (the stuff that causes the picture to get posted.) Maybe it seems like I've seen it more because I read these same comments over and over.

[Fiere]

Same here. A lot of the time recently, I've taken to just skipping over the obvious ones entirely. Really starting to cheese me off. I think it's slowly getting better, though. It was worse with all the Marty-Trib stuff.

[Icor]

Bryntryst's Momma.

[WarriorCleric]

This wasn't against you WC... I love the picture... I laugh every time I see it. (Did you make it?)

What I'm getting tired of is reading this stuff over again. Y'know, the beating... (the stuff that causes the picture to get posted.) Maybe it seems like I've seen it more because I read these same comments over and over.

Ah, my bad. I apologize for being a bit to hasty with my response.

I did not make the gif.

WC

[Pali]

Ah, my bad. I apologize for being a bit to hasty with my response.

I did not make the gif.

WC

Don't feel bad. Her original post seemed to be against you to me also.

[WarriorCleric]

She is among the few here I really should have known which way she was getting at. If she wanted to tell me something like that she would have done it off forum. She's cool, she's cool to the upteenth degree.

That's right folks, you heard it here...

Merriwren is cool.

WC

[inscribed]

thats cute.

[Merriwren]

Oh yeah. That's right!

| Check the Sig!

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\/

[F-3000]

I think that everyone is cool. Tho, I'm drunk atm.

[Pali]

Oh, I've always thought she was cool. Her original post sounding anti-yourpic surprised me.

[Crypticant]

I don't think MUDs are necessarily dying. FL certainly hasn't issued its death knell at this point. However, MUDs in general have a limited lifespan, and I believe they are much closer to the end of that lifespan than the middle. I don't mean FL, I mean MUDs in general. Here's why I feel this way:

While MUDs started in the 80's, the real MUD heyday started in the early 90's. Back then, most people had 14.4 dialup access through AOL, or some other small local carrier. AOL was huge, and had gazillions of users, because high speed internet was not accessible to the common man. Every now and then you'd get users who were badasses because they could connect through their school's T1, and have insane bandwidth. MUDs were great in school, because you didn't have to install much, if any software, and it would run on the current internet connection (because most schools didn't have firewalls in the early 90's).

As the early 90's lead into the mid 90's, people's modem speeds picked up to 56.6K. Some lucky people had cable or DSL modems. The internet was starting to really pickup popularity around the world, and more people were getting wired up from home. MUDs were great because they were an awesome game that you could easily run from a low speed computer (I started on a 386 DX) with a dialup connection. You'd see some MUDs peaking out at over 300 people online. The community grew, and zillions of MUDs popped up.

As the 90's transitioned into the 00's, more people had high speed connections. The average speed of home PCs increased dramatically, and internet commerce skyrocketed. PCs in general dropped in price, making powerful systems much more affordable. MUDs started their decline around the early part of 2000. I'd estimate around 2002 or so.

As it stands now, MUDs are still on a large scale decline. There continue to be less and less listings for MUDs around the world. They have lost a lot of their popularity in the face of MMORPGs and console games. And they will continue to lose face as time goes on. Most of us who play MUDs now do it for nostaligic reasons. We remember the great interactions of the past. We love the RP. But we're also getting older. And the younger generation, raised more on console games and first person online shooters is less interested in a moving novel and more interested in frame rate and moving polygons.

The days of MUDs are numbered. It's sad, because I love mudding, and will until I can't find a MUD worth playing. I'm sure there are a lot of people who will disagree with my assessment, and that's fine. But keep in mind that ROM (Rivers of Mud, which is what the CF/AR/FL source code was born from) has been gone since 2.41b, and the site is defunct, and has been for some time. There are hardly any new codebases that have come out in recent years. Few people are supporting existing codebases. The number of MUDs on TMS and other sources has faded dramatically over the years. As a subscriber to the Rom.org mailing list, it has been silent for years now. I used to have a full mailbox each day with ROM people communicating. Now, I'm lucky to get one email a month.

Anyway, that was a long winded post. Personally, I don't mind a small playerbase. I like the way FL is running, and sure, it might be fun to have more people, but I don't think that will happen. So, just enjoy it for what it is.

[the Dude]

I hate the small playerbase. But yah, we all knew from the start that MUDs weren't going to last forever.

At least now we're the best quality environment we've EVER been in, that alone will sustain our current playerbase I think. There is a bright side I suppose: We can't have any fewer players than we do now!!!

[Zrothum]

I'm leaving.

[Deykari]

I'm leaving.

Dey