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Hi all,
The lack of active players seems (at least to me) to be becoming a major issue. I can't remember the game being so quiet. Just on a whim, I went to mudconnector.com to see what our entry is like.
There are a number of obvious issues:
1) You can't connect to sentience from the link provided. This is bad, and so easily fixable if someone has the ability to edit it.
2) The info email doesn't work. Well that's not entirely true. It's been set up in such a way that a human can read the email address and modify it to be correct, but a direct-marketing robot scanning web pages for victims can't. Do we really get that much spam? Surely it's worth the pain of setting up a free account that say, the imps could access (or a nominated PR imm perhaps) and dealing with the spam in order to be able to answer any queries about the game?
Then there are the less obvious issues that may or may not be subject to your own viewpoint:
1) The description of the mud features is old and out of date. It doesn't mention any of the new stuff you guys have all been working so hard on.
2) The game's blurb has (no offence Syn) been written by a coder. There's no allure - nothing in my humble opinion to suck people in and make them want to come check us out. Maybe we could have a "design meeting" to come up with something a bit better. Simply listing all the modifications we've made to stock rom, just makes us a ROM game in the prospective players eyes - if you know what I mean. Being a ROM derivative is a good and bad thing to different people
3) I haven't checked, but getting people to vote for us, even for a little while will generate leads. I'm not advocating doing what Vass did, as in hiring some miscreant to write a bot voting prog (although the results are there for all to see =p). I just mean perhaps organising the faithful and semi-faithful to do their bit, once a week just to get our numbers up. Might help?
And some of my own suggestions, out of left-field:
1) Carrot and stick approach - Reward people who attend with regular global quests, judicial use of boosts, give churches special rewards for being the church with most regular attendees, and incentives to non-churchies who also turn up. Suggestions for the stick side - set a minimum attendance rate and provide a method for a user to set themself inactive if they need to, to avoid being archived. I'm not a big advocate of the "delete people who don't turn up every month" approach because a) we don't have that many players to begin with, b) that kind of thing never worked in the past on any of the games I've played, and c) because then you get people turning up once a month to anti-idle their char and then disappear again.
2) Have a top ten players stats pop up when people log in - not just a command noone bothers to use. Encourage some competition between both individuals and churches, (and perhaps imms as well - let's face it - it's pretty quiet out there except the usual suspects).
3) In the same vein, imms - where are all our imms? Do they have any work to do? If there aren't any assignments going, why should they turn up? Also, people should be able to see imms working in "who" - it encourages them that new stuff is on the way. Right now, we give off the appearance of being very static. If people don't think we're going anywhere, why should they turn up?
4) We need a website - now. Right now. Not in 6 months time. It doesn't have to be great, or even good. It just needs to have the name of the game, how to get online, what to expect initially and some teaser info about what happens when you invest some time. We can worry about the whole "these are all the classes and what they do" and stories n stuff later. Without a web presence we simply cannot advertise the fact that we exist. It's obvious that the whole word-of-mouth thing just isn't working. It also needs to be referenceable from mud-connector, since that site has a half decent google rating. We can worry about our own google rating later on. What we need right now is people online, talking about and playing sentience. To coin a horrible cliche: "If you build it, they will come".
Apologies if any of this gets anyone's back up. I realise everyone is busy with important things like real life, work, family - shit that really matters. But what are we doing here? I can't believe that anyone is happy with the way things are going at the moment, but it worries me that there doesn't appear to be any real action on it. Design meetings among the faithful simply won't bring people in, and we can talk about nice-to-have's till we're blue in the face, but at the end of the day there's no point building a game noone wants to play, or noone knows about. I'm just a coder, and perhaps it's not really my place to say any of this, but it's about time we started actually [color=#FF0000]doing something[/color] about it.
Let's get some real discussion going, and make some plans. Those with shit to deal with right now can simply keep up to date and make sure we don't go off at an unexpected tangent, but those of us who are able, capable and motivated have to pick up the pace right now, or we'll continue to be logging into a great little game with no players.
Scott (Vizz).
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Setting all other projects on hold to start on a simple website this evening. We'll have something up for people within a week. The rest'll come later :P
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I agree completely with everything said here. A few more specific responses:
> 1) You can't connect to sentience from the link provided. This is bad, and so easily fixable if someone has the ability to edit it.
>
> 2) The info email doesn't work. Well that's not entirely true. It's been set up in such a way that a human can read the email address and modify it to be correct, but a direct-marketing robot scanning web pages for victims can't. Do we really get that much spam? Surely it's worth the pain of setting up a free account that say, the imps could access (or a nominated PR imm perhaps) and dealing with the spam in order to be able to answer any queries about the game?
Both points definitely true. As to the spam, screw it, as I get tons in my gmail account anyway. I think the login details for mudconnector were set up by the aussies long, long ago (we're talking 3+ years here!), and I will contact the mudconnector people over thanksgiving and let them know so that we can fix this.
> 1) The description of the mud features is old and out of date. It doesn't mention any of the new stuff you guys have all been working so hard on.
>
> 2) The game's blurb has (no offence Syn) been written by a coder. There's no allure - nothing in my humble opinion to suck people in and make them want to come check us out. Maybe we could have a "design meeting" to come up with something a bit better. Simply listing all the modifications we've made to stock rom, just makes us a ROM game in the prospective players eyes - if you know what I mean. Being a ROM derivative is a good and bad thing to different people
>
> 3) I haven't checked, but getting people to vote for us, even for a little while will generate leads. I'm not advocating doing what Vass did, as in hiring some miscreant to write a bot voting prog (although the results are there for all to see =p). I just mean perhaps organising the faithful and semi-faithful to do their bit, once a week just to get our numbers up. Might help?
1) Completely agreed. I will update this as soon as I get the login details back.
2) Hahahah, no problems here. I really, really *REALLY* suck at writing, so I am completely in favor of a meeting to discuss some of this stuff. I know you folks in the UK don't get a holiday next week, but maybe we could meet sometime over the weekend to come up with something better? Problem is, years of training in science has made anything I write creatively look like bargain-bin fantasy compared to most of our other imms.
We can get rid of as much as the ROM refs as possible. This is good in my opinion, as long as we give them a shout out we'll be good.
3) Also agreed. Despite our lack of active players, there are quite a fair few people who "just come by every once in a while". If we can get everyone to vote, we might even look semi popular. 8)
> 1) Carrot and stick approach - Reward people who attend with regular global quests, judicial use of boosts, give churches special rewards for being the church with most regular attendees, and incentives to non-churchies who also turn up. Suggestions for the stick side - set a minimum attendance rate and provide a method for a user to set themself inactive if they need to, to avoid being archived.
>
> 2) Have a top ten players stats pop up when people log in - not just a command noone bothers to use. Encourage some competition between both individuals and churches, (and perhaps imms as well - let's face it - it's pretty quiet out there except the usual suspects).
>
> 3) In the same vein, imms - where are all our imms? Do they have any work to do? If there aren't any assignments going, why should they turn up? Also, people should be able to see imms working in "who" - it encourages them that new stuff is on the way. Right now, we give off the appearance of being very static. If people don't think we're going anywhere, why should they turn up?
>
> 4) We need a website - now. Right now. Not in 6 months time. It doesn't have to be great, or even good. It just needs to have the name of the game, how to get online, what to expect initially and some teaser info about what happens when you invest some time. We can worry about the whole "these are all the classes and what they do" and stories n stuff later. Without a web presence we simply cannot advertise the fact that we exist. It's obvious that the whole word-of-mouth thing just isn't working. It also needs to be referenceable from mud-connector, since that site has a half decent google rating. We can worry about our own google rating later on. What we need right now is people online, talking about and playing sentience. To coin a horrible cliche: "If you build it, they will come".
1) Agreed. Hrith and Pol have created some truly incredible GQs in the past - I remember the Linus Acrylin quest had people showing up all over the place.
2) Sounds like a great idea. Surprised I hadn't thought about it before, but combining the various stats lists into a "top ten players" might actually encourage people to compete.
3) Hrith, being the staff manager, would probably be able to tell you more about this than I can, but I think (and I won't mention names here) that we have some slackers among the staff. One of the problems here I think is that people want the imm powers, but not the imm responsibilities. I know building isn't completely alluring to some folks, but I have been working as hard as I can in conjunction with Pol and Hrith to improve things like scripting for example.
Some possible ideas:
* Have a time sheet sort of thing so we can track who has worked for how long each week. Note "worked" does not mean "logged in and went AFK". I usually tell people who want to be imms that it's about a 5-10 hour a week work commitment (whether you're a builder, coder whatever), which is fairly flexible and considers real life issues. I don't think this is unreasonable. Perhaps tracking people's work will improve efficiency.
* Documentation on building would definitely help, even a slight bit of would do a great deal. I know currently we have some people who just refuse to learn scripting. Hoping a well documented "Immortal's Guide" might help get people interested in creating rooms that have some degree of depth, NPCs which do more than just stand there, etc.
* Review people's assignments, and give them assignments they are interested in. If someone has been assigned to fix up an old unreleased area, and are just not interested in it, they're likely not to do anything with it. I hesitate to say "Let's dump all of the old unreleased areas", but it might be a good idea to this, because a new area has not been released in a long time - which shows to me that people have just lost interest. Work on a new area is better than lack of work on some old area which was probably shite to begin with. It seems right now the IMPs are the only ones actively building, which is opposite of what it should be.
* Building flag sounds decent to me.
I am really tempted to say "fire everyone who isn't actively working", but I'm not going to. The ultimate decision is Hrith's since he is the staff manager, and I would like to hear his thoughts on this. I don't think the IMPs should be the ones doing all the work as far as building, scripting, GQs and such.
4) Website - couldn't agree more. Areo has signed onto this, we can start simple and work our way up to flashy graphics later.
> Apologies if any of this gets anyone's back up. I realise everyone is busy with important things like real life, work, family - shit that really matters. But what are we doing here? I can't believe that anyone is happy with the way things are going at the moment, but it worries me that there doesn't appear to be any real action on it. Design meetings among the faithful simply won't bring people in, and we can talk about nice-to-have's till we're blue in the face, but at the end of the day there's no point building a game noone wants to play, or noone knows about. I'm just a coder, and perhaps it's not really my place to say any of this, but it's about time we started actually doing something about it.
>
> Let's get some real discussion going, and make some plans. Those with shit to deal with right now can simply keep up to date and make sure we don't go off at an unexpected tangent, but those of us who are able, capable and motivated have to pick up the pace right now, or we'll continue to be logging into a great little game with no players.
I think you bring up some excellent points. It might seem obvious to state, but our general strategy to get player activity should be :
(1) give our current and old players, who have seen everything in Sentience, some reason to play
(2) try to recruit NEW people who haven't been to every corner of the world and gotten bored with it yet.
You've hit on both in this post. (2) I think is a little easier to fix if we just get a mudconnector entry and a website. I'll do the first of those over next week. One thing to mention is our lack of a newbie area that really shows off our capabilities to the players. I mean, I wrote the current newb area with a bare understanding of ROM scripting, and haven't changed it much since. Perhaps I'll revive that topic on the thread since this area is VITAL.
(1) will be tougher - it will require us to get our imm force in gear, get some new areas out, have regular global quests and implement new rewards for active players - top 10 players I think is a fantastic idea which isn't exactly nuclear physics to implement, although it will probably require a bit of tweaking.
I won't bother speaking of the progress we have made in other terms over the past year or so - e.g. new scripting additions, game stability, and bugfixes, since they don't directly apply here. But I do want to say it's good to remain optimistic. With some work on our part, we can revive interest amongst the old players - it's definitely been done before (I remember we went 4 months or something like that without even having a host). Heck, I remember when we had even less players and crashes every 30 minutes, and SOME people still played, so there must be SOME good stuff that we can build upon.
Sorry for my possible lack of good english as this post was written in some small degree of haste. 8). So let's start changing things. I'll get our mudconnector entry in gear and see if I can code in Top 10 players over Thanksgiving, since I'll have a few days off from work/school.
Anton/Syn
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I'll take time to post a proper reply later, but for now I think this speaks volumes.
~~, so I'm not sure what I can do about that.
I have yet to change the blurb, mainly because I am a shite writer, but I am trying to come up with somethin that (a) mentions the history of the game some (b) has a bit of mystery to it that makes people want to at least TRY the damn thing and © point out a FEW of the features in passing (NOT in bullet point form like madcow/whisp had it). Basically written with both some RP (this is the history of our world, and this is what has been going on), and a some of its features (this is what you can DO here that you can't do on other MUDs). The
former will require me drawing on the history Areo and Hrithma have been working so hard on.
As soon as I get something that is remotely good, I will put it up there. Playing around with those ideas now instead of studying my electrochemistry.
I wasn't sure what to do about "number of players online". For now I just went ahead and put "under 10" since it's about right, although during globals and things we have actually pushed the 10-24 limit. I think in this case honesty is our best policy, because if someone logs in and expects to find 10-24 players but finds 1 or 2 they may be miffed at our lying and not even give it a shot.
I attempted to contact the webmaster of topmudsites.com to inherit our account there, but got a bounce. I will keep digging around trying to contact them, as well as getting something up on Mudworld and Mudmagic. Also considering (next semester) buying the premium adspace option (I believe its 250$ for 7 months) - not extremely pricey, but before I do this, I would want to redesign the newbie area.
More updates (and a better MUD blurb) posted here soon.
Update: changed the admin contact address to "syn@sentiencemud.net" since I talked to Jonastio and he corrected the problems with it.
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Update: since webmaster@topmudsites.com keeps bouncing, I attempted to post a topic there. Apparently you have to wait a few days before your forum account is validated, so I'm doing that while trying to write a decent description.
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Maybe you might consider having a small competition among the player/immbase to see who can come up with the best description, according to criteria that you set?
Vizz.
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~~@Vizzini:~~
> Maybe you might consider having a small competition among the player/immbase to see who can come up with the best description, according to criteria that you set?
>
> Vizz.
That's not a bad idea. My main problem with writing the blurb right now is that all of the big changes we're bringing in will shift the perspective of the game a fair bit from what it used to be. Trying to write something decent enough to where we won't have to rewrite it too much later 8)
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~~@Vizzini:~~
> Maybe you might consider having a small competition among the player/immbase to see who can come up with the best description, according to criteria that you set?
>
> Vizz.
I wrote a news about a little contest which I'll run for a month and a half or so, and post when they finish moving the server. I've promised some special prizes which I will code, especially if anyone comes up with anything decent. 8)
Hopefully we'll get something out of it. Won't hurt to try.
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Update on TopMudSites:
~~@Topmudsites Admin:~~
> Cleaning up my inbox and just noticed this, so sorry for missing it the first time around.
>
> Probably the best bet is for me to just remove the MUD from the database and let you create a new user to relist it as best suits your needs.
>
> Just let me know if that's ok and I'll take care of it.
Told him I'd let the current owner know so we could re-add it when it was taken out.
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That sounds great. I've got a few submissions for the blurb contest, that have given me some ideas. They aren't perfect but not a bad starting point. Is he just waiting for me to send him an e-mail? Or has sentience been removed from there already? I'll get on this asap as next week is spring break (i.e. mad time off) for me.
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Told him to go ahead, so waiting on that now.
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Hey guys,
Well a bit of an update on this – I actually got six or so entries for the blurb contest, not many but more than I expected. Some are actually half decent and they're all probably better than I'd be able to write. I'll pick the best one of the lot and put it up on our mudconnector/topmudsites listing, as well as http://www.sentiencemud.net as our site address.
By the way, this is a question for Areo, but did you ever hear any word from that Topmudsites guy? I think you're the only one out of both of us that managed to get a hold of him. I'd rather not let this drop since TMS is a fairly often visited database.
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Our topmudsites entry from about 2000 was removed. We can put what we wish there now.
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~~@Areo:~~
> Our topmudsites entry from about 2000 was removed. We can put what we wish there now.
SUCCESS!!!
Areo, you will now my right hand man in executing the armies of incompetent webmasters. 8)
