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MUDs peaked in 2003?

April 18th, 2008 (Visited 1100 times) Tags: muds, vw history

MUD Listing Trend Graph | FindMUD

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9 Responses to “MUDs peaked in 2003?”

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The "Health," of Muds - Top Mud Sites Forum wrote on April 18th, 2008 at 10:10 pm:

[...] Re: The "Health," of Muds Here is something relevant to the conversation. I am not sure how accurate it is. But it is interesting. MUD Listing Trend Graph | FindMUD I was originally directed there from Raph Koster’s site. Raph’s Website � MUDs peaked in 2003? [...]

Muds have peaked? | From The Fringe wrote on April 19th, 2008 at 6:36 am:

[...] is an interesting chart I saw on Raph Koster’s blog [...]

Reader Comments

George said on April 19th, 2008 at 9:51 am:
The chart definitely is better than nothing, but the Mud Connector is somewhat notorious for ‘actively’ listing muds that are pretty much dead. In the last couple of years there have been a couple of batch deletes of these listings, and I don’t know if anyone has the data to prove when those muds went from active to inactive; I suspect that the graph really should be skewed into something of a plateau post-2001.
Raph said on April 19th, 2008 at 10:15 am:

I am certainly willing to believe that it was a couple of years earlier. I think that the startling thing is that we would consider a date in this century.
Michael Chui said on April 19th, 2008 at 3:23 pm:
I don’t know if anyone has the data to prove when those muds went from active to inactive

You’d need some kind of metric to determine what “active” and “inactive” means, too. I don’t think we can come up with an acceptable one anytime soon.

Off-topic,

Raph, I like the new layout, but could you kill the padding on the UL in your Categories sidebar? =P I’m using FF2.
Raph said on April 19th, 2008 at 3:55 pm:

I think it’s back to normal… I was fiddling with adding the teeny icons. New icons everywhere. Does it work for you now?
Roleplay said on April 21st, 2008 at 6:53 am:
That seems pretty accurate, actually. I think the golden age was a bit earlier (1999ish?), and then interest grew - finally all the new MUDs began failing (for lack of marketing and innovation), and thus our peak during 2003.

We recently put up a new MUD, actually - you can find us at RolePlayGateway’s MUD - and feel free to give us a shout.
Michael Chui said on April 21st, 2008 at 12:30 pm:
It’s working for me now, yes. Too bad Wordpress doesn’t have a debug mode.
AJ said on April 22nd, 2008 at 10:31 am:
There’s a strong interest in MUDs, MUCKs, and particularly MUSHes for people who think that graphical MMORPGs aren’t suitable locations for deep in-character roleplay. The RP MUSH community isn’t as large, to my observation, as the “roleplay by forum” community, (though I guess that might actually be a small community who are just very active in a large variety of simultaneous games). If the MUD-connect graph is tracking MUSHes and MUCKs then I’m actually not surprised by the trend. One of the advantages to opening such a game now is there is a relatively low barrier to entry.