Newbie thoughts.

Well, sorry. I've been dealing with some RL issues lately that have distracted me from the game. (QQ!) But I've been lurking, posting and doing my own research. Ironically I'd been doing something similiar to what Lysator has been doing. Independently. I took a day on Iron Realms' world of Achea to have a look at what they do that's different.

Website

I have to say, their website is a lot prettier than ours. But I think our wiki does a very similiar job, though it could be organised a bit better. Every once in a while I do actually go through phases of blazing through our wiki, in fact, the current setup of the main page a good deal of the stripping away the pages on 'races' and 'guilds' and the like and organising those pages into categories has been my doing. But I'm not really a wiki-fiend. My talent is for seeing stuff I like elsewhere, grabbing the code and then trying to make that code fit our website. One thing I'd like to understand better is templates. We used them on otherverse.wikia.com for characters, worlds, races and the like and applying them to our own wiki would actually make things a lot neater. Another problem we have is character art. Yes, Gav's /is/ a stolen image (from Warhammer), paintshopped and edited. I'd like to see character art at least for our race pages, and preferably original and not stolen from elsewhere.

However... here's the difference between the Iron Realms stuff and ours. Ours is a 'hobbyist' mud as they'd refer to us. They're professional, a business, they make a lot of money and actually seem to have money to spend for development and the like. We don't, so we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves.

Getting New Players

My own thoughts on the actually game-play of Iron Realms? I actually stuck around for the tutorial, the basics aren't that different though their interface is rather similiar to something I've thought would be a good idea for us for a while. An in-browser interface and it's very pretty. The casual passerby isn't going to want to download client software and figure out how to install it and input our game data. If (as the mudding community in general agrees) we want to grab new players we have to reach beyond the current mud-community. And grabbing /that/ lot means not assuming they know squat about telnet interfaces and port numbers. To get some of those guys we need a clicky click interface. Personally I can't think of anything better than 'Play Now!' *click* 'Welcome to Lost Souls'.

And beyond that we need a tutorial, Wardens do their best, but I think a nice little tutorial script (and no, not a 3 hour introduction to all the nuances of the game) to introduce the basics before letting them loose on Gaia. (And I'm starting to have problems with Gaia being the name of the world, goes against our whole new original theme approach).

And I think plague really needs to be reworked. Nothing worse than a n00b catching the plague in their first five minutes, Chaos knows about my dislike of that particular mechanic and I'm not going to go on about it again here.

I think that's enough for now.