Re: Suggestions for Wayfar 1444 relaunch welcome
Upward of 50 players is incredibly tiny in the grand scheme of things, and incredibly huge for muds. That's important to remember. Swamp used to have 100. When I say 1000-5000 blind players of muds in the world I am accounting for two factors. First is that many of those players are playing more than one mud. Second is that there's only 20-30 muds that get over 50 concurrent players. If you don't believe me, see mudstats.com. If you want to refute those numbers, you'll need to find significantly large muds that they don't list, and they've got almost every mud that exists period. Alter Aeon is now one of the largest muds that exists, only gets 120 or so max, and is majority blind.
If another codebase is to come into being and be mature you need two things: a skilled programmer, and a reason to write it. Maybe 1% of the world is a programmer in the first place. Assume 5000 mud players. Hell, let's assume 10000. That gets you down to 100ish people who might contribute. Maybe a bit higher since playing muds and being nerdy go together. Of those, way more than half are going to be blind 16-year-olds, the same sorts of people who come here and get stuck on non-blocking sockets, and make claims like "Python can't work for muds" and stuff like that. Those people will try, then get it wrong, have a codebase that's laggy and buggy, and it all falls down. This is a big part of how we got hellcore. Of the remaining fraction, many are going to be like myself: already with a dayjob, only have weekends, etc.
Once you've got your team, you then have to do a good enough game to poach players off something else, or do good enough that you can reach new audiences. By the nature of muds and mud clients, you're not going to reach new audiences while still being a mud. All the rest of it requires producing enough content and such so that the players come. Without a flagship game, you're just throwing code into the ether. It's not like Synthizer, where I'm effectively only competing with myself and OpenALSoft. You're competing with 50 or so other options, many of which are already very full-featured (see: every mature LPC mudlib, in particular haven, discworld, and to some extent dead souls; diku; smaug; circle; etc).
It's not going to happen in other words. There will be attempts. They won't get far. Coffeemud didn't get far for exactly these reasons. Evennia didn't get far for exactly these reasons.
Evennia is shit because it's shit, not because Python. You can run under Pypy and get the performance of C if being slow is really an issue, and you don't have desktop distribution concerns so it's literally just replacing the word Python with the word Pypy at the command line. No mud in the world is multi-threaded. For some reason people in Python mud land make really bad decisions, like trying to use Twisted (Clok I believe; slows down networking by a lot for the typical mud use case) or cannibalizing Django's ORM (Evennia, randomly introduces blocking database operations because it's not for games, maybe they moved off it).
You can say what you want about Smaug, but Smaug is actually pretty good C code. So is Godwars, Diku, etc. What everyone should remember about this topic is that when the mud codebases everyone used were first written, a ton of very skilled programmers were involved. They were World of Warcraft. As muds died, the number of skilled programmers that existed died with them. New codebases don't gain traction in part because the really old ones are super capable, super stable, and amazingly fast and efficient. They were written in C only because back then C was the most advanced, portable, etc thing on the market.
It's time to stop the wishful thinking about how muds aren't effectively dead and how they can reach tons of new players and how we'll get so much amazing stuff if only thing X or Y would happen. They're dead. They had a run of something like 40 years. That's really good. It makes me melancholic sometimes to have been around for the early 2000s when even small muds still had medium-to-high double digit player counts, and the big ones could top 500. People have been trying to revive them since 2000. If the last 20 years couldn't, the next 20 years won't. Sighted people are on the verge of having experiences that are literally exactly as good as the real world both in terms of sight and sound. They're not coming back. Thre aren't enough interested blind players. BK3 and Shadow Line have more complex gameplay than 90% of muds, and by the nature of text it's the rare thing like Wayfar that can do more. The future of muds is the occasional gem that lasts for however long, and everyone else playing Alter Aeon until the end of time, basically.
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