Is Nanny dead?

[Qwer]

Nanny was my first mud ever. Tried a few others but didn't stay. There might be other people also who just starts to play on a mud and stays there.

[Yavathol]

You can't advance to high lvls by exploring, you have to kill. And show me a newbie that finds and solves puzzles/quests and knows free loot etc. That's bs.

Just so you know, this was exactly what I did.  No one has ever accused me of doing things in a mainstream fashion, but after a couple of levels hunting rats with chopsticks I was eager to see the rest of the Mud, and I did.  I remember getting some good free equipment in Sindel's now closed area, and I still direct beginners to Carrion's and show them the falchion in Asp's tower.  Yeah, I explored, I found free equipment and I solved a lot of puzzles - when you are first starting out that's the only thing you can do as well as high level characters.  As far as getting to high levels, well I had achieved a level 12 character before I started having regular kills that I frequented.

[Kherec]

It takes a while to get the grip on how a mud works, critical areas such as common logic in commands, what can be done and can't be done is needed to really explore much, and/or solve puzzles and quests, apart from a few here and there.

It's a natural evolution for some people (admittedly some just stick to mindless killing) to start questing once they mastered the art of simply killing. Oddly enough most people don't go there, which I find odd because questing, despite the rather low game-wise reward is still rewarding to me because it's mostly fun (except for a few oddly recoded quests) and it takes you, if the quest is good, all over someone's area, or even all across the mud (like with Help Lorn, Hunt the Dragons, Help servant etc).

As far as the free loot thing goes, that's more of an experienced mudder's mindset, as a newbie you don't think about how you can get free cash, it's more about how you can earn cash.

[Deimos]

Here is my opinion, since I usually check this only when I hear someone mention it on the actual game.

I've read all the talk about newbies, the bitching and chest beating about who has been here longer, who knows what etc...who cares?

NannyMUD is dying because only dedicated players choose to sit down in front of the computer and play a TEXT BASED GAME for a couple hours. Now, I stress the text based game because I'm sure everyone knows graphic games are a hell of a lot more fun, if you're into that. We have lost tons of great players to shitty games like EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and so on. Thats the simple fact. And the very few newbies we do get on there, are probably getting bored with it anyway. NannyMUD was the easiest and best mud I could find back when I first started. Think of it like an old arcade you use to go to.

Speaking of newbies, I personally don't help them anymore. I don't mind answering questions, but I don't party. From my experience, newbies come and go all the time. They always have and always will. Its the very few that decide to take the time and get to know the game are the ones that stay for awhile. I'm tired of helping new players only to see them stop playing.

With all that said, I hope NannyMUD will continue to the time I have kids and I get a lot older and settle down. Its was once a great community, and it still is. Just because the numbers are down doesn't mean the charm of it has diminished.

- Deimos

[Carrion]

...because I'm sure everyone knows graphic games are a hell of a lot more fun...

Not sure what games you're talking about, I have probably not played them I know I get much more out of some 3D FPS in some ways (extremely fast paced action for example), but I still get back to Nanny and play a lot... I was a newbie once too, and there was even in those days graphical games that people thought to be better than text-based games, so I'd say there are still people who could get hooked to Nanny even though there are so many other games out there.

I guess I'm a bit odd in this respect, not going for the top games, the coolest games, the most |337 games, but keep coming back to Nanny over the years, enjoying myself a lot. And even if you do have a favourite game, you will probably not ONLY play that one game all of the time, but have some spare time for Nanny.

Anyway, I'll probably play Nanny as long as I can, hoping for some new players to join every now and then.

(Geez, can't really say I know what I'm trying to say here...)

[Yberiel]

I do think I know what you are saying, Carrion.. I was myself hooked on WoW (world of warcraft) for a while.. I wasn't playing Nanny too much before that either though, due to other things.. but I kept coming back to Nanny.. Even if I didn't play during that time-period, I always logged in to check things out.. and to say Hi to friends..

But as it is now, I dont play WoW and spend all my free time in Nanny.. I love Nanny and can not be without her.. Probably because it was my first MUD I've tried, tried others but they didn't get to me as much as Nanny did... I am not as 'old' as most of you guys are when it comes to Nanny.. I dont belong among the 'old farts' but Nanny has a special place in my heart.. sounds silly but thats how it is.. and hopefully a new 'generation' will grow to love Nanny as much as we do..

And as long we enter Nanny.. Nanny wont be dead.. Nanny has its charm, no matter how many players there is around..

I do understand what Deimos says too though. I have too helped many newbies just to see them leave and never return again.. and after a while we give up..

But as long as the 'Old Farts' like you and Grasshoppers like me is there, Nanny will live..

Ybs..

[lillstrumpa]

Well, I have not played Nanny for a very long time, except for the occassional logging in to read notes.

Anyway... I remember when Nanny used to have like 70-80 people online. I have some sort of faint memory about breaching 100 once when I was online, but I can be wrong about that. So the question, to me, is why has people online dropped? It seems like the amount of wizards online is pretty stable, so its the players one have to ponder why they are not around.

First, I think, one need to find out about this: Is there a pretty large and steady flow of newbies, but they just dont stick around (like someone said earlier)? Or is there a shortage in newbies too?

Personally, I think (and have done so for years), that one of the reasons is simply the lack of active advertising by the administration. There never was any active advertising going on at a variety of mud sites when I was active, just by the occasional player and that wasnt much either.

There are other muds out there that are same in size, age and have lots of interesting features, but that are not as good in many ways as nanny is. On the other hand: They can be seen advertising. So... *shrug*

/Lillstrumpan

[Tredon]

One of the main problems is PR.
Another is the administration, some wizards and the general rudeness of many players.

As I have mentioned many times, updates in the game are infrequent, they are not always proprely announced in a way which is informative and interesting. Often news ingame lack the "spin" required to be an interesting sell.

I remember when the simyarin portal to Antharis opened, I think it was Gabe who posted a note about it.
It went something along the line of: A portal has opened in the lighthouse on Island Ganennon, you can explore it if you dare. I don't remember the words exactly.

Me being a newbie thought it sounded dangerous, I imagined that there would be autoattacking demons on the other side or something, because the newspost and the wording made it sound very threatening.

The whole spin and phrasing made me not want to explore it, which I think was the opposite of the intended effect.

I have often mentioned the nannyMUD homepage is neither attractive, updated quickly, it lacks much of the interesting information about for example the guilds, both thematically and about powers, spells and abilities.

For example, when I was still playing I notified the admins that the vikings guildpage was down, it took over a year to fix it and then it was merely restored, not made more interesting or more attractive.

Many of the clubs in nanny isn't on the club pages, more clubs=more PR, more attractive, more options, more exploring.

Many of the existing club pages look bad, they have some text, maybe a picture, sometimes not even that.
It isn't an attractive sell, which is bad PR.

Much of the information about the guilds is in the helpfiles ingame, but often you have to join the guild first to access them and sometimes have to advance ranks to find out more about the spells, powers and abilities you have.

Most of the guild pages look bad, look at the champions of Khorne guildpage or the Simyarins.

Like, the prophets have recently opened in the game, still I cannot see anything about the prophets guild on the nannyMUD homepage.

Again, not a good enough spin on it, not good PR, not good advertisement.

I think that many newcomers are put off by the uninteresting look of lysators nannyMUD homepage, seriously, what is up with those poorly drawn maps?

Very amateurish.

It just seeps of the old school MUD page philosophy.

Then there is the fact that many newbies who need help are greeted with an uncaring shoulder if not outright rudeness or hostility.

I'm not saying that even most players are like that, but they do exist and might make the new ones feel unwelcome.

[lillstrumpa]

Yay, found that landstinget isnt blocking this site! So I can post from work.

Anyway... I do like the website though. I find it pretty stylish, but as you say, poorly updated and that isnt good. Otherwise, I think you have some good points that correlate with my own experiences. Since I have a wiz and can do pretty decent coding... I could work over at nanny. But since I feel some sort of indifference regarding lots of things from the admins, I rather code elsewhere and have also done so. Nontheless, Nanny is my original home and I still have lots of feelings and I would like to code there and help making it a nice place. But as long as things are as they are, it feels hopeless.

[Ereshkigal]

But since I feel some sort of indifference regarding lots of things from the admins, I rather code elsewhere and have also done so. Nontheless, Nanny is my original home and I still have lots of feelings and I would like to code there and help making it a nice place. But as long as things are as they are, it feels hopeless.

This is true. The decreasing player population doesn't exactly motivate much either.

[Opus]

The decreasing player population doesn't exactly motivate much either.

I know there are not as many players today as, lets say, ten years ago, but is the population still decreasing?

[lillstrumpa]

I dont know really if it is still decreasing. But I am fairly certain that an active round of advertising by the admins would have a noticable effect on new players logging on. Then there might, ofc, be a need of other things to keep them online.

[Ereshkigal]

I think the best advertisement for a MUD can come from the players themselves, not from the admins. I don't mean putting up posters and that kind of stuff. There are way too many games now and many of them are far better at advertising than we can ever hope to be. Old players naturally pass on information to people they know without any conscious effort to advertise.

So I think that the best way to keep a game alive, particularly now that there are so many other competing games, is to make changes that will affect players that are at the top end. I had posted a note about this on the improvements board (with another char - Savitri) some time back suggesting adding more mortal levels, modifying existing areas so that some can only be safely explored by high level players (by boosting all the monsters in the area in some consistent manner), etc. No one really seemed interested in thinking along those lines, but I think that while the implementation that I suggested may not be practical, the idea is essentially sound.

Right now you can max most guilds within less than 2 weeks of online time. (And that includes sims and darks - gates and higher education spells make little to no difference to the game and so I think they don't count.) Yes, there is much to explore and over a hundred quests to complete. But not everyone likes to go through the entire game one room at a time trying out different syntaxes. I think there needs to be more meaningful content in the game at the top end even if it means that players have to "grind" to get there. That might involve making a lot more guild abilities, more dangerous monsters, etc.

Yes, that will involve some actual coding and not only in areas but also in every guild. Beldin's response to my note was:
"Make no mistake: I think you're right, I just think that fixing the problems you've described would be an engineering effort beyond the resources of our admin/wizard staff to accomplish."

I didn't really pursue this much further there because I didn't want the debate to drag on forever. But I disagree with this. I don't think it will take _that_ big an effort.  I mean, how big a change to the player object would it take to make more levels available? And to compensate, you could just tweak the stats of monsters in current areas to adjust their difficulty level. Make customized bits of code to make monsters do nasty things. For example, just how long would it take to write the code to make a monster chase a player? A few minutes? And even a simple change like that can make the game a LOT more fun. If Yogul started chasing people, wouldn't it take a lot more intelligence and perhaps a lot better powers to kill him? Maybe it sounds like a very patchy solution, but I think it will work fine if it is implemented creatively and carefully enough. It will take some serious work to convince me that this is an unmanageably huge task.I think the real challenge would be to add content to guilds at the top level - i.e. more meaningful and exciting powers for players to work towards. But again, I don't think we are looking at something that cannot be done.

I think the actual obstacle to this is not that we don't have anyone to code. I believe the obstacle is that any concept that will lead to players being more powerful is immediately squashed by the admins at its very conception because they are so scared of messing with the MUD economy.

I don't mean to just blast the admins. I think they do a great job in their own way and I greatly respect that. I think they do have the better interests of the game at heart. But I think there is something fundamentally wrong about their notions about the economy of the game. Of course, they do need to have a hold on the economy, but this looks more like a stranglehold. (I could give examples, but that will be too much of a digression...) I don't have any doubts about their intentions, but I strongly disagree with the policies.

I just noticed a note on the improvements board by Sadyc that says essentially the same thing about admin policies, though it carries a far more venomous tone than I think the admins deserve (well.. most of them anyway ). I just prefer to disagree and move on.

Barbarella has an interesting response to my note on the improvement board:
"My only objection is the idea that 'Game Over' is a bad thing. You could always become a wizard and create new content - a whole new game, if you will, and one that doesn't have to mean 'game over'.  On the other hand, there are lots of marvelous games out there of which NannyMUD is just one.  If you're really into games, and you've reached the 'game over' part of Nanny, why try to drag it out with changes that may or may not make any difference?"

I am not sure how good a suggestion this is, but I took it. I found another game and moved to it. I am fairly certain that I will not be playing my mortals on Nanny again. I do plan to stick around and idle away with my wizard from time to time. I feel no motivation to code right now for various reasons. But perhaps I will feel motivated again some day. But my days as a mortal player are almost certainly over. I can't _play_ two games at a time and I am having much more fun elsewhere. So do my thoughts have any relevance? I guess not. But still, there they are.

Ereshkigal

[Carrion]

Good note, Eresh,

I also think we should try to get some new players, just a few occasionally would probably do. But then it's important that Nanny really is fun to play as a newbie. There's a thread about that, and there are several nice ideas there.

Then it's also a good idea to have something more to strive for as a 'top player', there are also a lot of good/interesting ideas...

Then it would be great if 'someone' would code some top notch area especially for top players, forcing players both to have a lot of power, but also brains. AND there would be some extra nice bonus/equipment/whatnot to get in that area.

Unfortunately it's not as if I will do much myself, I still play my mortals and will probably do that until I can't do it anymore
I can't help it, I really like Nanny and still have a lot to accomplish there!

(There ARE some new stuff coming in my area and outside, but nothing fancy atm (any year now)...)

[lillstrumpa]

Well, Eresh... Not much to say, its a very good note and I pretty much agree with most of it. Maybe I think that admins is important when it comes to advertising the mud, but naturally are players important too.