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Comments
For comparison on detrimental changes to a game, World of Warcraft vanilla(version 1.12) didn't have auto-grouping for dungeons, you had to meet with people and socialise and learn to play with eachother because dungeons were hard. Current WoW has the auto-grouping and dungeons are easy. It's short minded gaming with little player to player interaction. It caters to the masses, but the game isn't as good as it was. Subjective thinking.
And I stumbled upon this game while browsing muds when I first learned of em. What got me to actually try it was the class page
https://web.archive.org/web/20080306031515/http://www.achaea.com/classes.php
I wanted to be an apostate, occultist, or jester. I liked this class page and its what hooked me into actually playing. The current website looks like something I'd see linked on Kongregate, a gaming website.
And I also wanted to eventually be a dragon! I think I was 6.8% of the way when I stopped playing https://web.archive.org/web/20080308103931/http://www.achaea.com/dragons.php
And the game itself is executed perfectly. The color coding of rooms, people, messages, tells, was really nice. Makes it easy to quickly know what the text is about that it becomes natural to read. I loved the Romeo and Juliet guides and the land of Minia and the hi-jinks you'd get into as a new player making mistakes. And I loved this game for the clique like drama between players. I never got into that stuff, but I observed it. This was a game I told my brother maybe we'd play this when we're retired and old(with time on our hands). I don't think I can say that anymore.
- The baseline for people's minimum PC specs increased to a machine that can run League of Legends on minimum settings, rather than a machine that can only comfortably run telnet.
- More, flashier games are F2P.
- Fast internet speeds means the activities people can perform online have diversified; a MUD is no longer competing with BBSs and SNES roms, but streaming, gaming etc.
- People started shifting chunks of their online time from PCs to mobile devices, which struggle to comfortably run a MUD due to the need for a bigger screen and keyboard.
- People (justifiably) run adblock now, making it hard to advertise for new players.
- Gamers play Dota/LoL/CS/etc, they don't play other MUDs, making it harder for one of the big fish MUDs to cannibalise players from other smaller MUDs, because they just aren't there. You might tempt someone away from CS to Overwatch, or Dota 2 to Heroes of the Storm, but how do you attract someone from Dota 2 to Achaea?
- Steam sales, Humble Bundle etc mean the prices people find palatable in terms of microtransactions have shifted downwards.
- Probs plenty of other reasons.
Achaea, as with all MUDs, is a creature of the 90s. MUDs evolved into graphical MMOs, and the majority followed that progression (Everquest, NWN, Guild Wars, WoW etc). It's inevitable for older players to age out of the game, with real life responsibilities taking over the time required for this hobby which is so unfriendly to casual play; changing times then made it hard for new players to be attracted to fill their void. It's honestly remarkable that Achaea is still around at all, let alone in such good condition.
I also dislike some things Achaea has done. I find the new website charmless compared to the old one - like you, I loved the layout, palette, old class pages with their little icons. The game's development could have been prioritised in different directions (I guess it's easy to say this in hindsight). But I think some of your blame is misattributed.
If only we'd had his well of wisdom sooner, the game might have been saved.
Wait, how sarcastic are you being? I'm too drunk to make sure I'm not responding to something that I misinterpreted in the first place.
Stumbled onto Achaea googling FREE and Mmorpg..two mayor selling points..
Used to play around on M*U*S*H (which on googling since I haven't checked it out in a while, google kindly informs me m*u*s*h is meter * u * s * Planck's constant which is equal to 1.1002848 × 10-60 m3 kg2. amusing). Ended up here. How is a mystery, even to me.
Though according to google it's related to Plank's constant.
Site: https://github.com/trevize-achaea/scripts/releases
Thread: http://forums.achaea.com/discussion/4064/trevizes-scripts
Latest update: 9/26/2015 better character name handling in GoldTracker, separation of script and settings, addition of gold report and gold distribute aliases.
Your claim: "Achaea has been in decline awhile like since they started trying to modernize the game's face."
Reality: Last year was our second best year ever in terms of revenue, and only barely behind 2006, which was the best year Achaea ever had. See below for what happened in the next few years.
More Reality: The game's population peaked in 2004, and began to decline the month World of Warcraft came out. That's true for basically every large MUD that existed at the time. It is hard to overstate the extent of WoW's impact on MUDs. Many people left MUDs entirely for WoW and never came back.
Your claim: "The game was better managed in 2009".
Reality: Sure, if your idea of good management is driving it into the ground. 2009 was so bad (following similar declines in 2007 and 2008) that I fired Achaea's producer at the end of it. 2009 was the low point in Achaea's history from my perspective. And again, last year was our second best year ever, so it's pretty difficult to take this seriously.
We don't have to guess whether the new website is better than the last one. We know it is, because it converts people into trying the game a little better than the old one did. That's 90% of its purpose. The other 10% is to provide the interface for things like art/bard, web-based messages, etc.
Nexus? We track what clients people use, and old Nexus was virtually unused by the time we killed it. New Nexus is far far more used, and we regularly get new players mailing saying they're giving Achaea a try specifically because of it.
I'm also not a huge fan of the video, but having it on the front page converts people slightly better than not having it. Future experiments will include putting different videos on the front to see if they convert better. You measure success, you don't just put a finger in the air and say, "Well I prefer blue."
Ultimately, the problem with your analysis is that you're simply extrapolating what you personally like to the entire world, and that's only useful if we were building a game specifically for you.
Was released in Q3 (august specifically) of 2006. Note how it's not even close to when WoW's subs were at its peak? Your comparison is failing, mate. Believe what you want, a LOT of people will agree that Vanilla isn't close to as good as people 'remember' it as. Just go play on Nostalrius (most popular vanilla private server, and most bugfree) if you want proof of that.
After all, while it's understandable that 'the bottom line' is the most important standard to most... it's not universal.
On the other hand... this industry is nursing. In a perfect world (which I know we do not, have never, and will never have), this is not a line of work that should need to pay attention to money.
My point is this, I still remember very fondly the first year I starting playing. The world seemed huge back then and alive with new faces and possibility. Now it seems small and cramped with the same faces and same places. Once you play a game for so long I think you eventually can't help but become bias on the state of the game.
One thing is for sure though. It used to take a lot more work to get into the game. Now it is comparatively much easier. Some of the things I mentioned above were exciting for me but off putting for others. I actually feel alot more comfortable recommending people who see me playing at work to try it out. With the new website and play now approach its a lot easier to pick up and go. I would prefer not having to put in your email at creation. That will turn me off of something I am only slightly curious about more often than not.
@Szanthax was that Dragon's Gate?
@Sultani wins :pleased:
(Blades of Valour): Draekar says: "Synbios if sunbeams sparkle off that I'll kill you where you stand."
(Party) Halos says, "Disbar?"
(Party) Draekar says, "You know here we have disbar."
(Party) Draekar says, "And over there we have datbar."
On a more on topic note....
I can say the guilds and the era they were in were a special time (my first introduction to achaea).
On the pro-side you had more people and it seemed like there were many more events and deity initiated things that were not as automated in those days. Nostalgically speaking there was more synergy and role play. You didn't just raid the cities because you felt like it there were reasons to do so.
On the con-side I spent over 100 years as a HR 3 because I couldn't pass the basic defense test. I had so much trouble understanding coding to begin with (now I'm much better but it took getting zmud and spending a solid year with it and the entirety of my houses combat team tutors just to get the basics down). I spent at least another year getting to be passable at basics of combat. 3 RL years is a long commitment for anything like a game. So I will say all the improvements for novices and things like that have been beneficial.
You have to pick your battles as a game. I think Achaea picked correctly to focus on the development of more novice friendly initiatives. That being said I still miss some of the old interactions on a regular basis but there has to be a balance.
(Blades of Valour): Draekar says: "Synbios if sunbeams sparkle off that I'll kill you where you stand."
(Party) Halos says, "Disbar?"
(Party) Draekar says, "You know here we have disbar."
(Party) Draekar says, "And over there we have datbar."