Achaea on MMORPG.com

Short blurb about us there today. http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/9434/Four-of-My-Favorite-MUDs-of-All-Time.html

Beau, the writer, used to write for Massively.com and is probably the only member of the games media that writes about MUDs more than once. I believe he's going to be doing some more coverage on Achaea soon too, including possibly some streaming (though we'll see how successful that is....reading and narrating at the same time is not that easy!).


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Comments

  • edited February 2015
    There's two problems with streaming a MUD.

    - Most MUD experiences are based around personal interactivity, and there's not going to be a constant pace of action. Playing a MUD, specifically Achaea, is more about living in a world than playing a game. It's not really a spectator sport. 

    - The MUD community is so small that virtually nobody would be tuning into any theoretical streams. A small fraction of a games community typically watches streams of that game. For MUDs, the community is already microscopic.


    Sites like Twitch usually follow the 80/20 rule. 20% of the games get 80% of the views.  The only exception is when people follow the personality rather than the game. The only time I see obscure games getting decent views is when a prominent streamer is streaming them.

    image

  • Santar said:

    The only time I see obscure games getting decent views is when a prominent streamer is streaming them.
    I find this insightful & I agree.

    Still, it could happen. Achaea is small enough that a prominent streamer with thousands of viewers randomly deciding stream, and a tiny fraction of them checking the game out, would have a relatively large impact on Achaea's playerbase. They'd probs all be chased away by name requirements, the difficulty wall, and utility bill-sized macrotransactions, but still.
    image
  • MasarykMasaryk Sangre Plains
    Interesting article, and nice to see Achaea getting some good pub on a highly visited gaming site. :)



  • Santar said:

    The only time I see obscure games getting decent views is when a prominent streamer is streaming them.
    I find this insightful & I agree.

    Still, it could happen. Achaea is small enough that a prominent streamer with thousands of viewers randomly deciding stream, and a tiny fraction of them checking the game out, would have a relatively large impact on Achaea's playerbase. They'd probs all be chased away by name requirements, the difficulty wall, and utility bill-sized macrotransactions, but still.
    We're actually looking into paying streamers to play Achaea as it would help solve our biggest customer acquisition problem: Player expectations. Most people who enter our games that haven't played MUDs before have no idea what a MUD is and are confused on exiting character creation. If someone's watched a streamer first, at least they know what they're getting into, and that's pretty huge.

    On the other hand, streaming MUDs is unlikely to be particularly compelling to watch, and any streamer with a decent-sized audience is not cheap. For instance, I have a couple friends paying PewDiePie (totally unsuitable for Achaea obviously) $20k/month right now to do some streaming for them. 

  • KyrraKyrra Australia
    Dunn does epic raid streams. Or he used to. I liked watching Targ get smashed while eating breakfast >.>
    (D.M.A.): Cooper says, "Kyrra is either the most innocent person in the world, or the girl who uses the most innuendo seemingly unintentionally but really on purpose."

  • AktillumAktillum Philippines
    Glad to see Beau writing for MMORPG. That article has gotten much more comments than anything MUD-related he wrote for Massively.

    Livestreaming Achaea wouldn't be bad, just some minor tweaks would need to be made. I think most of us play with size 12 or smaller font, to squeeze more action onto the screen - that would be horrendous in a Livestream, you'd need to bump it up to at least 16+ during a cast, and probably gag out a bunch of stuff, so people could actually follow along.

    Ideally, the person streaming would also be a great narrator. Someone who can actually make the on-screen text sound exciting. Morgan Freeman could probably do it.






  • KresslackKresslack Florida, United States
    I've never been able to catch one of Dunn's streams, unfortunately. I can say, from recalling my own first experience with MUD's that it can be -incredibly- confusing and overwhelming starting out. While they are much like multiplayer books, as the article writer described them, you can't really set the pace of what's happening like you could with reading a book.

    I think streaming could go either way, really, but it's only really going to have a niche audience I imagine. That being said, I enjoy when people post logs or stream, because a lot of the times it helps me to understand different aspects of the game. That, along with seeing how certain things they've added for gagging and subbing to make fast paced, rather spammy instances like raids easy to keep up with without losing vital information.


  • SkyeSkye The Duchess Bellatere
    am fairly certain most streams would be spammed with variations of who lists and inventory. >_>




  • Kyrra said:
    Dunn does epic raid streams. Or he used to. I liked watching Targ get smashed while eating breakfast >.>
    He should do them again. I'd watch.
    - (Eleusis): Ellodin says, "The Fissure of Echoes is Sarathai's happy place."
    - With sharp, crackling tones, Kyrra tells you, "The ladies must love you immensely."
    - (Eleusian Ranger Techs): Savira says, "Most of the hard stuff seem to have this built in code like: If adventurer_hitting_me = "Sarathai" then send("terminate and selfdestruct")."
    - Makarios says, "Serve well and perish."
    - Xaden says, "Xaden confirmed scrub 2017."



  • edited February 2015
    I think if the streaming was carefully planned and executed it would work great. I did an internship a couple summers ago where I prepared tutorials for library databases. Each was just 2:30 long but I was controlling every word and mouse motion due to time constraints. Took forever to plan. Achaea's sprawling, but if we did a concise overview of the awesome, I think we could get our point across. For example, some particularly witty (and scripted) banter on like Stygian crossroads and then a CTF-scale raid brawl.

    I don't know what in particular would be most effective, but I do think a scripted thing would do the trick. Sticking the viewer straight into a raid would probably be disorienting, but if you set a contrast between normal activity and PK while showing the positives of both it would work. A lot of the conversation in Achaea is interesting, and then you got the total chaos of combat where 60 things are happening at once and the viewer can still see people orienting themselves, and that's interesting too.

    Just my two cents.


  • AktillumAktillum Philippines
    Beau Hindman clearly needs to join the CIJ. Then he'd write nothing but rave reviews about Achaea.

  • KenwayKenway San Francisco
    This may just be me but listening to someone dueling/sparring who is relatively vocal about what's going on is actually pretty damn interesting and more often than not quite funny. Pretty sure at least a couple people I know share this opinion or else I'm not sure what they're giggling at while I'm fighting. Also could be interesting too see one of the cooler quests done. A couple people listened to me on skype while I tried to figure out Lothos and they seemed to enjoy themselves a bit (obviously you'd want someone who swears less)

    - Limb Counter - Fracture Relapsing -
    "Honestly, I just love that it counts limbs." - Mizik Corten
  • Now I want to hear Kenway streaming Achaea. Also, I imagine Achaea'd be better as a let's play than a stream. More room for re-narrating things in editing, and skipping boring parts, etc. More work too, though.
  • Hmm I used to stream quite frequently back when I used to play D3 but only issue I could see would as already mentioned trying to slow it all down assuming PvP was involved. Otherwise I think making a serperate server for the stream where it might not have as many people(possible select few people to join) to all converge and tackle something or give a in depth tour of Achaea. Example travel to the main city states and Delos and explain about the cities briefly as well as the classes and races?

    Quite a few ideas really what could do for a live stream as not to scare away people away. Give them glimpse of various aspects of the game. Show them the endless possibilities Achaea has in store with them. Just food for thought.
  • CaladbolgCaladbolg Campbell County TN
    Sorry for the double post. But I would just like to remind everyone we need fresh life in the game. Please don't be super douchebags to new players. ._. we only get 1 shot  at this

  • I'm telling you guys, be careful, because one day some gamer like Pewdiepie is going to find Achaea, stream it, and then Creation will be torn apart... It will be baby boomers part II
  • Klendathu said:
    (someperson) tells you, "I heard of this game on mmorpg.com and want to try and see how fast i can get to the game's dragon."
    The record is what, six to eight weeks or something?
    - (Eleusis): Ellodin says, "The Fissure of Echoes is Sarathai's happy place."
    - With sharp, crackling tones, Kyrra tells you, "The ladies must love you immensely."
    - (Eleusian Ranger Techs): Savira says, "Most of the hard stuff seem to have this built in code like: If adventurer_hitting_me = "Sarathai" then send("terminate and selfdestruct")."
    - Makarios says, "Serve well and perish."
    - Xaden says, "Xaden confirmed scrub 2017."



  • The "Lol you aren't bashing efficiently enough" crowd's projection is that its possible to do it in a couple weeks.
    image
  • edited March 2015
    Theoretical time to get to dragon for a person that needs to sleep 8 hours a day but otherwise bashes for 16 hours a day is probably about 2 or 2 and a half weeks.

    The fastest ever to do it was a month and a half-ish I think?

    image

  • Which, you'll note, is approximately 3x longer than the people that actually bashed for 16 hours a day did it in.
    image
  • Santar said:
    Theoretical time to get to dragon for a person that needs to sleep 8 hours a day but otherwise bashes for 16 hours a day is probably about 2 or 2 and a half weeks.

    The fastest ever to do it was a month and a half-ish I think?
    Well shit.

    I wasted a lot of time.
  • edited March 2015
    Sarapis said:
    Santar said:

    The only time I see obscure games getting decent views is when a prominent streamer is streaming them.
    I find this insightful & I agree.

    Still, it could happen. Achaea is small enough that a prominent streamer with thousands of viewers randomly deciding stream, and a tiny fraction of them checking the game out, would have a relatively large impact on Achaea's playerbase. They'd probs all be chased away by name requirements, the difficulty wall, and utility bill-sized macrotransactions, but still.
    We're actually looking into paying streamers to play Achaea as it would help solve our biggest customer acquisition problem: Player expectations. Most people who enter our games that haven't played MUDs before have no idea what a MUD is and are confused on exiting character creation. If someone's watched a streamer first, at least they know what they're getting into, and that's pretty huge.

    On the other hand, streaming MUDs is unlikely to be particularly compelling to watch, and any streamer with a decent-sized audience is not cheap. For instance, I have a couple friends paying PewDiePie (totally unsuitable for Achaea obviously) $20k/month right now to do some streaming for them. 

    One thing that you might consider encouraging is videos about the game rather than videos of people playing the game.

    If you look on youtube at people like WoodenPotatoes - he's a very popular video maker for Guild Wars 2 and most of his videos are about the lore of the world, speculation about upcoming features/narrative, etc. Many of his videos show gameplay, but it's just backdrop for him to speak about totally unrelated things - a lot of his videos are just slideshows.

    The gameplay of Achaea is exciting, but it requires a lot of pre-existing knowledge to parse and I suspect it's a lot more exciting to play than to watch. It's not a great candidate for advertising.

    The lore, however, could be a huge draw. Videos exploring the different organisations, history, lore, areas, exploration, etc. could be very entertaining if done well and could, I think, attract a lot more people than gameplay streams. Right now, Achaea doesn't really have anything like that - the video on the front page for instance doesn't even scratch the surface of the game, watching it doesn't give you any sense of how deep everything goes (especially compared to a lot of other MUDs and especially compared to graphical MMOs).

    Videos that get at the depth rather than breadth seem more likely to attract attention.

    On top of the lore, regular videos or podcasts or similar (Every week? Plenty of things happen every week to warrant a video.) that discuss current events and offer informed speculation about what is to come similar to WoodenPotatoes would really drive home how dynamic the game's landscape can be and how interesting all of the different interlocking narratives are. The forums are always filled with oldbies pointing out that the world is ultimately pretty static (Targossas can't really make some big push and "win" the fight against Mhaldor, at least not without admin sanction and intervention), but the overall narrative and sense of permanancy is staggering compared to most graphical games. Heck, I bet you could even get a rotating stable of players together and do a Google Hangouts-style podcast.

    I think one of the big points is that probably the hottest thing in MMOs right now is developers attempting to add ongoing narrative with clear effects on the world - narrative that doesn't just progress the story by progressively releasing static zones. There is endless discussion on this in almost every MMO right now and the general consensus is that no game has figured it out. Compared to those other MMOs, Achaea has. On top of that, Achaea figured out very early on (maybe from the beginning), that the most interesting, deep, and renewable "content" in an MMO is other players.

    Achaea is the sandbox MMO with incredibly deep lore, persistence, narrative, and player-centric design that everyone seems to want. But I don't think just telling people that is going to get their attention (MMOs tell them that all the time and fail to deliver), I think you probably need to make videos/podcasts/whatever that actually offer clear examples. A video that explains in detail the history and philosophy and current situation of the Virtuosi is going to prove a lot more to the viewer than a video that simply says "We have X player-driven organisations, each with their own rich history".
  • MasarykMasaryk Sangre Plains
    Tael said:
    Sarapis said:
    Santar said:

    The only time I see obscure games getting decent views is when a prominent streamer is streaming them.
    I find this insightful & I agree.

    Still, it could happen. Achaea is small enough that a prominent streamer with thousands of viewers randomly deciding stream, and a tiny fraction of them checking the game out, would have a relatively large impact on Achaea's playerbase. They'd probs all be chased away by name requirements, the difficulty wall, and utility bill-sized macrotransactions, but still.
    We're actually looking into paying streamers to play Achaea as it would help solve our biggest customer acquisition problem: Player expectations. Most people who enter our games that haven't played MUDs before have no idea what a MUD is and are confused on exiting character creation. If someone's watched a streamer first, at least they know what they're getting into, and that's pretty huge.

    On the other hand, streaming MUDs is unlikely to be particularly compelling to watch, and any streamer with a decent-sized audience is not cheap. For instance, I have a couple friends paying PewDiePie (totally unsuitable for Achaea obviously) $20k/month right now to do some streaming for them. 

    One thing that you might consider encouraging is videos about the game rather than videos of people playing the game.

    If you look on youtube at people like WoodenPotatoes - he's a very popular video maker for Guild Wars 2 and most of his videos are about the lore of the world, speculation about upcoming features/narrative, etc. Many of his videos show gameplay, but it's just backdrop for him to speak about totally unrelated things - a lot of his videos are just slideshows.

    The gameplay of Achaea is exciting, but it requires a lot of pre-existing knowledge to parse and I suspect it's a lot more exciting to play than to watch. It's not a great candidate for advertising.

    The lore, however, could be a huge draw. Videos exploring the different organisations, history, lore, areas, exploration, etc. could be very entertaining if done well and could, I think, attract a lot more people than gameplay streams. Right now, Achaea doesn't really have anything like that - the video on the front page for instance doesn't even scratch the surface of the game, watching it doesn't give you any sense of how deep everything goes (especially compared to a lot of other MUDs and especially compared to graphical MMOs).

    Videos that get at the depth rather than breadth seem more likely to attract attention.

    On top of the lore, regular videos or podcasts or similar (Every week? Plenty of things happen every week to warrant a video.) that discuss current events and offer informed speculation about what is to come similar to WoodenPotatoes would really drive home how dynamic the game's landscape can be and how interesting all of the different interlocking narratives are. The forums are always filled with oldbies pointing out that the world is ultimately pretty static (Targossas can't really make some big push and "win" the fight against Mhaldor, at least not without admin sanction and intervention), but the overall narrative and sense of permanancy is staggering compared to most graphical games. Heck, I bet you could even get a rotating stable of players together and do a Google Hangouts-style podcast.

    I think one of the big points is that probably the hottest thing in MMOs right now is developers attempting to add ongoing narrative with clear effects on the world - narrative that doesn't just progress the story by progressively releasing static zones. There is endless discussion on this in almost every MMO right now and the general consensus is that no game has figured it out. Compared to those other MMOs, Achaea has. On top of that, Achaea figured out very early on (maybe from the beginning), that the most interesting, deep, and renewable "content" in an MMO is other players.

    Achaea is the sandbox MMO with incredibly deep lore, persistence, narrative, and player-centric design that everyone seems to want. But I don't think just telling people that is going to get their attention (MMOs tell them that all the time and fail to deliver), I think you probably need to make videos/podcasts/whatever that actually offer clear examples. A video that explains in detail the history and philosophy and current situation of the Virtuosi is going to prove a lot more to the viewer than a video that simply says "We have X player-driven organisations, each with their own rich history".
    I think that is a great idea. Or a stream during some game changing event so people can witness what players actually go through/feel. I can only imagine some of the things being said when @Artemis came back and subsequent raids went out.



  • edited March 2015
    Tael said:

    One thing that you might consider encouraging is videos about the game rather than videos of people playing the game.

    If you look on youtube at people like WoodenPotatoes - he's a very popular video maker for Guild Wars 2 and most of his videos are about the lore of the world, speculation about upcoming features/narrative, etc. Many of his videos show gameplay, but it's just backdrop for him to speak about totally unrelated things - a lot of his videos are just slideshows.

    Yeah, but that's aimed mainly at the existing GW2 audience. The idea here is to find new methods of customer acquisition in quantity, and for that we need a streamer who already has a following. We intend to do some videos for the site once the next big version of the client is out, but those are unlikely to be viewed much/at all by anyone who isn't already visiting the site. They're likely to be conversion tools rather than traffic generating tools. Conversion is just as important as traffic, but you have to have traffic first before conversion matters at all.
  • Get TotalBiscuit to play Achaea.

    image

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