Future of AR

[Davairus]

Hi guys,

I wanted to give a quick update on AR, where we are at and where we are heading.

First of all with the website redesign. There isn't a lot to say about it, so that's why I'll address here first. I hope that the website will satisfy every craving you have for AR while outside it. I'm looking for a design that both entices new users in and encourages the rest of us to return and motivate us to vote. Its going to continue being dynamic, meaning it pulls its data from databases properly instead of relying on hardcoded files. It should be a reliable resource and the necessary steps have been followed to make it one.

You might think the website is a wrap - not at all. This was kind of a phase 2. Phase 1 was making it appealing to newbs. Phase 2 was for us. Phase 3 is to add the polish of a professional looking site. Given that I have no expertise in that area I recruited Thorgoth to be the lead on this. He's using a framework, and we'll be moving towards getting it into a content management system so that we have no trouble launching new designs for that website. I think that's a big deal. We need to be able to release a new look more easily. That's what Thorgoth's enabling.

With respect to the game server, I think I'm happy with the server I'm at. Its affordable for me, and I get the level of control over the server that allows me to manage users properly and not have to do a half-assed job. Unfortunately, most of the time at wolfpaw (and every server in AR's lifetime) we were so restricted by BSD jail that this is exactly what we needed to do to achieve our desired feature goals. So we are currently in a kind of a "spring cleaning" phase. Its like 300 bugs backed up all the time, a lot of which call for modernization of the codebase, not 1 line 10 minute fixes. I think right now whats most important is for me to put my head down and focus on that. We are not unstable, things aren't broken, but certainly this isn't the level of quality I want and one of the main motivations for me to move off wolfpaw was to have the control over the server I needed to update its packages and allow fixes. We'v eseen a lot of that progress but I think its another 3 months of hard work to get it somewhere I can say that, yes, I am confident that we finally have robustness and maintainability.


Other than that, areas and classes seem like the places currently lacking the most sorely. I think we can basically forget about the concern of a PK'er needing to know his way around to play at this point, it doesn't seem like there are dikumuds to jump around anymore so that is no longer a marketable point. So we will start making strides towards a 100% non-stock game world. I'm planning on us working on this from the bottom upwards, but if there are any areas you think we should prioritize redoing first, let me know and I'lll adjust accordingly. I currently have 3-4 rewritten areas ready to go but I'd rather avoid the cloud castle travesty again and will instead try to do a slower release schedule with time to really properly do these areas.

For classes, Nycticora has done a nice job for us on invoker and dark-knight. I plan to rest him for a while after he completes his dark-knight/vampire work. Our next targetted class is monks and I may or may not do that myself depending on schedules, but I am definitely aiming for monks open for playing by the end of this year.


Finally, marketing. Right now we are doing a terrible job of this. There are many MUDs with healthy playerbases. We're voting but that isn't enough. Our staff have excelled in so many areas but marketing was little better than giving the mud a name beginning with an "A" (for first result on a list, 15 years ago) and then bumping the mud connector updating the game listing to put it on recently listed. In 1998 to get 100 players, that is all it took. This is 2014, the mud world is not exploding with players like that anymore. We have to pursue this harder than we are doing. Once I am done with the bugs, I will see if I can figure that out.

[beia]

As the great Kevin Flynn said - The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then one day...

[Ergorion]

I think the Twitter has taken great strides in the past couple months. The automated tweets are, for the most part, often enough to call attention to the account but not too often (with the exception of some inactivity deletes) that it's spammy.

The next step for twitter should be more interaction with the community, I think. Tracking down the sub-cultures that we overlap with (LARP'ers, D&D'ers, fantasy book readers, &c.), following their twitter accounts, listening to their conversations and engaging them in conversation.

I don't think there's too much we could do with Instagram, but we could totally hop on the Throwback Thursday phenomenon which happens on Twitter and Facebook as well.

Our community is niche enough and weird enough that I think it could generate some interest from certain magazines and/or blogs. We could try to find some writers and pitch to them the idea of doing a story on MUDs as a way to gain exposure in yet another sphere as well.

[Vanisse]

That's a great idea Ergorion. Anyone want to sign up to be a social media correspondent? I feel like we could open this up to Emissaries. I'm terrible with Twitter but I bet some of you guys use it much more often and would be great ambassadors for AR.

[uzume]

Another thing we might want to think about or look into is maybe expansion. A lot of our competitors use more than just pk we might want to look into it. Yes its lots of work, yes it will be a huge pain in the rump, but we are competing against that we are the old we are like MySpace we need to upgrade to facebook. We might want to think on that

[beia]

The type of stuff we are competing with is, Player Built Cities, Player built Clans, Player Built Economy. Deep deep RP, 10-15 active IMMS, 5-10 active coders, no such thing as Con Death, Real Group PK. In depth crafting systems.

We are just a PK mud and that has to be our strong point.

[asudan]

No changes for thieves?

[tayyah]

Didn't they just get a few new skills?

[Vanisse]

[Ergorion]

Are we auto-following everyone who follows our Twitter account?