Note: This was written after reading a log of the meeting that someone was kind enough to let me browse – I’m not certain whether it’ll be posted to the forums later. Also, this post is very, very long, but it needs to be read in its entirety, unfortunately.

Dear Admin,

Let me preface this by saying that I’m not making any personal attacks here.

In reading the logs of the meeting with the IRE head honcho (sorry, if you read this, but your name escapes me for a moment), I was incredibly disheartened to note that the meeting appeared to mostly be a glorified envoy report. To summarise for those reading this post that didn’t read the logs, the 12 point agenda was roughly as follows:

1) About guild balance in organisations
2) About updating old skills when new skills are released
3) Construct balance
4) Inflexibility of politics
5) Domoth balancing
6) Conflict quests and their implementation
7) PK and its handling
8) More PK stuff
9) Differences in raidability of Cosmic and Ethereal
10) Glomdoring’s problems, again
11) Combat balancing
12) Lack of admin emphasis on building/RP

I’m very, very surprised that player numbers weren’t the big, main issue here.

Let me break it down this way.

A typical (Achaea is being used here for specific examples) IRE mud has the following player requirement in leadership : 25 guilds, requiring 1 GM and 1 Novice Head, 6 cities requiring a ruling council of 7 (4 of which can be guild heads, and usually are) plus 10 appointed officials, for a total of about 128 active players required to ensure that the organisations merely run.

Lusternia, however, has 20 guilds with 3 elected positions each, and 4 city/communes requiring 1 elected leader and 9 appointed officials, for a total of about 100 active players required to ensure that organisations run.

To establish the relative size of the MUDs, I quickly checked (at about 4.30am GMT, to be fair) player numbers in Achaea (250) and Lusternia (124) (for interest, Aetolia was around 120, Imperian 94), which suggests that Achaea’s player base is nearly twice the size of ours.

Now, enough of the build-up – time for the bit that unnerves me (and that I’m surprised wasn’t the main point of this meeting). Text MMOs are not a huge growth area in terms of players, and it seems reasonable that as the hardware required to play online, graphical MMOs like WoW, AoC, or even IRE’s own upcoming Earth Eternal falls in cost, the number of players that tend to go towards text will fall.

Add to this the rapidly expanding set of IRE text muds. Tears of Polaris (ToP) and Midkemia Online (MKO) will both be launching in the not too distant future (I’m not sure on the dates). Given that it’s highly unlikely that there will be a massive influx of new players from non-MUD backgrounds to these games, it seems reasonable to assume that the players that go to these will be from MUD games. Where will they come from? A poll on ToP’s forums has the following distribution of people who are actively following the game at even this, pre-beta stage of its lifecycle – (44% Lusternia, 22% Achaea, 8% Aetolia, 22% Imperian, 4% Other). This strongly suggests that these MUDs are going to redistribute population from other IRE games, and Lusternia is at the top of the list of people who seem to be wanting to go. I don’t have figures for MKO, but I’d imagine that the number of fans of Raymond E. Feist that aren’t already into MUDs are going to be unlikely to sign up for MKO. Then you have Earth Eternal as well.

Lusternia hasn’t grown much, either. Since it opened, the number of players that I’ve seen online has remained pretty much constant. Let’s say that ToP opens, and its stable player base is around that of Lusternia as it stands. Right now, that equates to a drop in people logged in from 124 to 81 (as I don’t have any actual figures on player numbers). There are already major population problems in some guilds. That’s just ToP – the effect will be worse with MKO and EE opening, unless there’s some major push to fix the numbers problem.

What are you intending to do?

Lusternia’s guilds and orgs can’t operate without a certain number of players, and dysfunctional guilds discourage new players from staying, as we’ve seen in the past with Glomdoring. Do you then destroy or reallocate player orgs?

At what point does the game become non-viable, and close? (I know this has never happened in IRE, but the fact that the games are businesses suggests that there’s not really that high a likelihood of them staying open if the cost of running them exceeds revenue.)

-Liam (Caedryn)

PS Caedryn IC != Liam IC, it’s just that my name is actually Liam, so yeah.

I think we either tried to or did bring up how many people an org requires to function but didn't have as much time as we'd have liked.

You also misinterpreted several of the points as it wasn't that envoy-like at all.

Log plz

Yes, I tried to bring it up, it's in the log.

To be fair, it's not the admin's fault it didn't get addressed, we just ran out of time.

Soj has a log I think.

Xiel will post a log in a sec, mine's kind of nasty and colourful.

I'm very eager to see the log.

As for the player populations...there simply needs to be a decrease in the number of people required to run a city. Mag has functioned with inactives in appointed positions for a long time. Hell, Xenimus was the ambassador in Glom for an obscenely long amount of time after he went very dormant. There are a lot of positions that really aren't necessary.

As for opening new MUDs, it's going to happen and there is no use fighting it. IRE is first and foremost a bussiness, and quantity makes more money than quality. When ToP opens, expect a massive drop in the Lusternian population. We'll survive, but don't expect the lost orgs to open. Ever.

The lost orgs would have been possible without bards and monks, or maybe just one of them, but with both, it's a pipe-dream at best.

We did not choose what the players would bring forth. They were under no obligation to bring a particular set of questions and concerns to us.


As hardware improves, games get more cpu/gpu hungry, and the need for more powerful chips is born. Games rarely stay at the same graphical level for very long. Imagine if the original Everquest came out in 2008. Games usually improve their graphical engines as time goes on, requiring newer hardware. What I've actually noticed is a strong trend toward netbooks and smaller, "check my email" computers. It's cheaper to get a video-game ready console than a video-game-ready computer.


Naturally populations are going to shift, but I wouldn't say a forum poll is a good indicator.

But I like colors...

Agreed. Even though I am one, I kind of wish they never existed. Bards have taken a pretty substantial bit of the Admin's time, and monks have sucked it up completely lately with the momentum overhaul. Every monk and bard guild has seen the bottom of TOPGUILDS repeatedly, and most linger there for lengthy spans of time. The exceptions being ninjakari (noobs love the idea of ninjas) and lately Spiritsingers (the OP flavor of the month), but again, both those have seen the bottom of the list, just not as often.

Guild Novice Score Member Score Vote Rating
------------------------------------------------------------
.....
Aquamancers 5 34 3
Harbingers 8 33 1
Cantors 2 32 0
Celestines 8 31 1
Shofangi 3 25 2
Tahtetso 4 23 0
Cacophony 1 9 2
------------------------------------------------------------

5 out of the 6 bottom spots are bards/monks, and this is by no means a rare occurance. TOPGUILDS looks like this constantly. I know several of the bard and monk guilds struggly with finding ties with their respective org. On top of it all, they are syphoning many, many members from the original guilds and in some cases, causing those guilds to struggle. When you ask the playerbase if the implementation of monks and bards was a wise decision on the part of the Admin, the answer is a resounding "No." They haven't really added anything and they have soaked up vast quantities of the Admin's time, on top of throwing Lusternia's balance completely of kilter. Conflict isn't any more interesting with bards and monks. In their place, one of the lost org's could have been opened and injected some life into Lusternian conflict.

Maybe all those people rallying for deleting bards and monks are on to something.

I wonder if it would be possible to get rid of the admin position in guilds (dividing responcibilies between GM and Champion.. i.e Champion can also deal with guild discipline/punishment/advancement and the GM can take care of assigning mentors and tests etc.), and also getting rid of protectors in guild positions. (also, whats really the point of steward? the City leader can do that job on thier own, and the steward almost always seems to be some inactive person who nobody thinks will end up stealing all the city's gold)

I imagine there are likely other positions that could get scrapped also. (If the population to run orgs really is an issue. I'd say that if every org has people in top (i.e. elected) positions that are inactive, this would indicate that there is a population problem)

Simply removing positions isn't going to suddenly make us gain new players, that's not really a good point.

The idea is that since less people are required to make an org work, a new org is more feasible since it wouldn't cripple entire orgs. I don't think it'd work like that in practice though - just having people in positions is not enough to make an org work either!

The point brought up was not the lack of players, it was the lack of players that allow organizations to run smoothly.

Achaea, which has DOUBLE the population, only requires 28 more people to run orgs. I think that was the point.

Nothing is going to dramatically increase the number of players Lusternia has. (well, maybe the death of all graphic cards, and a sudden international interest in text)

Unfortunately it's not the number of positions an org requires that makes it run, but rather a minimal popuation, giving the guilds say 10 active people each, that's already a 200 person minimum active population for our current guilds, add in the extra four orgs with their four guilds, that's 400 just to make them run and have enough people to not talk to yourself most of the time.

I assume you'll start working on this immediately?

I think to get the most accurate argument here we should probably focus on only 1 additional org (or -4 additional guilds, but frankly that will not happen full stop, especially after all the work put in by the admins.)