MU* Population
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What I find more interesting about the mudstats data isn’t the total number of players, but how they’re spread across games.
Just looking at MUSHes (which do include some Ares games, btw) - more than half of all the total counted players today were on “adult” games - the vast majority on Penultimate Destination.
Those aside, only 13 other games crack more than 10 players on their 30 day average total.
Similar effects with MUXes (with Shang of course having the bulk of players).
So while there may be a lot of players in total, it seems they’re thin on the ground on any given RP MU. That probably accounts for the perception of player density most of us feel on a daily basis.
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I can easily see the current, active MU* population in the thousands, maybe even mid to high thousands, depending on the marker of activity. Yet still somehow that feels both so small to me and so large at the same time.
It feels small because, like – I KNOW there are more RPers out there. There are SO MANY. People RP everywhere! THERE ARE IDIOTS OUT THERE TRYING TO RP ON TUMBLR. The overall population of people who are engaging in text-based RP has got to be so much larger.
I’m wildly biased toward MU*s as a preferred form of text-based RPing, obviously, and the barrier for entry used to be HUGE – and remains challenging, even as people like @Faraday do tremendous work in making it easier for people. But it’s never going to be as easy as it is for people to pop up a Tumblr, a Twitter, even a forum.
It just made me curious what our actual population might really be.
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@Faraday said in MU* Population:
While some of those are undoubtedly duplicates, I’d guess it’s a relatively small percentage.
I wonder about this myself, 'cause I know of one player who’s used at least three (that I know of) in an effort to obfuscate her identity.
But that’s a whole other thing.
On Dragon Wings · https://pern.gaslightswitch.com · pern.gaslightswitch.com port 4201
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@KarmaBum …why wouldn’t you just not use a handle?
as previously stated, good day.
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@KarmaBum said in MU* Population:
I wonder about this myself, 'cause I know of one player whose used at least three (that I know of) in an effort to obfuscate her identity.
Indeed. And several who don’t want Ares tags either because they’re afraid of past abusers or they are the past abusers, or entirely other reasons, most of which are probably not as suspish as my mind wants to make them.
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@farfalla said in MU* Population:
@KarmaBum …why wouldn’t you just not use a handle?
In the case of that player – because, for a long time, it worked. Naw, that’s not Sarah, Sarah’s tag is something else. This player is just acting kind of like Sarah but it has to be coincidental.
Sarah, of course, is a fictional name. There never was a Sarah. The Sarah is a lie.
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@L-B-Heuschkel I’m just super lazy and don’t want to bother.
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@farfalla Not using a handle would be passive deception. This person is active about it.
Ed: I assume most people who don’t use handles are like @Pyrephox. Though there are benefits! You can set up prefs that carry across accounts. Since I freak the fuck out if my MUSH window looks even a tiny bit different than I’m used to, this is a big deal for me.
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@Pyrephox said in MU* Population:
@L-B-Heuschkel I’m just super lazy and don’t want to bother.
Which is entirely legit. People have plenty legit reasons not to bother. I’m just watching for certain tags like a hawk due to bad past experiences.
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@Tez said in MU* Population:
It made me wonder: how many people do you think there really ARE in this hobby? 10k felt low to me at first, but after thinking about and poking a little more, that’s actually probably high. ANY IDEAS? ANY OTHER DATA OUT THERE?
I have thought a good bit about this, as it came up. I think much more than people think on the general sense but still very small compared to other communities.
So it depends a lot on how you classify population. Like ‘How many people roleplayed in a MU* in the past week? If you classify a MU as a mud, mush, muck, moo, ares, evennia game, etc’ I think the answer is probably going to be a couple thousand people, and that’s largely from a couple of the really, really big sandboxes out there that don’t necessarily have a whole lot of overlap.
On the other hand, I think people drift in and out of the hobby constantly, get active for a month or two with a new game, take a year off, come back, etc. If you would say, ‘in the past year, how many unique individuals have played in a MU format’ I think you’d hit anywhere from 10k to 30k depending on how generously you were describing someone putting in an app or one line shit posting as playing.
Now, if you were to say, ‘how many people roleplay online including message boards, MMOs, google docs, discord, twitter and every typed medium possible’ in english alone you’re easily getting into the millions of people, no question. There’s like forums alone with hundreds of thousands of people, let alone things like the server locked ‘sry too many people’ things like FFXIV rp servers. And when you start including non-english, the numbers get crazy huge.
Random fact- evennia apparently super popular in china. We’ve gotten like 5-6 apps over the years on Arx of people that absolutely could not speak any english and had chinese emails.
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@KarmaBum said in MU* Population:
I wonder about this myself, 'cause I know of one player who’s used at least three (that I know of) in an effort to obfuscate her identity.
Yeah, for sure those people exist. Or some who really really want a handle for each game.
I just know enough people who come across as distinct humans across games, forums, discords, etc. to think that they represent a small minority of handle users.
I have no concrete data to back that up though. IPs can be VPNed, emails can be throwaways… it’s just a lot of hassle to go to for me to think it’s widespread.
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@Apos In the past WEEK? I don’t count because I didn’t rp this week
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@sao I was generously taking it to be like, logged in to a game. But even then it’s a question mark some weeks.
as previously stated, good day.
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@Faraday Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.
There are individuals on certain Ares games I would much rather avoid, so I do not always tie every character to my handle.
It’s worth the hassle of logging out of the account in order to have some peace, quiet, and not have to deal with certain individuals.
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@farfalla honestly I don’t even remember if I logged on this week. I can check journals and bbs without logging in and especially when work is being beastly I tend not to have a lot of bandwidth for it. If I log on I am at least making a passive commitment to being available to others and when my clients are drawing my empathy to its lowest ebb I often end up just not having the spoons.
(Then I wallow in guilt about getting behind and apologize to everyone and their dog the next time I do log on…)
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I’d be curious to know whether they’re counting players, or player-bits. As in do my five alts count as one person, or five.
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@Pavel Mudstats is just grabbing connection data, right? so definitely connections not players. they wouldn’t have any way to know, afaik.
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@farfalla said in MU* Population:
Mudstats is just grabbing connection data, right?
I dunno how or what they’re grabbing, which is part of my point.
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I read somewhere that you multiply the peak connections by 2.5 to get a good estimate of the total playerbase, but I have no idea where I read that, and it doesn’t apply to places that allow multiple alts, so take this info with a grain of salt.
But in the bigger picture, there’s so much roleplaying going on in the world that there’s no way it’s going away anytime soon. Even after the world collapses, you can guarantee there’ll be players in a cave rolling dice and telling stories in between their battles with radioactive spiderlocusts.
