MU* Population
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There was a post on r/muds asking for filters people might want on mudstats.com. I got curious and wandered over there to see what it looks like now, and this chart caught my eye:
The total number of accounts on all games hovers at a high of 10k right now. Given that people have alts on games, and play on multiple games, the actual number of people in the hobby at the moment must be lower. Stripping it back further to look only at MUSH / MUX / MUCK / MOO / MUSE, we see:
That looks like around 1.5k connected accounts. It’s worth noting that this cross-section does not include Ares or Evennia, which is where a lot of new games are.
BUT STILL.
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?
she/they
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@Tez The lack of Ares feels significant since it’s booming these days, but they tend to be smaller games so maybe it’s not actually that big an impact.
Anyway, I want to know the average number of characters a player has connected. The most I’ve ever had is probably 4, and 2 is my default. But I would guess that’s on the lower end? I don’t know! How many characters are people playing at one time?
as previously stated, good day.
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@farfalla said in MU* Population:
@Tez The lack of Ares feels significant since it’s booming these days, but they tend to be smaller games so maybe it’s not actually that big an impact.
Anyway, I want to know the average number of characters a player has connected. The most I’ve ever had is probably 4, and 2 is my default. But I would guess that’s on the lower end? I don’t know! How many characters are people playing at one time?
Agree, agree. It feels impossible to get good data here. BUT I CRAVE IT.
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@farfalla I’ve seen a MOO with people playing 10-15 alts.
ETA: By which I mean I’m looking at it, right this second.
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@Snackness Jesus christ how??? But also, I bet on Shang alone people have like 10 alts. Maybe not all connected at once, though.
as previously stated, good day.
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@farfalla lol you played there
On Dragon Wings · https://pern.gaslightswitch.com · pern.gaslightswitch.com port 4201
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@farfalla Hell if I know, I have trouble keeping one nowadays (and never more than 3).
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@KarmaBum omg hahahaha
I had two characters there!!! -
@Snackness Ah the ol ploy to artificially bump your numbers. Kind of like youtubers using bots during streams or upvotes.
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6 to 8 windows. The variable is if I’m doing extra maintenance stuff like digging and need to keep my main staff bit ‘clean’ to handle pages and stuff. It’s on 2 games, typically, but sometimes I cruise through a third.
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@Tez said in MU* Population:
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?
How many people are registered here? Almost 200? Considering this board is meant to be a niche within a niche, that speaks to a pretty high population of MUSHers out there.
Or a really high percentage of them have accounts here.
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Follow-up question: how many does the community need to sustain itself? Not to start the ‘is mu* dying’ debate. HYPOTHETICALLY.
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I’m just happy Mudstats lives.
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AresCentral has 940 player handles registered.
While some of those are undoubtedly duplicates, I’d guess it’s a relatively small percentage. Seeing as how the entire purpose of player handles is to give yourself a consistent OOC moniker throughout the community.
There are lots of MUSHs/MUXes out there of varying flavors. I wouldn’t doubt there are a few thousand players total. That’s still a comparatively small population considering that’s a world-wide count, and there are estimated to be almost three million players playing Fornite right now (not total, just right now).
But it’s not nothing.
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@farfalla said in MU* Population:
@Snackness Jesus christ how??? But also, I bet on Shang alone people have like 10 alts. Maybe not all connected at once, though.
Darwin and HoneyBadger are anomalies, but do exist so we include them in the maths.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
@Jennkryst Spiders Georg should not have been counted
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I’ve been convinced for years that while the MU*ing community took a real, substantial hit from the rise of the graphical MMO, there’s no reason to believe the hobby is dying.
We’re down, but we’ve stopped the bleeding.
<X PLAYER> has 50 alts is great for jokes, but most people don’t have that kind of bandwidth. There are more players than you think.
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@Faraday I once counted something like 100 unique players just on Spirit Lake in its 3 year run, and there are tons and tons of people I know who never popped over. And we were not a large game.
I don’t think the M*ing world is HUGE, but I don’t think it’s as small as we sometimes feel it is either.
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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.
