Star Trek Online launched back in 2010 as a paid box with an ongoing monthly subscription, but nowadays it’s a free download with no additional fees required. The game has a cash shop but also offers a monthly gold membership as well as a lifetime subscription. Gold members pay $12.99 a month and get an… [more]

It’s been suggested that New Worlds Ateraan is using uncredited artwork on its website. I spent a couple of minutes on google image search and it looks like pretty much all the art on the New Worlds website has been taken from other sources. Perhaps New Worlds have permission from the artists to use their… [more]

I’ve been going through old backups recently and came across some account and payment data for Maiden Desmodus. These figures are for the first year of opening from June 2009 to June 2010. Revenue Total Revenue    7300 Total Transactions    62 Unique Users    2159 Unique Paying Users    18 ARPU    0.28 ARPPU… [more]

Someone on TMS has been getting stick for their ad offering to pay $100 for a coder for their new MUD, so as a public service I’ve put together this handy list of dos and don’ts when looking for a coder. Do have a design written out. It doesn’t have to be a formal design document, but… [more]

@bcdevmatt I have sorta fallen off reading it after mudreading.com went dark I like having a single aggregated place for my mud news — Ben Beige (@dariuscardren) April 23, 2013 I would just use a feed reader myself, but for those who like their MUD news on a single page, here you go. I also recommend Planet… [more]

Going through some old backups I came across this Maiden Desmodus Player Guide and as the game is probably never coming back I thought I’d post it here for future generations to enjoy, or not as the case may be. Looking at it now I still think it’s really well written (not by me I hasten to… [more]

There was a recent thread at TMS asking if MUDs need to be brought into the 21st century. A few years ago my answer would have been a resounding “Yes!” and I’d have gone on about accessibility and web clients and user interfaces and blah blah blah. Nowadays I tend to think that there’s not… [more]

One of the things I remember Bartle banging on about in his Designing Virtual Worlds book was how many designers simply copied ideas and systems from earlier games without fully understanding why the original designers had implemented them. I was reminded of this recently when reading about a MUD in development called Casadona. There’s a… [more]

The folks over at TMS love their books vs movies analogy when it comes to MUDs and graphical MMOs, but I’m not so sure that it’s very accurate. If World of Warcraft is a movie then your average text MUD is not a book. Fallen London is a book. Mafia Wars is a book (albeit a children’s book… [more]

Here’s a funny/sad/shocking (delete as appropriate) MUD log that came my way recently. The MUD in question has a two tiered subscription model where new subscribers pay at a lower rate than old players. The administration of the game track this across characters so if you’ve ever been on the higher rate with one character… [more]