So me and my friends started a new Mush, (hiddendimensions.aresmush.com),and recently opened it to the public on Aug 17. We’ve been aggressively advertising, spreading the word and doing some mu* exchange ads. The game allows players to play FCs andOCs from a large number of games: Buffy, Angel, Charmed, Dreddenfiles, Highlander, Twilight, and while we use fate combat we are very flexible with people not using rolls in situations where they want a specific outcome.
However, we’ve had very little luck in recruiting players. Players will log on as guests, peek around, sometimes even express interest, then pop off and never show again. We have maybe 8 players total and two weeks later we’re still tiny.
I’ve started up mus before and they’ve always had a large explosion of players in the beginning, at least 20, sometimes even 50-100. Now I’m looking at other ares and other mus sometimes with very obscure themes and OCs only that are super popular and wondering what are we doing wrong? What wise can we do to attract players? Are supernatural themes really so unpopular now?
Supernatural games aren’t really my thing, so I can’t comment on the specifics of your game. But I will point out a couple things:
The pandemic has been tough on everyone, so I think a lot of players don’t have the same free time and emotional bandwidth for games they used to. This might make it harder to draw in players.
Supernatural seems like a popular theme with a bunch of games, so there’s probably some dilution of audience.
Your game is still listed as “In development” rather than fully open on AresCentral, so that might turn some people off.
While there are certainly some advantages to a multiverse kind of game where anybody can do anything, it can also make it tougher for folks to figure out what the game’s about and what they will actually DO in the game.
Hopefully other folks can chime in with suggestions as well. Good luck!
I noticed your game last night as I was perusing new games on Ares like I usually do and as I was going through your site, a few things struck me from a usability standpoint that I’ll share.
Your wiki needs a bit of organization and to make better use of the game menus to draw people to the various areas of information that you provide.
Your pages, specifically the combat page in general, and probably others, could use some formatting to separate topics under headers with information beneath. The big block of white text is tiring to the eyes and hard to read through.
Dark purple on black is a difficult color combination for a lot of people to read, particularly those with vision issues. It doesn’t bother me, but after doing CSS for a few sites and lots of feedback, that’s a common complaint I have heard.
Linking things to a big list and calling them “news files” is kind of an antiquated concept at this point. Making better use of the wiki and linking things under the menus such as putting your Character Creation Guide somewhere near the menu item to create a character so people are drawn to it first will put the information more prominently in front of them.
Those are just some things that I noticed while I was poking around the site, myself and that made it a little difficult for me to keep reading after a while and so I didn’t make it through all of the information available.