Just to comment that "potential recruits" -part. There is six billion or so of
us. There must be enough people who would rather play something else than WoW.
It is true that the competition in the area of online gaming has multiplied
manifold from what it was back in the 90's, but this does not mean there would
not be potential players any more. We just need to reach that 0.0001% minortiy
who want something different and try to keep them in the game long enough to
realise what all we have to offer. So let's not call it quits just yet.

However, what comes to rest of your post: I agree to some degree. I would love
to see more people with less than two full guilds. I don't think it is optimal
that half the players are lvl 100. Newbie (or even lvl 40-70) party is a
rarity. Then again, some people think the true and fun gaming only begins when
you get your levels and decent eq. They probably are not completely wrong
either.

I was personally agains exp bonus pools and other similar measures even when I
was a mortal, and even when my solo rates were so low that exp pool
essentially meant double exp for me all the time. But still. The exp inflation
has been considerable for quite a few years, but I have always felt that part
of Bat's greatness is the "neverending story-feeling" in it, and any kind of
forced GAME OVER would be a terrible thing. However, exp could simply start
losing its meaning after a certain amount of megs and after that people could
juts "buy "nifty (but not too useful! ) stuff with it, titles, abilities,
land and estates (wtf?) or something.

We need a lot of imagination and maybe some new measures to carry this game
yet another 25 years forward, but hopefully we have some nice conversations at
the anniversary party. And remember everybody to be there when we reach that
50 years!

As far as I know we have done this already - I mean, "few pennies" have been
invested in net-based advertising. I do not know how successful it was or how
much money was used, but at least this has been tried. If someone comes up
with an excellent way to promote us, even if it costs a bit, I'm quite sure
the admins are more than iterested to hear of it.

Good post and interesting thoughts...

You are absolutely right that it's difficult to attract new players
from outside the MUD scene to play - that is a common issue for all
MUDs. There's many reasons for that, including the medium (text
based gaming) and graphical MMOs becoming both more widely accepted
and have a higher quality than they used to.

What I don't agree with in your post is the notion that it would be
somehow bad to extend the game for existing players. Unlike commercial
operations, our goal isn't to "have as many customers as possible,
get their money and then serve the next one". As a community driven,
volunteer based game, the purpose is to provide a fun environment for
players, developers and admins. Why should we not try to make this
fun for people who have been here for a long time and still enjoy it?

There is a fundemental difference in thought and goals between a
volunteer effort like BatMUD and a commercial operation (most MMOs) -
we don't have large expenses to cover (developer salaries etc), so
the game can basically be run almost indefinetly as long as people
want to play and run it. Nor is our goal to have thousands of new
players - we wouldn't have the resources to support that. So we do
not benchmark ourselves against how many "customers" we have or the
revenue we generate - our benchmark is that the people involved
have fun and want to continue doing this.

That said, we would certainly welcome more fresh players and we want
to encourage everybody to help with marketing BatMUD - word of mouth
is often the best way to get people attracted to a medium like ours.

-- Gore