Hello guys,

I suppose I'm here again on my usual voting rant, but at least I have some
more facts for you. Over the last 8 months or so, I've compiled and taken data
comparing the number players created each day and graphed it, side by side:

http://labs.dura.fi/p/Tarken/1962.png

What exactly are we looking at here? Well, if you notice my last huge voting
campaign managed to get a fair amount of you to get voting, and it brought at
nice influx. We can see this in the Apr - Jul range. It's a bit of a mess so I
applied a 4-day moving average to 'smooth' out the lines a bit to something a
bit more comprehensible. An increase in votes (red) usually causes a jump in
creation (blue) as our rankings increase and people find more worth taking a
look at. I have no data on retention, as with the moving popular playtimes,
timezones, and such, it's quite difficult to track how many people are
actually staying, but at least it feels like there are more around...and there
should be. A few months back or so, I roughly calculated that we keep 1 in 20
new players for at least a few days of play time, so we have two things to
improve upon if we want to take the leads over Aardwolf.

Firstly, considering how fast we climbed the plaques, from #85 to #7 on TMS
(unsure about TMC) in just under two weeks time...there's clear reason to
believe we can easily hold #1 or #2 on a regular monthly basis, just like the
good old days, with just a little bit of help from everyone. The second,
player retention. I've been rather impressed with the amount of work lately
that some of our newbie helpers (as well as other players) have been putting
into answering questions at all times of the day on the newbie channel, and it
is CLEARLY helping. I'm seeing a lot of new names show up day after day after
day...this is good...and we need to keep it up. Feel free to get these new
players feeling welcomed, invite them to parties...I think we could use a few
more like...was it Tiktok that used to run those newbie parties? You can bitch
and moan that they suck, but I think most of you would agree that you haven't
been here on some epic quest to get 4190281283071092312 exp, but because of
the people you get to meet and play with here, let's expand those horizons a
bit!

All in all, I guess where I'm getting at...I sit here each day twiddling on
bugs and area code and such and I see a lot of you worrying that BatMUD is
dying, we're losing players, etc...and that makes me sad and I assure you it
is far from it, nor will I let it become so without a fight. We are getting
new players, new coders, and even some wizards getting off their idle stool to
code something again...it all comes as a package.

So what can you do?

Take the time to drop a vote in once or twice a day on the websites. There's 2
handy commands to help you out. 'voteurl' will show you the links to the two
sites (TMC - The Mudconnector and TMS - Top Mud Sites). TMC lets you vote
once/day and TMS lets you vote once/12h. Yes, TMC requires you to register,
but just throw in your e-mail, make your web browser remember the password (I
haven't been asked to put it in again in over a year), and then it's just a
click away. Once you're done, you can type the neat little command I added
(which a few of the top MUDs have similar) called 'voted' (also please read
'help voted' before using) to remind you in 12h with a little line in your
short score that it's time to vote again.

Lastly, I thank all of you that have been voting on a regular basis and
helping out the newbies and I encourage you to keep it up and get others to do
the same. I'll stop talking for now and I apologize for my poorly formatted
and probably grammatically incorrect rant.


-- Lord Tarken Aurelius, the Sage