Interesting times

There has been a decent amount of discussion in the administration lately on how to increase the player base again as it has dwindled some. I looked last night and of the 26 people online, I think I found one person who hadn't been playing for over a year.

A lot of the sometimes heated discussion was around fixing a few nagging balance issues, running quests and the like. Doing these things, in my opinion, may bring back a few older players, but won't help recruit new ones.

My thought is, it's really about networking. Players need to help find new players. Post on their facebook, myspace and other social networking sites post about the game they love to play. Maybe a few of their friends will play and that will mean a few of their friends will play, etc.

This is how we got players in the old days, minus the social networking sites. People would go to college and hear about this kind of thing from their networks of new friends. Somewhere in the past 3 years something has changed a bit and this cycle seems to be broken. Whether it is because people are now playing graphical games (I'm sure there is some of this) or because there are a lot of other really good muds out there that people are playing instead, I don't know.

Comments and suggestions welcome.