The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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3:15pm on Wednesday, 2nd July, 2008:
Anecdote
I was looking through some old papers today, and came across this piece of market research I conducted for MUD2. There's no date on it, but it would be 1985 at the latest (Simon Dally asked me to do it prior to our starting MUSE Ltd.).
What I did was ask a bunch of players what might influence their choice of which MUD to play. I sorted these out into categories, and got a list of 24 of them. I then put the list to the players in general, asking them to rank each one between -5 (hate) and 5 (love). The resulting average scores were then multiplied by 5 for some arcane reason of Simon Dally's, and rounded to the nearest integer. Some of the things they asked for were in the design for MUD2, so I marked these afterwards with a * (and all but one — conversing with mobiles — were implemented, too).
Here is the result:
| * | Intelligent mobiles | 25 |
| * | Conversing with mobiles | 22 |
| * | More magic | 21 |
| Cheap per hour to play | 19 | |
| * | Regularly improved | 19 |
| * | Messages to pick up later | 15 |
| * | Lots of rooms | 14 |
| * | Different starts | 13 |
| Reputation of author | 13 | |
| Access speed | 13 | |
| Cheap registration fee | 12 | |
| Friend's recommendation | 12 | |
| * | Understand complex sentences | 11 |
| * | Lots of players | 11 |
| Speed of response | 10 | |
| * | Free sample games | 10 |
| * | Long textual descriptions | 9 |
| * | Never crashes | 9 |
| * | Special offers for cheap time | 9 |
| International game | 6 | |
| Lots of books/documentation | 5 | |
| What magazines said | 3 | |
| Built-in adverts | -3 | |
| Graphics | -3 |
Referenced by Where I Work #7.
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Copyright © 2008 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).