Clients and Newbies

I recently released a new client update for Alter Aeon, one that includes (but is not limited to) the following cool changes:

- vastly upgraded automap
- vote menu
- 'last command select'
- various settings now save
- function key alias mapping

This really is a big step forward in the evolution of the client, and I've received a lot of compliments on it. Unfortunately, there is a problem with this client release, and it all goes back to the problem of newbie retention. But before we go into that, here's some background on the current state of newbies on the game.

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There appears to be three primary types of new player right now:

1) Sighted players from mudlists, who generally already have a client. These players usually don't download the custom client, and if they did they probably would go back to their own client anyway.

2) Blind players who use blind clients. They generally don't use the AA client, as it has crap for blind player support.

3) True new players who probably have never mudded before. These people are the long-term future, as the number of mudlist players is shrinking and blind players will eventually get their eyes fixed. This is also by far the largest market to tap. You don't compete with World of Warcraft unless you're hitting up ordinary sighted people.

The mudlist players will pretty much do their own thing. There's a limit to how much you can do with them, as they have their own opinions already. Many are unrecoverable, as they have been damaged by some other mud.

Blind players we seem to be doing reasonably well with. I have no complaints here, other than making the AA client work really well with readers would probably help a good amount.

The third category, by far the biggest market, is the problem. Since they have no prior mudding experience, odds are very good they downloaded the client, which shows up easily in my stats. I can also track logins based on web page hits. If this class of player is sticking around, I'll see it by looking for newbie players using the client.

This is exactly what I don't see. I see the expected players log in with the client, just as they should. There's a large initial dropout rate, but a good percentage of them level and play for a while. After that they all disappear. We're not keeping people entertained.

I suspect what's going on is they play for a while, run out of stuff to do or don't see the point, and bail. That pretty much describes my first mudding experiences; I got a low level character and basically just wandered around looking at stuff. None of the text meant anything in particular to me, and I would wander ridiculous places because I didn't know where to go or what to do. I didn't even know what the point of the game was.

I clearly need to add a lot more statistics tracking and try to see where the dropoffs are occuring - what level ranges, number of logins, etc. With this information in hand we can improve the introductory areas; but so far, my initial numbers indicate that the dropoffs happen for the newbie areas that are well tested and considered in good shape. So what is really going on?

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The final piece of the puzzle revolves around the massively improved automap function in the new client. I tried really hard to play with the mouse for a while, and it worked as well as could be expected. Unfortunately, when using and concentrating on exploring using the map, the entire text window (which contains everything that's important) disappears. Not from the client, but from your mind. It simply isn't as important as the automap. Looking back at it takes effort.

So say you're exploring with the map. You see unexplored spots on the map, you know you can go that way, and you click the button to go there. Nothing happens. You click the button again - you just want to go explore that part of the map - and nothing happens again. How irritating.

Nothing happens because you're fighting. But unless you take your eyes off the map and look back to the main window, you don't notice it. You just get irritated that you didn't move when you clicked the button. And all the scrolling crap in the main window, highlighted and all, really doesn't mean anything to you.

I've got a few things in the works to combat this, including audio sounds for fighting, changing the buttons in combat, and changing the area description to list various positions such as "Combat!", sleeping, resting, etc. That will have to wait until next week though, as I've got a lot of web work to get caught up on as well.

It's definitely a good problem to chew on.

Merging merging merging...

Keep them dawgies mergin!

Over the last couple of days, I've been trying to get stuff merged in from one of the other coders, as well as fixing up various issues and trying to get some things caught up. While doing this, I'm starting to get a better idea of what I really can and cannot do in a certain period of time.

One thing I should probably do is set aside just one day per week that is going to be dedicated to doing nothing but implementing one single feature. I can actually get quite a bit done in a 3 hour or 5 hour block, and with another 3 to 5 hours to clean things up, it can be booted into the game and functional. But in order to get this time, I need to ignore things like minor bug fixes and all the crap detail work that so easily can bog one down. Not that detail work isn't important, but sometimes big new features are important too.

In other news, I got a freaking pile of directions and 'blind maps' from one of my blind users. The only problem is that there's so much of it, it's going to need a database just to make it all accessible.

Hooray!

After all this time and effort, something finally paid off on the main Alter Aeon web pages: at some point in the last week, we went from page rank 2 to page rank 3. Yay!

I'm actually really jazzed about this. Finally, something I did had a positive effect. That said, looking back at the historical analytics data for this year, I really don't see any change in overall traffic to the site. A long term average since may seems to be about flat. Granted, I didn't start really hitting the site hard until september or october, but not seeing any impact at all over the course of several months is discouraging to say the least.

The only real solution to this is simply to spend time linkbuilding and getting us listed everywhere I possibly can. I suspect my latest push for that here is what raised the page rank.

In other news, the quest to add useful content continues. I added a bunch of stuff to the Blind and Visually Impaired Player Support page, including more downloads and scripts for GMud and a raft of MushClient sound and data files.

I also spent a good chunk of the morning going through Scribe's old mudding site, and imported a couple of articles for the current AA pages. A number of dead links were killed in the process, which hopefully will cause the google webmaster tools to complain less. The two new articles are:

Player Types and Styles, and

So you want to be a Player Killer?

This brings the article total up to 21, not including other things scattered around the site but not in my high-tech document management system. This is pretty low as far as SEO goes, in that most SEO sites recommend at least a hundred pages of solid content, but it's a start.

People will be jerks

A lot of my players use a piece of software named 'Jaws', which is a screen reader for blind and visually impaired folks. Now it turns out that the guys who work on Jaws are either not real bright, not real dedicated, or simply short on funding - but either way, they have a serious problem on their hands and they don't appear to care in any way:

Certain words crash Jaws.

That's right. The very act of reading certain misspelled words no longer than 6 characters kills Jaws dead. Dead as in silently wonder why your computer has stopped talking to you, futz around hoping that you've tabbed to the right console, and try to restart it. Or blindly (sorry about the pun) hit control-alt-delete and pray for the best.

Normally, you'd very infrequently find words like this on professional, static websites. More commonly, you'd find it on boards and blogs. But when it comes to an on-line game, it becomes a serious issue.

Which leads to the title of this posting: people are jerks. My poor blind players have been having a hell of a time with this - especially when a particular jerk player makes use of it because he finds it amusing.

While none of this is technically my problem, my players are unhappy, and that makes it my problem. Therefore, 1) siteban lists now save across reboots to take care of the jerk player who quite frankly can find some other mud to annoy, and 2) the socket layer has a new filter to mask out the problematic letter combinations at the source, hopefully killing the problem for everyone.

HTML logfiles

I managed to get the logfile save routines working in the AA client tonight. The text version is trivial, but the html version was harder; nevertheless, I have an initial (buggy) implementation done, and you can see the output of it here.

[Update - the various minor bugs have been fixed and the logfile updated. It's now HTML 4.01 transitional compliant.]

If you look closely at this, you'll notice a number of bugs of various kinds: it's not W3C compliant, uses tags that are probably obsolete or nearly so, and doesn't escape important characters like <>. These are all minor inconveniences compared to the inconvenience of using this toolkit; the file selection dialog has so far been the only thing about this port that has been relatively painless.

Next on the hit list is to fix these issues, then try it out on the windows laptop to see if the screen reader part of it works. I'm going to try to get a usable blind-friendly client out first, then work on the pretty graphics part later.