Kami Harbinger

There's lies, damn lies, and numbers of accounts reported for virtual worlds.

Richard Bartle's list of "The five most important people in the virtual world" has this "gem" of statistics:

"To give some sense of what he's achieved, some eight million people (as I write this) have tried Second Life at least once; for Lineage, the figure is over sixty million (and the population of South Korea is only about 49m). Now THAT'S impact."

The 8.2 million "Total Residents" is not even remotely "people who have tried Second Life at least once" (it may reasonably be in the 4-6 million range), but that's not the worst of it.

But Richard's next statistic is even more wrong. First, according to Wikipedia's article on Lineage, "NCsoft has reported that Lineage had at one point more than three million subscribers". For Lineage II, it says "reporting 610,918 unique users during the month of March 2007"... The Second Life economy page says "Residents Logged-In During Last 30 Days: 889,914". SL is 45% larger than L2.

Second, the number of accounts ever created in Lineage are totally meaningless, because Koreans often play on temporary accounts at netcafes. An "account" may only be used for one session. A single player can easily use dozens or hundreds of accounts. That's why there's more accounts than Koreans.

User-hours are the only metric that can be reasonably compared between VWs, and most of them won't report them, because they know how bad it makes them look. I had 4 accounts on FFXI (one main, three mules in different cities so I could use their auction houses). But I never spent more than a few minutes a day as the mules, I spent several hours a day for 9 months as my main. I have accounts on Runescape and several others, but I only played them for an hour or so each. Those accounts should only count as a single user-hour, while my FFXI usage was close to 1000 hours. I have a main account and an alt that I use for permissions testing in SL. I log into my alt maybe once a month for a few minutes, check something, and log out.

Roy Trubshaw Because if Roy hadn't figured out how to create a shareable, writeable high segment on a DECsystem-10 mainframe in 1978, we wouldn't be having this discussion."

Well, in the sense that they wouldn't be talking to Richard Bartle, I suppose that's true, though he might have ended up another Julian Dibbell or the like. If Rob Trubshaw hadn't built his timesharing system, and Bartle hadn't managed to make MUD commercial, VWs would still have come from PLATO and Habitat, and reporters would be talking to someone else. I played Avatar in the latter years of PLATO, and it's indistinguishable in genre from any modern MMORPG. I never got to play the original Habitat, but I've played Club Caribe, and it's very Second Life-like.

Gygax and Arneson introduced the idea of the role-playing game; taking the part of a single hero piece in a game instead of just controlling it from above. They're the originators of the idea. Colossal Cave, Rogue, and PLATO's dnd followed from that, and MMORPGs were inevitably going to follow from those.

For earliest appearance, it's Oubliette, not MUD. Richard Bartle repeatedly claims in his blog and on other blogs that Oubliette and Avatar had no persistence, despite the ability to play it and assurances by the original developers that it does, and despite the fact that MUD1 was regularly reset, and therefore wasn't persistent!

For most innovative, that's clearly either Avatar or Habitat. MUD was just Colossal Cave for multiple players, but Habitat was weird and yet recognizably comfortable.

And for greatest direct influence, DikuMUD is the source of all modern MMORPGs. While it was certainly based on MUD, it threw out much of what MUD or any other derivative had done (which infuriates many of the old-time MUD developers), made the gameplay simple and mechanistic, and it succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. You can't play EverQuest, DaoC, FFXI, WoW, or almost any other MMORPG without playing DikuMUD.