Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Mon Jan 24, 2005 8:16 pm

LAST DAY TO BID! Bidding ends on Midnight (EST) the night of February 23rd.
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For detailed information on what a "zMUD startup icon is", go to the Icon Information page. For detailed information on how the bidding process for the zMUD icons works, go to the Bidding Information page.

To create an account to bid on an icon or to view your existing bidding account, go to the Main Bidding Page.

If you have questions on the bidding process, post them here or send email to zugg@zuggsoft.com.

Bidding will end at Midnight, February 23rd, 2005 (PST), which gives 4 weeks for bidding.

Beginner Joined: 18 Nov 2003 Posts: 19 Location: Italy

I play in an italian mud and I like to have my icon in the "zmud main page", but only for italian user. I don't want to pay for an icon that english users never use.

This bidding session is already started, but why don't think to create completely localized zMUD version that automatically install the correct language pack and the localized Mud Icon (plus some english icon) ??

Just my two cents

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2005 6:07 pm

Unfortunately there is no way for the current version of zMUD to only download localized icons or to create localized versions. Doing this would require a lot of changes to how the zMUD startup works. I'll think about it for a future version.

Beginner Joined: 18 Nov 2003 Posts: 19 Location: Italy

Maybe a future version can create localized icons, but i think that it's easier change the installer to auto-detect the user language and ask how language install. I think that a lot of italian (spanish, swedish, ect.) people, usually very bad english reader, can buy zMUD if they can use it in their native language.

PS: i'm not Joker, but we 'work' in the same mud

Site Admin Joined: 29 Sep 2000 Posts: 389 Location: USA

The problem with that is administrating all of it. Consider that the big MUDs that buy icons want their icons displayed on *all* systems. So, let's say the first 4 icon slots are from these kind of MUDs...they need to be displayed regardless of language. Now, let's say that you got lcon #5 as a localized Italian icon. This would be displayed on Italian systems. But then what about all of the non-Italian systems...what icon does zMUD display instead? If it displays icon #6 in the #5 spot, then you only end up with 9 icons on non-Italian systems. Now extend this problem to include all other specific languages. You can see what a mess it could be deciding what icons to display.

Sure, the language specific MUDs only want icons displayed for that language, but most all of the other icons will want to be displayed on *all* systems. There isn't any good way to mess these two methods that I can think of.

The installer could certainly be made smart enough to automatically detect the language. But honestly, most foreign language users still want the English version of zMUD because they are most likely playing an English MUD. I know that there are a lot of Italians, for example, that still play English MUDs. So, the installer would at least have to *ask* the user to select what language they want installed...I don't think I'd ever make it automatic.

And while that would work fine for the translations, zMUD itself would still need to be modified to download different icons depending upon the language if we had language-specific icon slots like that. There is no way to control that just via the installer.

(Oh, this is Zugg posting using Chiara's account because my computer is gone for repair for a couple days)

Beginner Joined: 18 Nov 2003 Posts: 19 Location: Italy

Thanks for explanation, Zugg (with Chiara account Very Happy

)

I understand the motivations and I agree.

Maybe a future versione can at least ask the user to install the localized package. Maybe in a future Cool

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

This is exciting even though I am not participating Mr. Green

. How is the bidding going? I guess a lot of MUDs are fighting hard for the really nice promotional space within zMUD. It'll be really interesting to see what MUDs "win".

What surprises me a lot though is that I so far have seen no discussions about this on sites such as topmudsites. Perhaps I haven't looked well enough.

Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2005 7:10 pm

Bumping this thread because today is the LAST DAY for bids! Bidding will end promptly at midnight, Eastern time (which is 11pm Central, 10pm Mountain, and 9pm Pacific time). Remember that when you submit a bid, the system will not allow additional bids for a period of one minute. This is an attempt to curb any last minute bidding wars.

There are still several icon slots available for the minimum bid of $1000. Remember that in case of a tie, the icon slot is awarded to which ever MUD bids first.

Some people have asked me about icon statistics, so I have checked the latest log files and have verified that the current zMUD startup icons are being downloaded and viewed by new zMUD players about 270 times per day. You can check these statistics yourself by going to http://www.zuggsoft.com/stats/ . Go down to the section that shows the full list of files viewed on the web site. You'll see that the "getversion.htm" file, which is downloaded each time anyone runs zMUD, is accessed about 120,000 times per day (indicating the number of times per day someone in the world is running any version of zMUD since v5.55). The startup.ini file, along with the files "materiamagica_def.mud", "retromud.txt", "imperian.txt", "medievia.txt", etc are all downloaded when someone does a fresh install of zMUD and gets the icons. These files consistently show the 270 downloads per day mentioned above. Looking at the raw log files, I can show that all of these downloads are from the zMUD user agent and are not coming from other sources like web bots or spiders.

For those of you used to buying banner ads and paying a "cost per click", the 270 icon downloads per day, with a cost of $1000 for the icon per year converts to a cost of $10 per 1,000 icon downloads (or $10/CPM in advertising jargon). These icon downloads are occurring for people who are actually running zMUD in order to play a MUD, and are primarily new players installing zMUD for the first time and looking to choose a MUD to play. This makes the icon a far more effective advertising method than a simple banner display on a web site which might be viewed by many people who are not even playing a MUD. Also keep in mind that the 270 per day number only indicates the number of people who install zMUD and get your icon downloaded for the first time. After the icon is downloaded, this player will see your icon *every* time they run zMUD.

Other people have asked me how much the use and sales of zMUD has decreased. My old web hosting company didn't provide statistics like this, so I don't have firm numbers on usage based upon the "getversion.htm" downloaded. However, I can say that sales today is about 65% of what it was at the peak of zMUD purchases, which was about 3 years ago. The decrease has been gradual, but steady, and it's hard to say whether this decrease is due to fewer people using MUDs and zMUD, or a greater number of people using free cracked versions of zMUD.

Hopefully these statistics will help those of you interested in how many times new players might see your icon, and how many players are running zMUD these days.

Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 5:09 am

Bidding for zMUD icons has now closed. I'll be setting up the payment links via Paypal within the next day or so and contacting each winner for their icon and other details. Thanks to everyone who participated in this process.

If you have any suggestions on how this process could be improved for next year, please let me know.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

If you could do monthly installments I could almost afford it hehe :)

Aside from that, I'm sure the bidding process works hehe.

Newbie Joined: 23 Feb 2005 Posts: 8

In case anyone is interested, here are the results. MUD followed by price paid:

1 Nodeka 4000
2 RetroMUD 3500
3 Materia Magica 2510
4 Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands 2500
5 Lusternia, Age of Ascension 1700
6 Aetolia, the Midnight Age 1700
7 Avalon; The Legend Lives 1550
8 Dark Castle 1290
9 Akanbar 1220
10 Imperian 1100

-matt
Iron Realms Entertainment
Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands
Aetolia, the Midnight Age
Imperian
Lusternia, Age of Ascension

Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 6:07 am

Thanks Matt, you beat me too it ;)

Yeah, Rainchild, I actually offered in the instructions to consider alternative payment plans if contacted in advance. Nobody took me up on it. Which indicates that at least for now there doesn't seem to be much need, and it's certainly easier for *me* to get it all at once. It's just in time to pay my taxes for this past year Confused