Shattered Kingdoms

Well, one look at the who and I'm sure you can draw some correlation as to why new players don't stay very long.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here or why a comment about the forums ties into the who list.

If you are saying that there isn't enough diversity in the who list and that the veteran majority drives away new players with different play styles, you wouldn't have to twist my arm to get me to agree. But maybe you are saying something completely different.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. The who is a reflection of the this and vice versa.

Also there's a ton of peer pressure/clique behavior as well that contributes to it.

Frankly, as a new player but someone with a fair deal of mud experience in general:

You guys are a lot more newbie friendly than other muds I have tried, and even in places I disagree with staff, I am not terrified to talk about that for fear of losing the ability to play half the classes and races in the game... which is not true in some other places. As to cliquishness... really there's not a lot to be done about that, and it seems less cliquish and more a case of hardcore pvp players vs hardcore roleplayers, with the pkers talking a lot of crap about the roleplayers which I don't get in a mud where the tagline has roleplay before tactics but that's just me.

Muds in general lose players when they impose more restrictions on the whole, because the primary motivation for many sighted people to play a text based game in a world with 1080p plus graphics in many multiplayer games is this (in my opinion, again): You can do a lot more in a mud than you can in, say, Battlefield three. Yes, you can kill other people's avatars in both, but in Battlefield three, can you design new clothes/rooms/be the cause of the rise and fall of a kingdom? That is what leads me to that conclusion at least, and it informs a lot of my thoughts on mudding in general, but I come to mudding very late in the game and did not start playing text games until January of 2008.