Eric:               Welcome Glavians, Draconians, Gnomes, Ogres one and all to the Titans of Text podcast. We're your hosts, Eric Oestrich...

Danny:              and Danny "Austerity" Nissenfeld...

Eric:               And we have with us today the one and only Jason "Acer" Alexander the veritable Astraeus of the text gaming world. Welcome.

Acer:               Hey guys, thanks for having me.

Eric:               Thanks for coming on.

Danny:              Let's start out with a, with a bit of DarkWind cause that's what we're here to talk about. How far back does DarkWind's history among MUDs stretch?

Acer:               So DarkWind, as best as we can trace it back, goes to somewhere around 1994. That was when they first started it and the first original guys got it up and running and we can find little remnants of it in various pieces of source code throughout the world.

Eric:               So that sort of rolls us into the next question. What codebase did it start in?

Acer:               So the, the original started back in the one, if you guys remember, like the Amylaar driver, Amylaar kind of became a million different directions, but it became LP and later became LD. And I think there's some derivatives of LD even these days that have kind of branched off. But even now, if you log into DarkWind and you type the command "version", you'll actually see it comes up as Amylaar. But when you, when you actually dig in, there's very little kind of left of those bones these days. It's pretty much custom. We pretty much rewritten I would say 98% of the lib. There's a few places I think you get in and you'll notice actually some of the European spelling based on like what you're messing with. Sometimes, you know, armor is, it has a u in it versus an O and you'll find some of those kinds of older inherits that we don't really touch much. It kind of sits in the darker corners of the mud.

Danny:              And, uh, how did you get your start with DarkWind?

Acer:               So I was, uh, this was back in 96. I was a sophomore at the University of North Texas in Denton; computer science student. You know, you guys will remember that was kind of the early days of the Internet even so, you know, you had dial up, but it was kind of the dial into the university servers and you didn't really necessarily have a whole lot of internet connectivity back then. I would use like Archie or gopher one of those fun apps, use net IRC. But somewhere in there I can remember going to the computer lab to work on some of my, my, uh, cs homework. And I look over and there's a guy with a terminal pulled up playing and there's like colors and everything kind of scrolling through. And I remember literally leaning over and going, hey, what is that? And uh, Lo and behold, that was DarkWind, so I, I jumped in and kind of followed him in and set up a character and literally was hooked. I got my roommate hooked, I got, uh, basically all my friends and our little apartment, right. They're hooked. Uh, and many of them still play today, which is, which is kinda funny, but um, you know, it's, it's been a long kind of sort of history with DarkWind you know, I started as a player. I was a terrible player. I'm still at a terrible player. Um, I'm not very good at playing my own game. You know, I, uh, I can remember feverishly working kind of towards the level 30 requirement so that I could actually apply to be a wizard and immortal and start writing some code.

Acer:               And then once I wizzed it was kind of from then on, you know, the rest is history. As they say. I was heavily involved with the mud. I mean, you know, I think we all had a little bit of the drama over the last 20 years in our, our involvement with muds. But you know, staff come and go and ownership changes over and you know, people revolt and grab the code and spin up their own version of it. And I will say there was a lot of that, you know, over the years, you know, one admin shut it down, the other guys took it and set it back up and three of the other most senior level guys kind of got it running. And then we all left and started another mud and another driver. And you know, it kind of all full circle kind of come back around to DarkWind here we are 20 years later and I'm kind of the defacto owner these days.

Acer:               It, it fell into my lap many, many years ago. Nobody else kind of really wanted to take it and run with it. So I uh, I did all the legal work of trademarking the name and grabbing the domain and we kind of legally setting up a little bit of a defend-able position and set it up and started running it and kind of left it to, to do what it is. And my kids now, or I've got two daughters, 16 and 12, which dates me a little bit, but you know, I uh, I got, I kind of got busy with real life kind of leveling up my real life character. I joked that I have a wife +1 and, and kids +1. So my saving role is pretty strong, but really, you know, I think early this year one of the guys that were still kind of around, actually a girl, her name is Dink, a huge credit to her, she kinda came back around and said, hey, you know, I'd really love to try to, to breathe a little life in this thing and see if we can get it going again.

Acer:               One last Hurrah if you will. And, and I said, you know what, that actually sounds like fun. I didn't have a whole lot of hobbies going on and, uh, work was keeping me super busy and I just needed some way to kind of deflate. My guys here at work don't really let me code much anymore. They scream at me every time I get near our source. So, uh, yeah. I said, you know what, this'll be fun. So here we are a couple of months later, we've had some good success and having lots of fun and got some players back. So, you know, it's been, it's been, uh, a fun little ride the last couple months.

Danny:              So you are, you're staying active on the coding on DarkWind?

Acer:               Absolutely. I've gotten back and heavily involved. I, you know, I love to code, you know, and like I said, not something that makes a whole lot of sense for me to do at work. So with DarkWind it's been great because I kind of just got in and made a big long list of things that I wanted to do and kind of starting, you know, I've talked to Eric a lot, a lot about this on discord, but you know, kind of just said, hey, you know, back in the day we were, we were kind of jerks. I mean we, you know, and I think from what I hear from, from the community in general, it seems to be a common thread with the LP guys. Uh, you know, generally the we LP guys would kind of put our nose up in the air and if you can build your mud, you know, by writing code yourself and you were just using scripts and all that stuff, then you know, we were really better than you. And that's, I think that's really kind of how we looked at the world, you know, 15, 20 years ago.

Acer:               And I think we took a lot of that same approach and the game, I mean we, we basically gave the newbies no help and we just kind of said, hey, if you can't hack it, we don't really want you. And that's really well and good when you've got 120 players on at any one time and in a login cue here, ready, waiting to get in for somebody to log out. But you know, nowadays a, these are our customers and this is what I tell my staff. I'm like, guys, now these guys are super valuable and as I'm spending money marketing the game and, and it's, it's real money out of my pocket, you know, these guys are worth money to us. So we really have to listen and pay attention to what they want, what they're enjoying. They're not enjoying and be willing to compromise and not always be dicks about it. Um, yeah, that's kind of where we are today.

Eric:               So I guess how does a sort of a bit about that, but like what else sets dark wind apart from other games?

Acer:               So, you know, I had the same question from another guy and a I sat quietly and, uh, stared at my screen for probably a good 15 minutes. You know, what I would say is, I mean, I think with anything technology related, you know, I would argue that there's really nothing unique in this world anymore and it's really hard to come up with an idea that's truly unique. And I, I hope that that changes. But, um, what I would say is DarkWind we've been around for so long. And you know, we've really been pretty blessed with having active staff, a big staff of coders and they've been with us for, some of these guys have been with me, you know, 15, 20 years right alongside me though.

Acer:               The cool thing, and I guess the side effect from that is that we, we have a lot of features. I mean, you can imagine from our perspective, we hadn't really taken an opinionated stance on how we built the game. We just thought, you know, that's a cool feature. Let's build it. And you know, over the 20 years, if you were to put together kind of a timeline, I mean, we have a reward system. We have a hero system, we have multi classing. Uh, we have auctions systems, we have markets, you know, market systems, player run economies, playroom ships. We have PK systems, we have hardcore player systems. Essentially where you, once you die, you're dead forever. So, uh, we have, we have a ton of things. But you know, I would say the one thing that we really, that I haven't seen a lot of and other games and I could be wrong, but you know, really are our base mechanic is kind of around what we call the uniques and unique is just the super powerful item, whether it's a weapon and you know, a piece of armor or some kind of item that has an action that it does.

Acer:               But there's only one of it in the world. During that boot cycle, they can't be saved under the players inventory. It only exist for that one reboot. And then the next time we reboot, you have to kind of run it again. And so, you know, the, the game is really kind of set up around each, you know, essentially every five days we reboot the game, all the players get ready and they wait for the reboot. And then as soon as the game's up, they log in and they're all running through the game, trying to grab as many of the uniques as they can, you know, 15, 20,000 rooms. Uh, we probably have that last count close to 300 areas. You know, each area has at least one or two bosses boss level of mobs. Each one of those bosses over mobs have a unique on them.

Acer:               So you can imagine there's 3 to 600 unique items in the game that they're all racing to try to get. And so that's kind of a fun mechanic that I've never really seen. You know, another game do.

Danny:              You mentioned you have a remort system and to me like historically and we're talking to like, you know, ancient diku land remort is you, there's a max level, like a hundred or whatever it might be. You hit it and then you start over in a new class of level one and just run back to a hundred from there. Uh, how does your reward system play out and what is level cap exactly.

Acer:               Yeah. So level cap on our game is actually 90. Uh, we have, we have different tiers. So you know, it obviously from one up to 45, the level of 45 he hit what's called hero hero gets you a few more benefits, uh, and it basically unlocks your first slot, multiplayer slot. So a lot like, you know, we kind of took the page as far as design from games today is you know, you, you open your client, your launcher, you put in your username and password and then you're showing the kind of the player screen and you usually, you know, along the left hand side or right hand side, you've got the slots for each of your player characters that you've rolled. So we took a similar system where essentially you can, you can either buy a slot for really high levels of money or you can start unlocking them at certain levels. And so it at that level you can actually register your first slot and that allows you to have multiple players. So in our system, you know, that's our reward is, you know, from our perspective when you read reach a level 65, um, you can actually register your first mythic at 60 by actually 45.

Acer:               I mean, you can buy one for 100 million coins, you know, essentially you get to register your first mythic character and that character logs back in at level one, but it actually gets to join one of the mythic only guilds, or classes, what we called them guilds. But it's essentially the diku world. It's a class. The mythic guilds essentially are super powerful classes that have a little more theme, a little more color, a lot more powers, a lot stronger. Um, and that's essentially you start building that character backup as a mythic. And that's kind of how we look at the remort system.

Eric:               So what does the pve combat like are the bosses scripted encounters or they just big enemies?

Acer:               You know, right now I would say bosses are really just large enemies, you know, super powerful. Usually high level. Um, they might be in a room with other friendly mobs that kind of jump in and help kind of tackle you. Uh, but we do have what we call behaviors, their basic AI modules that tap into the game loop. So essentially for every mob can check on heartbeat. What's the current state of this mob? Is he fighting, is he sitting, is he resting and healing and all the different states. And so that mobs behaviors can then kind of evaluate what it should do or what it can do. And so you can actually wire up multiple behaviors to a mob to say, you know, does this mob try to heal itself? Does it cast magic spells? Does it, uh, aggressively track you from the room? You know, if it's a thief type player, does it steal the keg out of your hands? Does it try to disarm you if it's a fighter?

Acer:               And so on and so forth. So some of our bosses actually have a lot of those, those behaviors built in. So it makes the combat a little more aggressive, a little more fun. Um, but I do like the idea of kind of scripted encounters. We have the ability to actually role play a character as a wiz and get in and take control of it. Uh, I'll admit we don't do that a lot right now. Um, I'd love to, to try to set up some more formal events where we do something like that. I think they'd be a lot of fun.

Danny:              Why don't you tell us a little bit about the, the world of DarkWind, the lore, it's been around a while. Is it a pretty much like a static story, like backstory type thing, or has it evolved over time with the players?

Acer:               From our end, it's pretty static. DarkWind, you know, I think the lore behind it, you know, there was this dark wind an evil dark wind that kind of ravages the lands. Uh, it caused a lot of tension and strife, maimed and killed, you know, thousands and thousands of people. And, uh, you know, it's very a Tolkienish if you can start to recognize it, you know, it kind of forced all the races to be at odds for a while. And then that caused this, this infamous race wars and where everybody was just killing each other. And so the world kind of heavily fragmented and broke essentially. And in one day, you know, the gods kind of looked down and looked at what they had done and what had happened and they decided to intervene and so dark, but actually has a set of, of gods that it created in. Some are inspired by our real gods and you know, nature gods and stuff like that.

Acer:               And some are inspired by some of the original, some of the original coders that, that actually started the mud like Alerien and some of these guys. So, uh, but you know, these gods supposedly, you know, look down intervened and in doing that, you know, decided to kind of shepherd all the races back together, uh, bestow upon them supernatural powers and kind of magic and command of the elements. And in doing so, that kind of helped all the races. It's kind of set them back on path, kind of righted the world. And at that point, you know, all the races kind of decided to shake hands and plant a flag there. And that's where the town naturally grew from. And that's the main town of, of dark wind when you first log in. So that's, that's kind of the background of it all.

Eric:               So what do you see as the role of the staff for DarkWind is it hands off affair? Or do you guys get heavily involved?

Acer:               Uh, you know, from our end, I've, I've always tried to keep pretty hands off. Um, you know, I think it follows my own personal management style at work, but you know, I really like to kind of back up and let everybody have a lot of their own little kind of creativity and leeway nowadays. You, we're all struggling to make sure that we have a good staff and active staff, making sure that we have players, making sure that we're doing things to kind of further progress the game. And so, you know, I would really hope that I could kind of step back and let everybody kind of just say, hey, are we all grown ups at this point? And you know, can't we all just get along. What I will say is in the last two months, you know, with this big influx of players coming back, a lot of that comes with player drama.

Acer:               And then, you know, inevitably that kind of creeps into, you know, staff drama. And so, you know, I've been working with a lot of my guys and team, you know, I, and I say staff and team, these are, these are all guys that are peers to me and you know, they ran the mud for many years when I wasn't around. They did in the last few weeks going to come to me and say, hey, we really would like your leadership kind of helping us set a roadmap and direction. And some guys are good with just kind of being left alone and some guys kind of need a plan and you know, at least kind of say, here's the, you know, the course we're going to set and we're going to go this way and then we'll probably go back this way and we'll work on these 10 things. So that's, that's really kind of what I'm trying to do.

Acer:               But you know, certainly don't want to any kind of a malevolent dictator type situation where I'm just demanding things. That's not really me. But yeah, that's kind of what we're trying to work on now is put together a roadmap, kind of say what are our big themes? You know, you guys are professional developers in your day jobs too. So it's, it's very familiar. You know, it's a writing a BHAG, a big hairy audacious goal, setting up some epic stories and then decomposing those into, you know, basic user stories, uh, putting those into epics kind of giving each of them, each of the staff guys have, you know, a different area of responsibility they can kind of own and control. That's pretty much what we're doing now. But uh, hopefully we can still kind of keep it loose and fun. On the note of applying more, there's this practices type stuff to the mud.

Danny:              How, how exactly did the revival of DarkWind go? I imagine that was a concerted effort. Why don't you take us through some of that. I believe that is probably one of the most, or one of the largest things of interest to people that are running months today is how do I, how do I get bigger? How do I grow my player base again?

Acer:               Yeah. No absolutely. I think my 2 cents for, for anyone it seems really simple but you know, especially the guys that have a MUD that was once popular, you know, just don't, don't forget and you have data, you know, you have all of your players. Hopefully you, you collected email addresses along the way. I mean that's one of the first things that we did. You know, to back up my background in normal day to day business in real life, I'm CEO of a midsize private equity held company. We're an online training company that that does basically a boating, hunting, fishing, snowmobile, ATV, anything government regulated we do online courses for. So you know, it kind of taking that the a page from that book, you know, my experience in my background, I kinda got in and just said, how do I get people back? You know, from my end.

Acer:               I wrote a quick, uh, file parser in C# that basically traversed the playerr files, you know, and we had multiple copies of Lib, you know, we took snapshots and backups and uh, over the years there were different versions of the game that, you know, essentially you one, one person kind of forced the game and said, hey, I want to do this. And I think it would be interesting. So we let them, what we did from our end is we kind of grabbed all of those different versions of the game, took the Parser recursively, ran through all of them, grabbed all the player files, grabbed all the email addresses and we came around with somewhere around 40,000 email addresses. You ever take a lot of duplicates? Obviously, you know, a lot of bad emails. We, we kind of hand pruned a lot of those. Uh, and then programmatically pruned a lot of those.

Acer:               But it came, it came down to just like roughly a little over 4,000 email addresses that they look to be valid. I didn't want to get blacklisted or anything by using any kind of outside services. I didn't, didn't want to deal with like constant contact or those guys. So I just, I literally set up a mail merge with my, my personal email account and I sent a really personal email to each one of them just saying, uh, you know, hey, uh, you guys probably remember me. Uh, hopefully you remember the game. Uh, we're kind of trying to get it back and revive it. Would love to see you. I think we had a lot of fun back in the day. Uh, here's the address. Uh, maybe I'll see you on there. And, uh, you know, lo and behold, in the next week, the player counts slowly started growing.

Acer:               And so now, you know, two months later we've got about 110 active, unique players. They don't normally kind of log in at any one time. We tend to average around 30 players at one time. Uh, we peeked around 40, 45, you know, from our perspective, you know, that was a success. So, you know, we sent 4,000 emails, only about 1700 or so didn't bounce. Um, and then we've got a really good, you know, kind of response to that is I was really concerned that they were going to be like, hey, you know, why did you email me? You know, I didn't ask to be predominant as kind of a no spam sort of thing. And what I got, it was actually the opposite. You know, a lot of these guys saying, Hey, uh, what great timing boy, I was just thinking about dark when the other day. Uh, what a lot of fun, uh, definitely will be on.

Acer:               And uh, it's been really successful. So, you know, from there we kind of took that in and dovetailed it into kind of bigger campaigns. So, you know, I have, I use fiber a lot. I mean, I, I joke about him on discord, uh, especially like the axiom and those guys. It's like, man, you know, five, 10 bucks. You know, I had a print flyer designed that I've basically, I sent that out and walked and took it and dropped it off in a couple of a game shops here in town in Dallas. And you had just said, hey, you know, I, I know you guys run like weekly d and d campaigns. Uh, can I leave this here? Do you mind? I think, I think these guys would appreciate it. And uh, we've had a couple of people log in with that.

Acer:               You know, I worked with, with Eric, uh, firsthand. I mean we set up, you know, the play.darkwind to work. Um, we're basically driving people to that URL. That's been huge for us. So, you know, as we set up kind of Google PPC campaigns as I'm getting things, you know, marketing towards that, that's my URL. It's super simple and it gets, people kind of passed, you know, any kind of technical issues of like, how do I, how do I log into this thing? You know, I know from my end, like you're pretty, you're pretty quickly kind of see that, you know, windows, they've, I think they've removed the telnet client. A OSX has removed the telnet client. Then you've got to talk them into like, Hey, well you got to download this client, muddle it and install it and all this stuff. You know, pretty much all of our new players are coming in through web client.

Acer:               And so that's been a huge step for us. You know, overall, I'm kind of getting all over the place here. You know, my advice to people is, you know, really kind of look at at your big conversion points, right? You know, from my perspective, you kind of got three places, you know, and I, I call them the three R's. So you, you want to recruit new players, you want to retain your existing players and you want to reactivate any players that you've lost. And then, you know, we're all very smart people. We're all, most of us have been very successful in our day jobs. So, you know, sitting down and saying like, what do I gotta do tactically, uh, to actually recruit new players? And then what do I gotta do tactically to retain the players that I have today? And then what do I need to do or try to do to get players that I've lost or how do I even identify those players?

Acer:               And that's something I haven't kind of shifted into yet. I've been really focused on recruiting. Now we're kind of evolving into retaining, you know, my next phase will really be kind of reactivating players that have kind of come and gone. Uh, obviously we've, we've had players jump in with this whole resurgence of the game and then we've had them kind of already kind of fade away and maybe they get busy, you know, life is happening, you know, how do I reach out and make sure that I try to pull them back in the fold. Um, and there's, you know, there's a million things to do and I think, you know, hopefully people, and you know, that you guys that are, that are out there running muds today, think about, you know, the, the data you're, you're capturing and think about, you know, all the different conversion points, you know, from a visitor to a player, a player, a new player, you know, a Newbie player into a mid level player into an experienced player, uh, until two, a player that's gone or, or even, you know, an RN, you can actually suicide your character. But you know, making sure that you can kind of capture all the data in each of those points and actually take action with it. And that would be my advice. I know that's kind of long winded.

Eric:               That was pretty great advice. I think hopefully we can see some, some other muds have a resurgence. However, we did mention, I started, hinted at it a bit there, grape vine. So let's segue into an ad real quick.

Eric:               Are you tired of trying to get your mud noticed on websites that not only look like they were designed in the 90s, but are about that stable too? Come to Grapevine. Here at Grapevine, helping your mud look good is our top priority. Just head down to grapevine.haus. That's g r a p e v i n e Dot h a u s. Your mud has grown a lot since 1992. Why should you settle for a listing site that hasn't?

Danny:              And speaking of Grapevine of course the other part of grapevine is, uh, everyone that signs up essentially gets a free web client. Uh, and, and quite frankly a pretty good looking one at, at that. You mentioned that all almost all of your new players have come through the web client. Like how are you feeling about the web client? Like is it, does it provide a good experience? Are players actually saying things?

Acer:               I think that's, that's a great segue from earlier from my end, I'm very confident in driving, you know, spending money to drive audience to this web client. Think the web client is super stable. Uh, Eric's been really responsive to kind of work through the kinks that we had. A lot of it was just weird edge cases where, you know, when I'm telling my players, hey, please use the web client, let me know what you think. And then I've got guys that are, that are sitting on it for, you know, six, eight hours. That's a whole different use case than probably, you know, Eric had tested for originally or kind of easily test, you know, kind of out of the box. So it's been fun to kind of work with Eric directly as we've, he's introduced all kinds of, I use the royal weed. Did you notice that as we did all this work, but you know, it's been really cool because you know, he keeps including kind of new features, new enhancements and you know, at this point.

Acer:               This last weekend I actually had a group, they're a four or five, uh, new players login from Malaysia and these are, as I started talking to them, uh, it's kind of asking them, where are you from? What do you guys do, how'd you find us? You know, all the usual questions wanting to kind of peer in a little bit into their heads. And they were all in the web client, which was interesting. They were all sitting in a essentially in a computer lab in Malaysia and they were all game design students. So you know, they had all kind of gotten together and started searching around and they saw my, my Google ads, my PPC ads, they clicked on my ad and they went to the page, my landing page, big green button that says play now. They click the play now button and they went to the web client and kind of transparent to them. They didn't really know telnet or you know, it didn't have to understand kind of the mechanics of any of it. They were just suddenly logged into the game and like setting up a character and playing and uh, and that was fun.

Acer:               I think that's, that's going to be really key for me. And I, and I would argue for, for any of the, these, uh, these other guys that are out there running muds is remove the technical challenge from the equation completely. You know, you really want it to be transparent to the player that, you know, they're just logging in the game and it really doesn't, they don't really care like how they're doing it. As long as it is, it looks nice and they don't have to install anything. The browser's not freaking out or throwing any kind of errors are popping up anything. Um, they're suddenly in your game and kind of running with it with no experience. And I think that's been, that's been key for us. So I've been very, very grateful for it.

Eric:               Speaking of kind of new new players, um, what, what have you recently implemented to make the game more welcoming for them?

Acer:               Yeah, absolutely. So from our end, it's been a whirlwind for the last two months. I think we all got in and got super excited with the kind of the, the Phoenix rising from the ashes. And so we started rolling out all kinds of new stuff. We rolled out on a daily rewards program. You know, I, I tried to look at a lot of the mobile apps, mobile games that I play, and while most of them are just garbage, you know, one thing I think that a mobile apps do really well is that they kind of measure cohort right cohort is this, this Kpi essentially that kind of says, how often do people pick up your phone or pick up the phone and log into your app. And cohort typically is really high. You know, things like Instagram or snapchat or, you know, I, I look at my daughters and the way that they're constantly on their phone, uh, grabbing these apps and these games and, you know, checking them and doing something, I have to literally force them to put their phone down, you know, on my end, you know, self serving, you know, I want my game to be the same way, right?

Acer:               I want it to be really hard to put down. And so that's really kind of been the focus is, you know, really kind of bringing the fun back. So, you know, one of the things that we did, he had back in the day, it was real grind. It was so hard to get anywhere. So we, we reevaluate it, all of our XP curves, you know, what are the XP requirements to get to each level. We literally put them in a spreadsheet craft, um, and, and then change that graph to be a little more, little more smoother. So, you know, essentially levels one to 45 a move really fast. It's really easy and quick to kind of get up to level 45 and I'm a good player who's played dark when, who's played a mud before can probably get lord level 45 some would say within weeks.

Acer:               Uh, I'd like to say, you know, within a month, but you know, I can get in and hit level 20 pretty much in a couple days. And I'm like, I said, I'm a terrible player. So, you know, really kind of lowering those, those boundaries. And I think, you know, from my perspective, we did a lot of these things when I got in and I started thinking about it like, what do we need to do to get this thing hopping? And again, and as I looked all these kind of dumb policies and dumb things we did, I say, God, why did, why did we do that? And the answer often was like, because that's the way it's always been. And that just wasn't good enough, you know, reworking those systems a really looking at kind of the, the player feedback, you know, quickly to say like, what are you guys not liking right now?

Acer:               Um, so we added in daily reward so that, you know, each day they check in, they get a new reward and as they go from day one up to day 30, you know, the rewards continue to escalate. Whether it's more coins, every day, more XP, everyday more items, you know, you might start getting a set of items that build over the 30 days. So you get a matching set of armor or you know, a couple of really nice weapons that have some nice spam and empower on them, the abilities on them. So, um, that's been huge. You know, outside of that, I mean it's, it's really kind of working through all the details of why it would be more fun and kind of breaking that down. So that's really been key for us.

Danny:              No, I mean that's a, if you look at a like world of Warcraft, one of the best examples of breaking the industry, I mean, something no one thought would happen. They're well known philosophy that every, you know, every time they make an expansion, the level cap goes up by five or 10. And essentially it resets the XP gain to the point where level one, two expansions start level should take as much time as start level to the next ten. And it's, it's something that always moves that they just keep moving that target. So no one's ever spending too much time at the lower levels. It's at something I think a lot of muds could, could take on as, as a good idea.

Acer:               Yeah, exactly. I mean from our end, you know, when I told the guys I really wanted to, I wanted the player to kind of quickly get in and get a taste of success. If you can go and kill a few mobs and then suddenly you're already got enough to go advance a couple of stats or you know, get to level two or level three on our mud, it level five you can actually go join a guild or a class. And so at level one you're, you're really classless at that point. You have a couple of basic abilities that can, you can kind of use. Eric knows, cause he was playing DarkWind for a little while there. And then once you hit level five, you go join whether you're going to be a paladin or a bard or a ninja or garou, from that end then you can, you kind of get an upgraded set of skills and then you know what I really wanted.

Acer:               And the goal was hopefully that that climb to 45 it's so quick at that point you've invested time and resources and you've probably had some really great experiences. And so you're kind of emotionally attached to the game. And then you know, that first time you run into something that frustrates you, which is inevitable and none of us can build a perfect game, then they're going to be a little more forgiving, a little more lenient and say, you know what, this game is actually pretty awesome despite that. And hopefully they tell us what it is and we can kind of tweak and adjust. So that was really our biggest goal for, for everything there.

Danny:              I think we should wind out the interview here with, uh, what's, what's the future of dark wind? What, uh, what do you guys see down the near path, the far path? Like what's, what's going to happen to dark?

Acer:               Oh, that's a good question. I think from my end, you know, I'm a, I'm an idea guy so I can sit around and come up with 30 ideas and poor Eric is probably tired of hearing me. I'm constantly on discord. Like, Hey, what about this? Hey, what about that? But I do the same thing at work and to do the same thing in DarkWind. Yeah. But I would say, you know, trying to, to keep focused, we're really going to kind of be working with Eric. He's got some really cool ideas with the web client and he's got some really cool ideas on the grapevine client. And I think, you know, from my perspective, kind of rising tide raises all boats. You know, I, I'm not really here to, to compete with, with all the other muds. I think, you know, we're all to that point where as long as you're not iron realms or, or Aardwolf or any of those guys, you know, we're just trying to figure out how to enjoy our days and have something that we can be proud of and maybe spend a little of our, you know, hobby time on it.

Acer:               And so, you know, I'm, I'm hoping to do more with Eric and really I'm really looking at, you know, his, his web client as being our kind of defacto rich client. He's got some ideas that are coming up that I think is really gonna take it to the next level for us from our end. You know, I think we're going to continue to kind of streamline the new user experience as it is now. I've got all my marketing kind of geared up. We've had 12 new players that's in the last four days. It sounds ridiculous from the old days, but 12 new players right now is, is a smorgasbord of, of new players. I can't even, I can't even imagine, you know, we're doing things to try to understand why some of those guys are jumping in and jumping out and making sure that we you know, grab them quickly, make them feel part of a things and making them have a good experience.

Acer:               So that's really our biggest factor. We've got some technical debt. I mean it's a dirty word, a cuss word, but 20 years of LP uh, not all of that. That lib is actually good. So we've, we've got to go back and fix a few things and having players again, you know, you, we had a lot of players way back in the day. We built the game for that. Then we had very few players. So we adjusted the game for those, that number of players and now we have a moderate amount of players and so we've kinda come back and readjust for, you know, the, the player can't that we have now, kind of the average players. And it's just a different games. We need to do that. And there's always, you know, things always are marching forward. We've got new guilds coming, so such as monks, mustad, drawls kind of the metaguilds for our Werewolf class.

Speaker 1:          Gary, we've got some instant base instance based, uh, Dungeon's. So, uh, basically it's nothing super new or innovative, but it's new for DarkWind. When is basically, you know, stepping into a cave and behind the scenes auto generating, you know, 120 room dungeon. It requires them to kind of find their way through and then get you a boss mob, defeat it and then they can kind of get out of out of it. Kind of a raid, uh, awhile raid style theme. We've got a new quest system. Um, the introduces a kind of what, what you're used to with most MMOS kill quests, item quests, a escort quests. Uh, and then I, you know, I, my last thing and I'll, I'll quit rambling, but you know, I really liked the idea of a main storyline. Something that kind of draws you through and you know, it's kind of a continuation of your newbie academy experience but forces you to kind of wander through the main land.

Acer:               And you know, in our case we have multiple continents and ships and all that stuff. So, you know, forcing the players to kind of get out and explore the world kind of through this, the storyline. I think that's, that's really interesting. So who knows. Lots of fun stuff out there.

Danny:              It sounds like great stuff. I know ideas are cheap and implementation is king but you gotta have the ideas first and a lot of those sound pretty good.

Eric:               All right, thanks for coming and joining us on an episode, Jason.

Acer:               Hey, my pleasure guys. I appreciate you guys have, I mean this is a, this is really cool. I love what you guys are doing. I think the community here, I found that the mud reddit and then a that pointed me to the discord and then off to the slack and, and Lo and behold, I found a lot of you guys out there were super nice and super accommodating and, and working hard every day to kind of keep muds alive and I, I appreciate that. So thank you guys. Yeah, I mean, for what it's worth, I'll let me put it out there. You know, I'm always open to talk to anybody. If anybody wants to reach out to me on discord or we're in the slack, or, you know, acer at darkwind.org, uh, I'm always happy to help discuss or talk through anything. Feel free.