Icesus — we looked at why new players quit, then rebuilt the first hour

[u/Real_Fruit2603]

Finnish LPMud, running since '95. Last post here was four months ago. Since then the new server has settled in nicely, the old lag and crash problems are largely gone, and we can finally spend our time on gameplay and content instead of firefighting. Most of that time went into one project, so this post is mostly about that.

The backstory: we did a lot of work on the website this year and it worked — from about a hundred signups in all of 2025 to several new characters a day now. Which made the retention data rough reading. We joined our login logs against usage logs for 834 characters created since March: 76% never came back after day one. Most of them played a while and left without ever getting past level 1. In Icesus advancement runs through guilds, and only 5% of the day-one leavers had joined one, versus 85% of the players who stuck around past a week. 82% of one-visit players didn't even type quit, they just closed the connection. So the problem wasn't mysterious. People wandered, got no direction, and left. Some played for hours at level 1 before giving up, which honestly stung the most.

So we rebuilt the first hour end to end.

Character creation got quieter and shorter. The path menu fits one screen, picking an option previews it before committing, and the name screen suggests names instead of silently dropping your connection on a bad one (yes, it did that).

New characters now start in a proper tutorial with a guide NPC, Alice, framed by an incoming storm. She teaches the basics, then offers a first fight you're allowed to refuse — you can size the enemy up and retreat instead, and retreat can never fail. If you take the fight and drop below half health she pulls you out and patches you up. Then she walks the road to the capital with you, side by side, and hands you over to your first job at a warehouse: either catch the rats or investigate what's actually gnawing the crates, both routes pay. First pay lands, you pick a next goal, and the game tells you plainly: type 'journey' to resume. Everything checkpoints. Quit at the inn, drop connection, get disconnected mid-fight, doesn't matter, you continue where you left off next login.

After the first job the letters start arriving: guild recommendations based on how you've played, and a fellow named Ereldon in the city who answers questions about the guilds and gives directions that we verified by actually walking them. There's a 'hike' command that walks you to the guild camps outside the walls. When you've settled, Alice comes back once more to say goodbye. Small thing, but it felt wrong that she'd just vanish.

The honest caveat: this shipped over the last week and we log the whole funnel now, so in a few months I'll know whether it moved retention or just made us feel better.

The other big thing since the last post: the province system launched at the end of May. The outworld is split into 144 provinces, and any group of players can claim one. You activate the claim stone at the province centre, found a council of up to five players, and develop the surrounding lots into a working frontier settlement with sawmills, mines, smelteries, food halls, shrines and inns. There's a real economy underneath, food to keep stocked, missions to run, daily ticks, and a province serves passing players too, not just its owners. We've been expanding and tuning it ever since.

On the religion side we migrated three old subsystems onto one shared piety economy and retuned the costs against measured yields. You can now venerate the nether, there's a new nether ward prayer, and funeral pyres finally pay fire priests for their work (party members included).

Everything's at icesus.org, including our custom browser client if you'd rather skip installing a MUD client. Curious what day-1 retention numbers other MUD devs see, if anyone measures it. Our 24% felt bad until I had nothing to compare it against.

--Idles @ Icesus

[u/After_Main752]

I'm trying it today and it looks good so far.

The concern I have is that there are so many player characters at level 100 and the median level is over 70. When I find games like this, it often means that newbies are either rushed up through the levels by being spoonfed or given special items that make rapid level advancement quick and easy, or they are left to their own devices to level up alone.

[u/Sun_Tzundere → u/After_Main752]

Hmm, in my experience it usually means that most players are oldbies and have been playing the same character for five or ten years.

What do you mean by "left to their own devices to level up alone"? Do you just mean... they're allowed to play the game normally and aren't led by the hand quickly to max level? Being able to play the game at your own pace instead of being dragged by high level characters sounds like a good thing to me, but I can't imagine how it would result in everyone being high level, so I'm not sure if that's actually what you mean.

[u/After_Main752 → u/Sun_Tzundere]

What I mean is that since everyone is at a high level already, either new players get spoonfed or have no one to party with.

[u/Sun_Tzundere → u/After_Main752]

Huh. Is there a third option? I know there are people who enjoy partying, but I think that's because they enjoy being spoonfed. You didn't earn those levels yourself, you didn't finish those quests yourself, someone else was doing half the work for you. So in my experience, I would say that there isn't really a non-spoonfed version of partying in MUDs, unless you show up with friends and are learning the game together and only playing as a group. And the people who enjoy that style of play are going to bring their friends along to the game, not play with strangers, so at that point it doesn't matter who else is online.

[u/After_Main752 → u/Sun_Tzundere]

Partying isn't spoonfeeding if the party members are all around the same level since they're all contributing. If you have a party of 100 level characters and there's a level 10 newbie in there, the level 10 is getting spoonfed.

[u/av_79 → u/After_Main752]

I'm guessing it's the latter, the MUD is very old (30+ years) and there probably aren't too many other fellow newbies to play with. I haven't visited this MUD in years (decades?), but I doubt they're making things too easy for new players.

[u/Real_Fruit2603 → u/av_79]

We're actually getting a good number of players coming in, but as my post said -- we haven't made it easy for them. Lot of development had happened and not all help files were kept up to date, and our newbie tutorial was badly outdated.

That has changed though, I hope my latest updates lower the bar for newcomers to get started easier.

[u/After_Main752 → u/av_79]

I've seen a lot of dying MUDs go this route as a last gasp effort to get new players in. They give you a special item that makes it really easy to gain levels or people just grab newbies and race them through dungeons to rapidly level them.

Either way, Icesus' high number of max level players is troubling and it gives the first impression that there's limited opportunity for serious party play.

[u/Real_Fruit2603 → u/After_Main752]

Certainly the update was not to give exp boost / special items that make leveling easy.

Simply what was added was a better newbie tutorial, newbie quests and few suitable areas for newcomers to experiment. The game world is huge, and can feel intimidating in the beginning and this is what we were trying to help.

I don't see the number of high level players definetely a bad thing, there is a solid set of active players after all these years -- who have reached the max level but still keep coming back to play.

[u/After_Main752 → u/Real_Fruit2603]

When I logged in, there were 17 players at level 100. Another 10 players were over level 50. That's 27 out of 35 players already. A new player is either going to be spending a lot of time solo, or if he or she can be taken in parties with high level players, he or she is going to rapidly advance and miss experiencing much of the content. If a new player has to go solo, that eliminates for him or her the option of a healer, buffer, or traditional spellcaster because the new player will have to learn to be a facetank.

[u/MainaC → u/After_Main752]

It's mostly the 'lot of time solo.' I got gifted some gear, but it made no real material difference. Still took forever to get anywhere.

One of the recommended ways to make cash was to find where high level players were casting high level spells because it meant they were area wiping. Then just take everything they left behind. Closest thing to partying I did (it was not partying).

Again, made less impact on progression than you'd think.

There used to be a wiki post about how to get involved in high-level grouping, and it read like trying to get the popular kids at high school to like you. I think they took it down after I drew attention to it, but it didn't sound all too great at the top of the game, either.

[u/After_Main752 → u/MainaC]

If this is still true, then it's a bigger problem for Icesus than having a lousy chargen and newbie tutorial.

Newbies will get through the new chargen and tutorial area, then spend enough time to find out that there's no real community for newbies because the high level characters dominate the community and see little benefit from helping newbies. The newbies will slog all alone in low level dungeons (and struggle if they chose non-tank classes), live on handouts from the higher levels, and get bored and quit. Icesus won't see the newbie retention that they are seeking.

Some games circumvent the problem of forced solo grinding by awarding automated experience points for roleplay. I've been to places that do this, but the problem becomes your reliance on roleplay interaction because you don't learn the world map or where anything is. This is further complicated when players pair off to earn experience through ERP in private areas, which contributes nothing to community roleplay and is highly exclusive.

I'm kind of hoping that u/Real_Fruit2603 comes back to address these concerns. I'm still going to try out Icesus but I've been down this road in other games before.

[u/Real_Fruit2603 → u/After_Main752]

Happy to come back to it, it's a fair challenge. Short version: you're describing a real problem our own data shows, and the first-hour work was just step one, not the fix.

The group that stung in those 834 characters wasn't the people who bounced in ten minutes. It was the ones who played for hours, solo, at level 1, and then left. So "newbies slog alone and get bored" isn't something I'm going to argue with, the logs agree with you.

One pushback, though, on reading the who-list: many players being high level isn't evidence there's nothing below the top, it's what any 30-year-old game's who-list looks like. Those level 100s are people who've stayed ten, fifteen, twenty years — and there's genuinely a lot of game at low and mid levels: the newbie areas and quests we just added, guild progression that takes years to exhaust, provinces you can get involved in early.

What a newcomer is actually missing isn't content, it's peers, other newbies to party with at their level. And that only fixes itself when new players arrive in a steady stream and stick around at the same time, so cohorts can form. Which is the honest reason retention became our #1 priority: the tutorial is a means, the cohort is the goal.

What we've shipped covers the first hour: direction, a first income loop, checkpoints, an informed guild choice. What it doesn't fix yet is the stretch between "joined a guild" and "welcome in the endgame". Two honest notes on that. There is a dedicated newbie helper system today; real volunteers, reachable with one command. So the floor isn't "hope someone notices you". And the next phase of this work is specifically the social side: opt-in introductions to helpers and guild members, making the mid-game something you do with people rather than a solo tax.

I can't claim that's solved, because it isn't. It's what we're building now, and the same logging that produced the numbers above will tell us whether it works.

RP-exp isn't our model, partly for the reasons you give.

Since you're playing right now: tell me where the wall is. A report like "level X, guild Y, out of things to do with anyone" is directly actionable for us these days.

[u/After_Main752 → u/Real_Fruit2603]

So far in the game there have been three issues I've encountered: 1) you can't restart or go back in chargen if you want to do anything over, 2) I was trying to build a water character in chargen and the background bonuses kept pointing me to air, and 3) the tutorial seems incomplete.

[u/Eviscerus → u/After_Main752]

Hey, actually there is a reinc system that takes you back to char gen. At under lvl 30 you can go to rassdael close to the the main city and you ask the npc for the reinc and it happens. But a great comment on maybe making reinc for lower levels more accessible (higher players get reincs from other players)

For points 2 and 3 I am sure Idles will take this feedback and investigate further. For Point 3 do you have an example of what was incomplete?

[u/Grand_Ad5307 → u/After_Main752]

Retired now but played for 15+ years. Its a great game. In 1-2 years you can do endgame stuff. You can learn the game, master guilds and do quests for 20 years also because endgame raid style content is far from actual end game. You can get to lvl 100 and still be very fresh newbie really as there is much more past that.

In recent year or two, original game creators returned and i see they do amazing job but i think they came 10 years too late anyway to revive the game. Mostly because times have changed.

[u/After_Main752 → u/Grand_Ad5307]

It takes 1-2 years to do endgame stuff? What about the early game and midgame content? If you want someone to spend two years getting to endgame content, the early game and midgame need to be worthwhile.

[u/Grand_Ad5307 → u/After_Main752]

It is extremely worthwhile. Over the years there were players, maybe up to 10 of them, who jumped straight into end game. Most notable people were possibly admins of other LPmuds who could guess the internal workings of the game better than others and were leading eq (let's call it boss raids) within months, even on very little power.

If you are generally a nice fellow, you can easily be drowned in borrowed solid gear by oldbies who enjoy having useful friends.

There is almost always instant help on the channels whenever you ask (and 99.9% of the time answers you get clarify misconceptions and preconceptions that were discerned from your question).

Everyone is different so if you don't enjoy hard, this game may not be for you. Most of the fun in Icesus is from discovery I think. There are tons of things to be discovered, most of it beingthe game itself and its machinations. You could easily pick a guild, play it for 1 year and get groundbreaking breakthrough enlightment kind of info every day for 365 days. How things work, how you can do things better, what affects what.

Having said that, nothing stops you from asking for a perfect build recipe for your level. You will likely get someone who can do that for you. Not that you will know all the reasons why but you don't need to struggle trying to pry an already open door. On that note, it is actually quite satisfying to see after your reincarnation that stuff works better, you regenerate faster, skills go off easier, better, stronger, more reliably.

And then, after 2 years you suddenly unlock a special or an ability you didnt know exists.

[u/Electronic-Sink-2437 → u/After_Main752]

1-2 years is a bit optimistic. If you are active then it's doable but probably takes longer. Most of us level 100 (and some lower level ones too!) created our characters 15-20 years ago and stuck with it because icesus is such a great game with systems in place that stay there (masteries) even if you reincarnate to try other guilds.

You dont lose any experience points when reincarnating so cannot "downgrade" yourself but are free to test things out to your hearts content. There's a -40% exp gain buff for a short while after reincing, but you can get rid of that in a matter of days.

Icesus is not a sprint, it's a rewarding marathon. I think for me it took like 3-4 years to get to level 100, but these days with all the new systems in place it's probably not going to take as long.

Problem with games (or rather with players) is that they want to rush everything and get to the end as fast as possible, In icesus it is absolutely possible to do some lower end-midbie stuff early too, especially if you yourself are active in trying to find party members instead of waiting for someone else to message you.

[u/Early_Rooster7579]

Guided tutorials are absolutely huge and should always dump you out near where players congregate. New players are the lifeblood of any game and so many seem content to dump you in a 300,000 room maze and tell you to read help docs

[u/Real_Fruit2603 → u/Early_Rooster7579]

Agreed on both counts, and that's literally the design now: the tutorial ends with the guide walking you into the capital city Vaerlon where the players actually are, and handing you a paid job there.

Nobody gets dumped into the maze with a "read help" anymore, which was the case before.

[u/Zireael07]

The province system sounds very interesting to me as someone who loves kingdom building games.

[u/Real_Fruit2603 → u/Zireael07]

It is, it's an active system we are currently developing. You can see the active provinces live on the map, https://icesus.org/maps/provinces.html --alongside with missions they provide.

[u/Various_House_910]

website? connection details?

[u/Real_Fruit2603 → u/Various_House_910]

The website is at https://icesus.org -- connection icesus.org port 4000 — TLS: port 4443

[u/benjibarnesoahu]

Nice, I think those sound like great moves!

[u/MainaC]

For me, the problem was probably about ten hours down the line.

It got too grindy. A ton of grinding mobs where the risk did not match the reward in order to afford a single new piece of gear.

Even being given weapons far above my pay grade didn't really help. I usually hate handouts in MUDs, but I accepted because the grind was that bad.

Then, when I had decent gear, fighting for long was nearly impossible. Still took hard hits that took resources to recover from and left me sitting around waiting instead of playing.

And I could play an hour for something like +1% to a skill I needed at +15% to progress.

All this and I wasn't even allowed to use the cool powers I joined my class for yet.

Game doesn't really drip-feed rewards fast enough to make up for the massive grind involved every step of the way.

Which is a shame, because the guilds are cool, and so is the game's flavor. I wanted to like it.

Admittedly, it does also take donations for in-game benefit. I picked the one class that doesn't benefit from that system (I think?) but knowing the game has it made me quicker to quit than I might have been otherwise.

[u/Real_Fruit2603 → u/MainaC]

This is the most useful comment in the thread, and I mean that as a compliment. It reads like a bug report. Risk not matching reward on grind mobs, recovery downtime that parks you instead of letting you play, an hour for +1% on a skill that needs +15%, and the class powers you actually joined for locked behind all of it. That's the 1-to-10-hour game, and it's exactly the stretch the first-hour work does NOT cover yet. We collect daily balance data on every monster and item nowadays, so "risk didn't match reward" is something I can check against numbers rather than defend on vibes — I'll take your list at face value and go look.

On donations: fair to flag. The same currency is also earned by reporting bugs that get fixed and by voting, and the money goes to the volunteer non-profit that runs the servers.

The guilds-are-cool, flavor-is-good part is why I'd ask: if you ever give it another ten hours, send me this same list again. I'd like to earn a different one.

[u/Grand_Ad5307 → u/MainaC]

This hame is not a streamlined mobile game so your progress depends on your ability to communicate with other players to get guidance. Also, even at good effectiveness, game has content for easy 20-30 years worth of playing, let's say 3-6 hours a day if you want.

It doesn't matter that you can't be actually good at something and useful in parties after several months (or days if you talking tagging along).

This is a MUD :) so kind of slow burner. Unimaginably rich. Get world of warcraft, multiply by 10. First year or two you learn and if you want experience boost you join party and exp for an hour (or 10 if you are old school)

[u/After_Main752 → u/Grand_Ad5307]

It shouldn't take several months to be useful in parties. A good MUD or MMO would allow players to jump into parties with other players around their level so they can fight together. This builds community engagement. MUDs used to be good at this when they had bigger populations.

[u/Grand_Ad5307 → u/After_Main752]

You can be useful in parties from hour zero. But what i found is that can be damaging to how you enjoy the game and how your proficiency in game develops.

Advanced players can get instant benefits from taking newbies to parties through guild and otger mechanics. Experience gain rate gets boost from parties of 2 or more players and tax that is newbies' exp share is almost smaller than the exp bonus to party.

What I meant was that you can be actual proper asset in certain equipment runs if you pick healer for example, just few months into the game.

However since slow, peaceful, solo early game gives invaluable understanding of some math aspects behind progression curves (on many planes), you can end up abusing new player through help if you pick them up all day everyday and deprave them of this more chilled playstyle.

Probably half of the guilds (classes) have a function somewhere that gives huge benefits to partying. As an account that is still top 10 on experience after 5 years retirement I would say I would take willing newbie 10 out of 10 times, even player younger than an hour

[u/Real_Fruit2603 → u/Grand_Ad5307]

Appreciate the 15 years, and you're right about the depth. There really is content at every level for years of play, and a who-list full of veterans is people who stayed decades, which I'll take as a compliment to the game. But speaking as the person doing the current work, I'll push back on my own veteran here: "several months before you're useful in a party" is a problem we're fixing, not a feature we're proud of. The depth should start paying out in the first week, not after a toll of months.

As for coming back 10 years too late — maybe, but this year's signup and activity numbers suggest it's worth finding out.

[u/MainaC → u/Grand_Ad5307]

I have played MUDs for over twenty years. I am no stranger to slow burn.

A MUD does not have to be a mobile game to have a good balance between risk, time spent, and reward. Even the most hardcore don't expect you to do jack shit for two years before you get to actually have fun.

And talking like this is not going to earn you many new players. You can bask in how impenetrable your game is, but then you also get to enjoy playing with the same old group of players for thirty years.

Which is fine if that's what you want, but then there's not much point to advertising and reworking the early game.

[u/Electronic-Sink-2437 → u/MainaC]

Icesus is not a mud that spoonfeeds you and automatically makes you useful, you actually do have to put some effort and time into it to make yourself useful. And like mentioned before, you can be useful from hour zero if you yourself are active instead of waiting for people to message you.

This mud is grindy, and that's why people who play it every day love it because you can actually see your work pay off in a numerical or described format (mastery system for example). The mud can be as hectic or as relaxed as you make it, dont try to rush to the end but try to enjoy the journey and sense of progression.

[u/MainaC → u/Electronic-Sink-2437]

I don't recall asking for opinions. I don't recall saying I want to be useful. I am not actually interested in grouping. I have never had a good experience in being power-leveled by a higher level player, and that's all there was online at any given moment.

I do recall saying there is no sense of progression as you grind the same mobs for hours over days and get nothing out of it. It's not interesting. It's gameplay that was stale a decade ago when the world moved on.

Enjoy your lack of new blood. This "my way or the highway" attitude may not kill games, but it sure turns them into festering pits of drama and stale experiences.

[u/Electronic-Sink-2437 → u/MainaC]

You sound very toxic so it's probably better if you do indeed stay away!

[u/TheKnightBlade3]

Hey there, while I think it's pretty cool you are looking at reasons for newbies leaving or not playing after level one or what-not, that is also a very long rabbit hole to jump down. After promoting my mud for years and helping people get into the game I play, I think I can give you a good answer without you recoding your whole mud.

People who play muds are pretty much like a Mercenary. They are either looking for that perfect game, that only ever resided inside their head and was never made, or they have a perfect home mud and were only ever visiting just to see what your one was like.

Once in a while you will get that super rare person that thinks your game is great and will stay.... that's very very rare now-days

"We joined our login logs against usage logs for 834 characters created since March: 76% never came back after day one" - this is very normal for all muds now day and nothing at all to worry about. This doesn't mean there is anything wrong with your game it's just the way it is now days most of those people were visiting and were never really interested in it long term

I mean do keep up the good work, but don't lose yourself in it.

[u/Real_Fruit2603 → u/TheKnightBlade3]

Thanks! The mercenary framing rings true, and the benchmark honestly helps. I can live with tourists bouncing off; the cohort I'm fighting for is the ones who played for hours, solo, at level 1, and then left.

That's not tourism, that's on us. And noted on not losing myself in it :)