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