- Patreon isn't the ideal subscription service but it was the most lightweight tool we could find for the job since some users wanted to contribute and it didn't make sense to integrate a full payment platform right now. Is there a particular reason that you find it off-putting?
- Telnet actually came up recently on the Discord. It's something we might do, but would take a fair bit of work and loses out on some of the UI we've incorporated to try to make combat a little more engaging like cool down timers and cast bars. That said, we're not opposed to it if there's enough demand and people would actually use it.
- We've actually had a few visually impaired players and gotten some very useful feedback! There is a 'Use Accessibility Layout' option that tries to optimize the experience for screenreaders, although there is likely room for iteration.
- That's a fair point and may be tough to optimize to the same degree while taking advantage of the more modern frameworks that make the platform (hopefully) more user-friendly. That said, there's probably some refinement that could be done there to at least help a little and I would imagine that once in-game, the packets going back and forth don't put too much strain on the connection.
Always good to hear from people who know the space!
I'm extremely happy to hear that visually impaired players are accounted for. It was always one of my personal 'hills to die on' in MUD development.
As for Patreon, it's just personal preference. I just want to be able to put in my card details and go - Patreon makes me juggle Yet Another Account and, if you aren't a Patreon user already, the time to get a subscription is highly increased. Anecdotally, I'm not the only one I know who feels this way. I spent years just avoiding anything that made me sign up for a Patreon account just to avoid the hassle of it, and only caved in to support a friend's project. I know some who will still just see Patreon and run the other direction. It also might just be me, but I have horrible luck with services that integrate with it - it won't link the patreon account or recognise that I'm paying, and I need to get manual intervention on getting the thing I'm subscribing to.
Accessibility on the other hand is 100% a good thing to implement. Text adventures are more than any other medium theaters of the mind, and any additions you make to them should fall back gracefully to that core idea.
I believe that MUD developers' fixation on telnet support has been a major contributor[0] to the ongoing decline in popularity of MUDs over the last decade. It's a terrible protocol on which to build a multiplayer game. Supporting it as an option requires some kind of server-side content rendering layer which can be inherently restrictive to your other client offerings.
[0] There are others, yes. Particularly licensing issues and gameplay norms.
The group of people who play MUDs "traditionally" (with a dedicated, telnet-based MUD client) is small and shrinking every year.
The group of people who play lo-fi, retro-style games is large and growing every year.
Why give special treatment to the former group if it hinders your ability to appeal to the latter group?
It should be no more restrictive than the concept of supporting text rendering at all--which maybe want to be able to avoid?--as, worst case, you could literally just run a text client on a server on behalf of the user.
Now, this is not a hard requirement of the telnet protocol, for sure. ANSI controls exist, as do various sub-protocols, but support for these is mixed across telnet clients and therefore can't be relied on (unless you're willing to say your game can only be played by a subset of telnet clients, I suppose).
I haven't had time to play with it, but I do have three (or 2.5) pieces of feedback based off reading the documentation.
1. Service subscriptions are solid, and using them for multiplayer access is entirely reasonable here. $15/mo isn't actually very much for that, especially since hosting is handled, so that's an exquisitely low barrier to entry for that. That said, Patreon is a big turn-off for a lot of people (including myself, though I'm not necessarily your target audience either).
2. Lack of telnet connection on multiplayer worlds is a big hurdle. Most MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs are telnet-based, and by not making this a way to connect, you are effectively turning away ~30 years of software written, and a good percentage of the people who have grown used to this software. In the MUD I worked on, I still had players using zMUD because it's what they preferred and what they had things built for, despite it not having been maintained for years and not being able to use several features of the MUD as a result (xterm colour, MXP, GMCP and other telnet subnegotiation protocols).
2.5. VIPs (Visually Impaired Persons/Players) and accessibility. This is one of the largest userbases for a MUD or IF game, as other games that are accessible to them are somewhat rare. I cannot speak to how screenreader-friendly your web client is, but telnet access lets them use clients that already are compatible and integrated with screenreaders.
2.75. Players with terrible internet. Many countries have great internet. Many countries, and even parts of countries that would otherwise have great internet, do not. A lot of players I've met in MUDs played them not because they were enthusiasts, but because they were more friendly to slow connections with high latency. Throttling my connection to some test settings I used for testing data flow to a couple players so I could recommend settings to them and test things for them, your client and the initial screen of the game you have on your homepage linked to the "Play" button is 44s.
There is a chance none of these are concerns for you, and that is an entirely fair decision - you can't develop for everybody. But I hope this is useful feedback.