I believe that a big part of getting your image across and allowing the players to experience CF as you guys would want the players to experience it, especially as newbies, would be a CF client. This client would have to be the identity of cf and represent the game to anyone who downloads it. It may contain custom sounds or messages, built in help (which isnt IC), item help, area maps that you have access to IC, etc. Maybe it can incorporate a tutorial about CF and how things work in this world in which they are about to enter.

The client is a big part of game marketing simply because it controls the channel through which people access CF and controls the image you wish to present. Many new players dont know of mud clients and even if they did its difficult to customize it to CF for someone like me. It took me a year to find out Zmud existed. Telnet may ruin the experience for many who start.

This is believe would be a first and crucial step to getting people who have never mudded to even try CF, especially if you wish to go out into the big world for players.

I'd probably give people a message about how to download it in the academy.

Also, I think it would be useful if it had real areas in. Say, From Galadon to shadow grove (even include shadow grove), eastern road (but not Hamsah) and offshoot areas (grove, aldevari etc).

Maybe include northern plains, Tir Talith, Udgaard etc.

That would enable people to know their basic way around too.

As someone who is rather new to CF but not to muds, as I played a mud called darkness falls 1 and 2 (daoc was a spinoff of this game) for as long as it was out, I would say that yes, a client would help a great deal, but the biggest point of a client would not only be to look nicer and more organized, it would also allow, as he said, a map feature. DFC had maps for the (3) towns and some of the surrounding lowbie areas, and it aided in making the game FAR less intimidating because one has a least some early visual stimulus that allows for the transition to pure-text go a little easier.

CF is incredibly intimidating because when you first start you dont even have the means to explore your starting city without tracking your movements to get back or by recalling. For me at least, the in game maps werent a ton of help, but the ones on dikuclan were.

I dont know if there would be any problems with the creation of a CF-only client, but it would probably be the single most user friendly thing you could do.

just my feelings and i dont want this to detract from my previous statements...but CF seems like a really really fun game, but it really likes to throw up walls to the fun for me. In a lot of ways it feels like reaching into a pile of pins to get the key to the fun behind the door. I feel if i didnt already have prior mud knowledge and i didnt really really want to learn about and get into this game, i would have given up. Adding in a few maps of cities on a client would break down one of the biggest walls i faced.

and i found the game looking for other muds to play that could compare with DFC.