I played a Transformers MUSH when I was a teenager. It was great fun and some great memories with friends I’ve never met IRL. It’s a sort of play that becomes culturally less acceptable after a certain age.
Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
31–40 of 135 posts
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#32MUDs may be history to most people, but at Iron Realms we still have five commercial MUDs running live with dedicated paid staff on each constantly working to improve the gameplay and enlarge the already massive worlds. Honestly, it's pretty surprising to me, as when I launched our first one - Achaea - in 1997 right around when Ultima Online launched, I gave us five years. https://ironrealms.com
Wait, so people not only still play, but also actually pay for MUDs? OTOH, I managed to find the price list and seems to be quite heavily pay to win...
(context: I played Achaea without access to a source of cash)
Back when I played, you could buy "artefacts" with real money, but they were less "pay to win" and more "pay for convenience". They were definitely far more than mere cosmetic items, but it was more than possible to play without ever buying one.
Though I was always, always jealous when I saw somebody using wings. Those things took you to a kind of cloud teleportation hub where you could immediately jump to a number of places.
What was the code word... "Duanathar"?
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#33MUDs may be history to most people, but at Iron Realms we still have five commercial MUDs running live with dedicated paid staff on each constantly working to improve the gameplay and enlarge the already massive worlds. Honestly, it's pretty surprising to me, as when I launched our first one - Achaea - in 1997 right around when Ultima Online launched, I gave us five years. https://ironrealms.com
The combat system in Achaea was always so fascinating to me in terms of balance, but back when I was still playing it I was on bad dialup or satellite internet, which gave me a pretty big disadvantage against other people.
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#34And this is how I find out that macOS no longer includes telnet.
Found out as well.
brew install telnet
...and then I jumped into a MUD.
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#35My first mud experience was TFE back in the 90s at uni and I tanked psychology because of it. I decided to learn how to make my own (incidentally how I ended up in software engineering!) which never had a single player but 30~ developers for a period of 2-3 years hacking away on areas.. MUDs were the original community-coded-projects!
I have OFTEN considered the idea of writing a new MUD with the intention of bringing in a whole new realm of users to the genre but have never really worked out how to make it viable (I cannot see anyone funding a team to build a MUD startup)
I have some ideas though.. I think telnet is too intimidating for new players. The barrier to entry is too high. They need to work on mobile, they need to probably be some kind of browser-based experience with font styling and the lightest touch UI beyond the old '>' prompt.
If anyone's keen on dropping some coin I have 30 years of thinking on the subject and would happily leave my day job ;)
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, so people not only still play, but also actually pay for MUDs? OTOH, I managed to find the price list and seems to be quite heavily pay to win...
(context: I played Achaea without access to a source of cash) Back when I played, you could buy "artefacts" with real money, but they were less "pay to win" and more "pay for convenience". They were definitely far more than mere cosmetic items, but it was more than possible to play without ever buying one. Though I was always, always jealous when I saw somebody using wings. Those things took you to a kind of cloud te…
Depends on the item. Some of them were quite powerful, but even then, generally you'd get a 10% edge or an ability from another class. And people would often have macros to unequip all their artifacts for a fair duel.
The Lasallian Lyre is named after my character, but strangely enough, I never mastered the timing to make the best use of it. (A playable class was later based on some fiction I wrote for the official history, which arguably the most impact I've ever had on a product vision...)
Never thought I'd see Achaea discussed on HN. It was a deep influence on me, though my active time was a lifetime ago. Hi, Sarapis! Figured you'd like to know that Achaea, and of course Avalon before it (you were... Orthwein?) really did have a long-lasting impact. These games have always been deeply participatory: player-run guilds, player-run cities. At least at the time I played, you literally couldn't even get class abilities without joining a group and inheriting its political positions, friends, enemies. And although there were PvE quests, the majority of the game was about conflict between players, at the level of people, guilds, cities. That's a far cry from the theme-park nature of modern multiplayer RPGs like WoW.
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#37Chanced upon MUDs as a millennial due to the Discworld novels and the Discworld universe, spent my childhood laughing and playing in Discworld MUD, RIP Terry Pratchett http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/
I played that in the early 90s, my gf at the time was addicted to it and was a admin/creator and worked on the world of the gnomes.
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#38I used to spend quite a bit of time on the #emacs Freenode IRC channel, but then discovered Discworld MUD, which is like #emacs on steroids: more NPCs (though less advanced ones), more puns (not a fan of those personally, but they create an amusing atmosphere), more locations. It can be quite a time sink, but indeed a fun one. I'm finding it rather strange that those are not more popular, and would recommend to try t…
Wotcher!
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#39Chanced upon MUDs as a millennial due to the Discworld novels and the Discworld universe, spent my childhood laughing and playing in Discworld MUD, RIP Terry Pratchett http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/
Lawks!
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#40Chanced upon MUDs as a millennial due to the Discworld novels and the Discworld universe, spent my childhood laughing and playing in Discworld MUD, RIP Terry Pratchett http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/
I played that in the early 90s, my gf at the time was addicted to it and was a admin/creator and worked on the world of the gnomes.
Who was that? ^_^ I was a fluffy creator around then, discworld terminology for a visiting mud creator via the old inter-mud system