WoTMUD, the Wheel of Time MUD, is something I sunk so, so, so many hours into in the 90s. It’s still around too, and was officially sanctioned by the late Robert Jordan himself. Had/has the most intense and fun PK/PvP of any online game I’ve ever played. Played it a bit again during the pandemic and surprisingly still holds up as fun some 25 years later.
Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
111–120 of 135 posts
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#112Plug of my favorite MUD growing up which still is running https://alteraeon.com
Had lots of fun running my own modified DikuMUD for a while. It’s a great outlet for creative writing.
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#113MUDs 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
Since you run the place, I'll state here that it would be nice if I could look at your web site and decide if I'm interested before being hit with a pop-up window asking me to sign up for a newsletter. How do I know if I want your newsletter, if I haven't figured out what your product is? Window closed. Sale lost.
Yeh I have had made this point and had it changed on some of the sites I work on - immediately popping up a call to action is counter productive.
It might also hurt your SEO as well
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#114Way back in the day (1985) I was figuring out how to do timeslicing on a 4MHz Z80, and once I had it working on multiple terminals I slung a simple MUD on it (Shades). Connecting it to a couple of modems (this was the days when BB's were the thing) got people playing, at which point British Telecom's Prestel/Micronet decided they'd like to run it on their system. The demand was sufficient that it kept crashing the en…
Hi Hazeii
LTNS I remember playing on shades (TG and Prestel) and going to some of the meets with Cuthulu (we both worked for Telecom Gold / Prestel)
I was Mouser on Shades I believe
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#115I am the maintainer of FluffOS, (www.fluffos.info), a mud game engine.
MUD is my entry point to programming and I thought I can continue work on making MudOS better.
If anyone would like to get in touch, please join Gitter.im/fluffos
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
(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…
I tried Achaea after I got too frustrated with MUME. What turned me off wasn't the way people could pay to avoid grind, but rather how you absolutely needed a client script for combat. If you didn't have some kind of script that provided automated reactions, PVE was really hard and you couldn't even consider PVP. And, of course, people who made the best scripts were charging for them.
That's true! I did very little combat overall -- I spent most of my time on the social side of the game -- but I did build a few of my own convenience scripts anyway, so the criticism is well-founded.
You can get by in PvE without anything overly complex, and it's honestly more fun to figure out how to deal with the damage and affliction patterns from individual monsters yourself than relying on an autocure system. (Achaea has strict rules on what goes beyond the line of "botting", too.) But yeah, PvP essentially required some automation to let you focus on tactics instead.
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#117Old-school MUDs are alright, but I'd love to see a modern reinterpretation of them that rethinks the interfaces and offers more democratized tools. For instance, I'd love rooms that could be populated with sounds, images, environmental effects, day/night cycles, and text effects. This would be purely ornamental and could be done in a way to support backward compatibility with text-only views, as I'd want to keep this…
I've actually been thinking about this and working on prototypes for years. The scope always spirals out of control. It started out as mobile-only game, migrated to web tech, current iteration is for VR...
In MUD the text interface gives impression that anything is possible. Even if you are using same 10 verbs for 99% of interaction, there's still illusion of so many actions and verbs to be discovered. Any idea how to capture this magic on mobile interface?
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#118MUDs 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...
Iron Realms games are pay to win enough to make every publisher jealous. Though they are some of the most involved/integrated communities of players/developers/tool-makers in likely any game at the moment.
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#119I loved playing on MUDs in the 90s. My friend and I were wizards on one that was called Shadow something-or-another. It was awesome to be able to script new adventures and play online with friends as a kid in middle school and high school.
Shadows of the mind?
No, iirc it was ShadowGate, but not that ShadowGate
Re: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried Achaea after I got too frustrated with MUME. What turned me off wasn't the way people could pay to avoid grind, but rather how you absolutely needed a client script for combat. If you didn't have some kind of script that provided automated reactions, PVE was really hard and you couldn't even consider PVP. And, of course, people who made the best scripts were charging for them.
That's true! I did very little combat overall -- I spent most of my time on the social side of the game -- but I did build a few of my own convenience scripts anyway, so the criticism is well-founded. You can get by in PvE without anything overly complex, and it's honestly more fun to figure out how to deal with the damage and affliction patterns from individual monsters yourself than relying on an autocure system. (…
Yeah, I remember the rules about "botting", too. I don't know if they changed a lot since I played, but back then they basically amounted to "don't automate your character to farm while idle". In light of the pay-to-avoid-grind system, it didn't take me too long to conclude that the rules were pretty much "don't affect our bottom line, anything else goes".