Anyone interested in MUDs?

I tried asking about this on /v/ a few days ago, and the only response I got was that MUDs were a dead genre from one guy.

However, because Veeky Forums is basically the quintessential roleplaying board, I was wondering if anyone here was deep into any MUD games?

I've recently been playing a game called Achaea, and I was surprised by how much the concept of these games intrigued me.

But I've been having difficulty really establishing a rapport with anyone I met, mainly because A) Interactions with people around my own level are confused and awkward because we don't know much about what the fuck is going on, and B) Interactions with any veterans are weird and cryptic because their understanding of how the game and its social dynamics work are way different than mine.

Also, though most people are chill I keep stumbling upon interactions with weird autists. I guess that just sort of happens.

Anyway, general MUD thread.

I've tried to get into MUDs too and it is a challenge. There's only a few MUDs with huge large populations and the smaller niche ones have the same 10 people that have been playing since the 90s and tend to be a circlejerk of OP characters and old friends.

I think I like the idea of it far more than the reality. It's an incredible historical curiosity of both video games and roleplaying games.

I have no recs for MUDs, but I'd love to try one based off an existing RPG to maybe help with learning how the fuck things work. I found one WoD MUD that wasn't dead, but that's all.

The only two that I know of that are relatively healthy are Aardwolf and Achaea.

Aardwolf is more active, having around 250 or so players at peak times, but honestly I just sort of dislike that game's feel.

Achaea has like 150 or so players on a good day, which really isn't a lot. This lends itself to the feeling that you the players either already know everyone or are total outsiders.

I'm not having difficulty learning the controls or how to play (There is some annoying shit related to how combat and afflictions work, but whatever.), my main problem is that the people I'm meeting just don't seem very cordial.

Even when there's 20 people online in my characters city, I just plain don't see anyone talking like normal people or anything, I'm starting to get the sense that most of the actual conversations are going on entirely in private messages and parties and I'm just sort of shit out of luck unless I can break into some kind of private circle, which poses a huge problem as I won't know whether or not the people I'm dealing with are cringey fucktards unless I can get them to open up to me.

Eh, 150 is still quite a bit. If you think about when these games were in their heyday back in the 80s-90s 20+ was a large number. It's just that now it's all very cliquey and that makes it hard to break in to. Everyone is best friends on smaller servers so new blood is rare.

Also as a note about numbers not all of those are active players. Look at a "who" list and you'll see a shitload that have been on for months. A lot of people just leave it open in the background constantly and use it for social reasons or it'll be just to artificially inflate the numbers.

I tried playing a Game of Thrones MUD, Blood of Dragons. It has a permalink on the Wiki of Ice and Fire.

It was a very weird experience. It's run by the two people who are the heads of the wiki and also helped GRRM write his World of Ice & Fire book (basically the campaign guide). You had to go through the tutorial to know the basic commands, and if successful you went to the next phase of picking a character. There was a huge list of mentioned characters, set up just like a wiki, with links to other characters.

You couldn't just make your own character, or your own name, you had to choose someone who was mentioned in passing but wasn't controlled by a player. THEN the two who ran the MUD would accept you once you took the character you chose, added a bit to him while showing you did your homework by mentioning other characters who were linked in the chosen character's page.

The process was fucking autistic, it felt very controlled by the two head honchos and felt like a private club for the "OG" GoT crowd. Worst part was I got through it, and once I was in the MUD, I had no idea what to do beyond the basic commands the tutorial showed me. So I just bailed.

I think MUD communities have slowly cloistered themselves off.
I used to play Realms of Despair like...Jesus, 19 years ago? I'd come back to it every now again. Plus a bunch of others based on SMAUG, and a few others, including Achaea.

A year or two ago I went back on Realms to check it out. There were a lot of buffbots and stuff, not many people talking and the ones that did were pretty rude and unhelpful. You used to be able to see up to 1000 concurrent players back in its day, with quite a bit of chat traffic.

I think their decline has led to them mostly being populated by a certain kind of person - like the kind who really enjoys being a forum moderator.

What can I do to get inside the kobold slave?

>n
>n
>w
>w
>n
>enter kobold slave
>"I don't know how to enter kobold slave."
>open kobold slave door
>"The kobold slave does not have a door."
>penetrate kobold slave
>"What do you want to penetrate the kobold slave with?"
>my dick
>"You are not carrying a my dick."
>Goddammit this $@(*&%$ word parser!
>"You fuck the word parser hard. It looks pleased."

A generally good idea with Achaea is to try and develop a rapport within your House with a mentor. Have them take you around, introduce you to people, and so on. Failing that, you can always just wander up to people and try RPing with them, find a conversational thread, and so on.

Some of Achaea's cities are better at this than others. The evil city is remarkably good at it, and they have a custom newbie clan to ensure people know that they aren't all try hard fedora edgelords.

Also, get your mentor or a house/city mentor (ambassador aide) to maybe take you bashing for a bit or something. They have those jobs for a reason, they're supposed to be helping novices.

>source: played Achaea for several years

I went through a big try all the muds phase lately. Most of the big name roleplay intensive muds are filled little circlejerks of vetran players who either ignore or make life hell for newbies, and a lot of the non-rpi ones are just super grindy from day 1.

I would recomend Alter Aeon, Icesus, Batmud, Genesis, and 3scapes as all pretty good tand different enough so something might strike your fancy.
>Others I would kind of recommend
Empiremud is mostly empty but interesting as you can build your own empire as well as your character, kind of a very casual dwarf fort feel to it.
Aardwolf has a heap of people for a mud and doesn't have anything huge issues but it never appealed to me.
IRE games are big on pvp and pay to win as all fuck, even pay to progress at higher levels really, but they happen to unfortunately also have good roleplaying, fluff and mechanics. Just be warned that if you aren't going to be a whale and throw down hundreds or even thousands of dollars it will take an eternity of grinding to be half as good and expect some crazy stockholm syndrome from the long time players about this.

I used to play Revelations Lands of Kaldana all the time, then it died and I haven't really been able to find another one. BatMud I've meesed around with but I haven't gotten the time to actually play it.

>I think their decline has led to them mostly being populated by a certain kind of person - like the kind who really enjoys being a forum moderator.
Yeah, I feel that.

They seem to be really verbose when they're telling you what to do or they are copying stuff from pre-prepared document, but they become kind of stiff when I just walk right up and start talking.

I want to fuck the word parser pretty badly.

I won't mention what city I'm in (Because I've already flagrantly dropped the word "autist" and I don't need to have my character outed as belonging to a Veeky Forums shitposter.), but I've been following your advice as much as I can.

My complaint isn't that they aren't being helpful really, because they do pretty much whatever I've asked and answered all of my questions. It's more that they seem to become really stiff and inorganic when I just start trying to talk normally without asking for help or something.

I've heard that Mahldor (The evil city) is really fucking good at roleplaying when compared to the rest, yeah. But I simply don't have the personality type to join them in that shit. Also, I've heard that of all the cities they're actually the weakest, which is kind of amusing considering all the shit they talk about how the strong should rule over the weak.

Sounds like the whole thing would work better if you reset the server and rolled new characters every few months. Maybe with randomly assigned factions after your first trip.

Some people just won't know what to do when interacted with, or otherwise it might seem quiet because the players are off doing things. They might be sailing, speaking with IG family, PvP, PvE, or just sitting at their afk spot shittalking on ooc clans.

Right now the game just got a whole new combat spec for the Monk class, too, so expect all the PvP players to be distracted for a week or two.

I played HellMoo once for the novelty but I got stuck inside the sewers and gave up

Is Achaea still rampant with "Might makes Right" and "Advancing in a class involves doing actual fucking homework like you just enrolled in Make Believe U" issues?

Gemstone 4 is still a thing. I know a few older guys that play it, they seem to have a good time

Depends on what city you're in. In the evil city you get might makes right bullshit, in the spooky city you have to do homework on the game's lore, in the nature city you need to be furfag, etc.

Within the cities themselves there's some variation depending on who you associate yourself with, too.

If you're in Hashan and don't want to do homework on proper ritual bullshit (That is literally only roleplay, and not a proper game mechanic.), you can just join the house that doesn't care.

But to be honest, if you're going to play a roleplaying game, you may as well just go with the flow. It's only homeword bullshit if you treat it like it's bullshit. And if you join the homework bullshit city, or the evil bullshit city, nature bullshit, Paladin bullshit city, whatever, you really have no right to complain that the roleplay you're being exposed to is the wrong kind of RP bullshit for you.

It's fucking make believe, and some people take it more serious than others. If you don't want to play along with their shit, associate with other people.

There's a strong push to get rid of homework ish stuff. You still need to learn about the factional ethos, but it isn't too complex, and within those boundaries there's reasonable space to do whatever. Take a foundation and guidelines, and build on it.

It helped that the admin explicitly slapped down for a while on anybody trying to institute essay-like tasks. Orders are the most work to get into, but they're more intensive generally.

There is still a might makes right in some cities, but it's also talk-shit-get-hit.

You can just embrace your class as a particular level now. No more guilds controlling your class skills, with the sole exception of two factional skills (Necromancy and Devotion) that have some limitations attached because said skills derive directly from gods and thus there is a mortal player assigned to watch over them and make sure they don't get abused or such. But stick within factional like that, and you wouldn't have a problem with it really.

I used to play MUDs for a long, long time and a lot of what is said in this thread is certainly true. With the advent of MMOS and other games it is pretty much a dead medium.

One chronic and catastrophic problem for MUDS in general was certainly toxic leadership. I've seen far too many places go through the following process.

>Wizards/mods make a friend an immortal/leader
>Friend in question is a total cunt
>Friend starts to do cunt things to the players
>Players start to leave or give up due to cunt behaviour.
>No players left to bully, the Friend then leaves
>Mud is now an empty husk.

Circlejerks are absolutely poisonous and it's almost certainly what helped contribute to the death of the medium. PVP was similar too. There was only two types of pk'er. Green Rookies who would mash the keyboard or Turbo-autists with every single "I WIN" script and macro under the sun. These same people tended to be more inclined to murder new players outright rather than teach them. The wanking of said ego would lead to the decline as I mentioned above.

It's a shame really. I made some fantastic friends and it was a good way to rp quietly with an expansive group of people. I know of some people who waited until all the cunts had bled the game they loved dry, bought the server from them then started entirely afresh, vowing to never let the same thing happen to them. Unfortunately, you can count the playerbase on one hand. MUDs aren't exactly easy to break into or stumble upon by accident either.

I've not tried any of the bigger muds, but with how time consuming MUDS ultimately turned out to be, I doubt I'll have the time to invest myself. Either way, that's my experience with them.

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MUDs are a shitty medium for PvP and bad to mediocre for combat in general. RP Intensive MUDs are dying too. Just about all coders have moved on to greener pastures, so there's nothing of note being developed. The only thing that comes to mind is Shadows of Isildur, which underwent a years-long botched "expansion" and became a treehouse with more builders than players. Now, it's a very welcoming treehouse and the staff does its best with what they have, but it's kinda dull since not a lot goes on there, since there's only the same old people there. A pity too, since I lost years of my life playing it (until it started going to shit over things like javascript:quote('53369571'); )

Erm..

Arctic MUD, based loosely on dragonlance is incredibly deep in both pvp and content.

How is the ERP? Up to the standards of Shang and Flexible Survival?

I will never forget that one time my orc brought a female PC to the cult base and the other goblin unsubtly suggested that "rape was allowed in the rules".

"...but only if I'm watching!"

IMMs do tend to linger by people fucking and save it or burst into the room in some way, shape or form.

It was pretty silly too. The Gondorian fat cat crafters in the low combat area were all bored, so they ERP'd each other while waiting for DM assistance with plots.

And then there were the Mordor players, who were outraged when the staff got tired of the rampant rapes and made rules against it.

That's really discouraging.

As I said, I'm really fucking intrigued by the potential of the concept, but it does seem like a pretty large investment for something that may turn out really lukewarm if the the playerbase turns out to be dead or fucked up in some critical manner.

As for PvP, I myself am a pretty cancerous munchkin, so I've been creeping around the forums trying to learn how to use macros. I just can't stand the idea of being some greenhorn that can't handle himself, so I'm striving to be the best, but as you said, the mechanics for these games require autism rather than skill to really master, so I keep getting insecure as to why I'm even bothering.

>The community and roleplay are the draws, but they might be fucked up beyond my knowledge and I won't find out until I break in.

>The game mechanics are cool and allow for some versatility, but I also get frustrated with it being pretty fucking pointlessly dense and requiring me to script in order to get good.

>Achaea has some pretty strong pay to win undercurrents. I could reach level 100 and have 500 lessons to spread among my skills, or I could just spend 10 bucks on 1000 immediately, which is fucking gay.

>I'm waffling hard on whether or not I should ENJOY the homework my house is making me do as part of roleplaying, or whether or not I should be fucking annoyed that I'm just being told to read quietly and get back to them once I can "prove" myself. I still don't know whether I should be irritated or not.

That's my bullet point list of what I'm dealing with right now. But ALL of those things are theoretically easily fixable, but it's not going to happen because the genre is anemic, and it fucking sucks.

A polished, highly developed MUD with some money behind it would be amazing. Or just one with a lot of dedicated coders.

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