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In like middle school I was all over... PokeMUSH, I think? It was a MUSH based on Pokemon, with heavy influence from the anime and manga. There were hot shots who were authorized to play as the canon characters, and a lot of other people just doing the thing. You could play as a human or a pokemon. Sometimes one or more of the pokemon in your team were other players. I had a Totodile that was played by another person, whose schtick was "cute, but massively unhelpful." I was playing as a Team Rocket grunt, basically, so it was pretty appropriate. Anyway, it was kinda neat. You had to put in like a freakin job application to get into any of the organizations in the world. As a member of Team Rocket, I got my own "room" in the Team Rocket Secret Base, where I had scripting privileges to customize the description and objects in there. Looking back on it, it was all probably incredibly cringe-inducing stuff. The person playing Ash was a giant prima-donna who was based on I guess Gold/Silver-timeline Red. It was basically against the rules to defeat him, so any time Team Rocket showed up to clash against him it was just kind of performance art for the bystanders. My own character was like the worst weeaboo edgelord motherfucker that 8th-grade me could come up with: a Team Rocket grunt who carried an Authentic Japanese Katana, which he would use to like wade into battles and get into sword fights with enemy pokemon. Like the kind of poo poo I would make fun of nowadays, all Hanzo Steel and grimdark baditude.
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Feb 5, 2016 15:25
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deadly_pudding posted:Looking back on it, it was all probably incredibly cringe-inducing stuff. The person playing Ash was a giant prima-donna who was based on I guess Gold/Silver-timeline Red. It was basically against the rules to defeat him, so any time Team Rocket showed up to clash against him it was just kind of performance art for the bystanders. I believe I know about this Ash.
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Feb 6, 2016 05:06
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I played a MUSH based on Megaman more than a decade ago for a few years. It was the only way for me to socialize because I had no friends. Unfortunately, that meant I didn't really know how to act with people and was terrible. I'm surprised I ended up leaving of my own free will rather than getting kicked out. Those guys and gals were saints for letting me hang around. I remember one person being at least as bad as me (funnily enough we both played the same character at some point).
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Feb 9, 2016 12:57
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I think there's a lot of patience from most MUSH runners who have any years of experience in these communities. It'd be easy to kick out someone with social problems, but then you'd end up with a somewhat limited player base, so the better alternative is to let the "problem players" stick around, or so the logic seems to go. Some players DO get better with guidance/correction, after all.
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Feb 9, 2016 15:52
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For years later I'd sometimes remember my time there and think of going back to see what's new and apologize for being so poo poo. I don't even know if they're still up. I left when I was around 17-18, so around 12-13 years ago.
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Feb 9, 2016 16:00
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my cat is norris posted:I think there's a lot of patience from most MUSH runners who have any years of experience in these communities. It'd be easy to kick out someone with social problems, but then you'd end up with a somewhat limited player base, so the better alternative is to let the "problem players" stick around, or so the logic seems to go. Some players DO get better with guidance/correction, after all. Absolutely. While I can't speak from a staff perspective - back when I staffed things, I tended to focus away from the PR side of things because I was much less willing to compromise then than I am now - I can speak from a prolific scene-runner perspective. While I understand the idea that you can't just run out problem players (because it's wholly subjective), I think it's pretty ridiculous that there's no will to corral them. If the problem players are seen as getting away with things, or not improving, then players leave - and, frankly, the players that leave tend to be of better quality. I've seen players degenerate because no one wants to step in. I've had plots derailed by players who go over my head and radically misinterpret things to staff, and then get belligerent when I express a lot of displeasure in that. And don't even get me started on players who don't do anything except peanut gallery scenes, even going so far as to report you to staff over developments they don't personally like. Things like that need to be quashed and quashed hard and publicly. You don't need to name names but you put up a public notice telling people to cut it out. You can't run a MUSH or MUD like a liberal democracy, it's unwieldy in implementation and impossible in reality. You've gotta wrangle players half the time and make sure they're actually doing things right. It's no different to teaching students. You need to lead and demonstrate how to do things correctly, then help them out with it, and eventually they should internalize it. But at the same time, you need to be prepared to drop the hammer and stop playing nice because a lot of players will take and take and take your patience to the absolute limit. Going back to MCM for a moment, I'm willing to state that these kinds of behaviors not getting dealt with by staff - or not dealt with in a way that makes it seem like action is being taken - is one of the significant reasons that player count is dropping. The Phlegmatist posted:I agree with this. If you have a schizophrenic break because a virtual dwarf said something nasty to your virtual elf, you probably weren't going to have the most mentally stable life to begin with. HellMOO had a very funny story about this kind of thing. A player in my corporation (from the US) started up a LDR with another player in Australia. It was... suitably dramatic. Unfortunately, it was about ten years ago and I don't remember too much about it beyond nebulous details and usernames. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Feb 10, 2016 |
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Feb 10, 2016 03:24
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Milky Moor posted:Going back to MCM for a moment, I'm willing to state that these kinds of behaviors not getting dealt with by staff - or not dealt with in a way that makes it seem like action is being taken - is one of the significant reasons that player count is dropping. There's only so much staff can DO about this issue, in MCM's defense. You can't run the playerbase like a dictatorship and expect people to stick around, either. If staff takes too hard a line, then players get frightened off, and a bad reputation forms. If staff goes too soft, then a bad reputation develops for other reasons. I mean, you can't apply the same treatment method to every player universally in a MUSH -- every person is unique in how they should be handled -- but since you can't do that, then how do you decide who to punish and when, and what angle to take? Whenever your bureaucracy gets bogged down in asking these questions, things slow down, fires don't get put out, etc. I think it's just more obvious a thing on MCM because more players = more problems, and the staff gets kind of overwhelmed. I'd love to see the game's playerbase stabilize and get back to having fun. I really hope, speaking from the outside, that MCM's on that course. Unfortunately, I have no clue! I avoid talking MUSH stuff with the people I'm still in touch with, so... 
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Feb 10, 2016 14:06
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Zanzibar Ham posted:For years later I'd sometimes remember my time there and think of going back to see what's new and apologize for being so poo poo. I don't even know if they're still up. I left when I was around 17-18, so around 12-13 years ago. If it's the one I'm thinking of, it might be closed. If it was M3, I think it's still around? Whether or not the same players are is another question. What's the longest-running MUSH right now?
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Feb 10, 2016 14:12
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I can't really tell you. If it matters, it had characters from both the classic Megaman, and X, and they just recently started adding from Zero when I left. I'm less sure about this, but maybe the Bonne family was also there.
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Feb 10, 2016 14:37
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I used to do these things a good bit, starting with the AOL Terris mud and the last one I played was a green dragon variant called Improbable Island. I always got the feeling that whole branch had little overlap with traditional mushers, it was larger than most but have you ever heard of it? Eventually I realized games like MUSH(the twinoid game not the genre) offered everything I liked about MU** and more with the added benefit of total world wipes one to thirty days after starting, which combined with the permadeath really put a kink in getting too attached to your character, and the solution to drama being killing the offenders. (Basically, SS13 without having to be online at the same time as everyone else for a dedicated block) Still got some amazing roleplay though. I don't even do that anymore though because I realized that in the end it was still a waste of time (they were arguably even more time consuming than MU*s, with daily deadlines for activities), and there were plenty of far healthier real life outlets for socialization. (I also had a kid, which sort of doesn't leave much room for time sink games) GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Feb 10, 2016 |
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Feb 10, 2016 18:54
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I loved Terris! Never got too far along into it -- barely defeated that Turpin fellow -- but I had a lot of fun. Still have a physical copy of the players guide that got printed back in the day.
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Feb 11, 2016 03:35
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my cat is norris posted:What's the longest-running MUSH right now? Sadly? Probably Shangri-la.
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Feb 11, 2016 04:11
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Sadly? Probably Shangri-la. I don't think so. Shang is definitely up there, but I'm fairly sure it started around 2000. LambdaMOO is still active, as well as Tapestries - the furry version of Shang. Both of those come from the early Nineties. GlyphGryph posted:Eventually I realized games like MUSH(the twinoid game not the genre) offered everything I liked about MU** and more with the added benefit of total world wipes one to thirty days after starting, which combined with the permadeath really put a kink in getting too attached to your character, and the solution to drama being killing the offenders. (Basically, SS13 without having to be online at the same time as everyone else for a dedicated block) Still got some amazing roleplay though. HellMOO would 'pwipe' every twelve months or so. I always thought that was great. The first time, they had a big alien invasion sort of thing. Another time, there was a button in the starting city which you got to push to end the world. Whoever pushed the button would have a statue immortalizing themselves doing it. So, of course, a massive brawl broke out.
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Feb 11, 2016 04:31
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Sadly? Probably Shangri-la. I think it would probably be FurryMUCK.. Or as mentioned, Tapestries. Both are absolutely ancient.
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Feb 11, 2016 09:12
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Camrath posted:I think it would probably be FurryMUCK.. Or as mentioned, Tapestries. Both are absolutely ancient. My (extremely) brief research says October 1991 for Tapestries, November 1990 for FurryMUCK and October 1990 for LambdaMOO. However, I've also found sources saying that FurryMUCK was opened in August of 1990. There seem to be a few conflicting sources. Personally, I've been under the impression that Lambda is the oldest still running.
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Feb 11, 2016 11:12
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Wow, since 1990? That's some serious dedication.  Regardless of the content, I can't help being impressed that those games have lasted so long.
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Feb 11, 2016 14:54
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Color me surprised that these are still a thing; that is, I knew a couple were still around, but so many? I messed around with these for the briefest periods in time. I was/am a huge fan of text based RPGs from the early 1980s; however, when it can to getting social interactions from games I bailed to GUI MMOs the day I was shown UO. I think it probably helped that I always had a healthy relationship with my computer. I had online friends since CompuServe and Prodigy in the really early 1990s, but still managed to keep the vast majority of my social network as real people that I physically saw on a daily basis. This made it far easier to transition into games that roughly fall into the same niche as MUDs, but are more fun from a gameplay perspective because I didn't have a bunch of friends I just couldn't leave.
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Feb 11, 2016 15:45
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my cat is norris posted:I loved Terris! Never got too far along into it -- barely defeated that Turpin fellow -- but I had a lot of fun. Still have a physical copy of the players guide that got printed back in the day. Terris actually still really has a special place in my heart just for having a whole lot of secrets and puzzle stuff, which many MUDs had a tiny bit of but few were willing to base entire dungeons around (at least in my experience). Milky Moor posted:HellMOO would 'pwipe' every twelve months or so. I always thought that was great. The first time, they had a big alien invasion sort of thing. Another time, there was a button in the starting city which you got to push to end the world. Whoever pushed the button would have a statue immortalizing themselves doing it. So, of course, a massive brawl broke out. That's pretty cool, I tried the game but thematically it just didn't do much for me so I never stuck around long enough to see a wipe in action.
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Feb 11, 2016 21:31
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GlyphGryph posted:Terris actually still really has a special place in my heart just for having a whole lot of secrets and puzzle stuff, which many MUDs had a tiny bit of but few were willing to base entire dungeons around (at least in my experience). The puzzles and secrets were what kept me mapping rooms! It was a lot of fun to figure out some of the random quests/puzzles/secrets throughout the first city alone (whatever that city was called). What I can't believe about this game is that a) it's still running and b) they still charge a subscription fee... http://www.legendsofterris.com/ -- get a free trial and delve into some nostalgia for a bit. 
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Feb 11, 2016 21:43
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my cat is norris posted:The puzzles and secrets were what kept me mapping rooms! It was a lot of fun to figure out some of the random quests/puzzles/secrets throughout the first city alone (whatever that city was called). Oh noooooo... no no way no way no how no no no... I have a life now drat it, I can't go back... I can't... Anyway, completely ignoring that link... I spent dozens upon dozens of hours drawing maps, and that was a great, great game for it. (I tried Armageddon once and ended up hating it because cartography is banned for most players and artlinking was banned for all of them, gently caress those guys and their dumb game because those are the two best parts of MUDs!) Exploration was definitely one of the best thing about MUDs (the other best parts being building areas for people to explore once you get your wizard permissions, drawing/sharing artwork, and working collaboratively to create some really interesting stories with other people). I did socialize quite a bit, and enjoyed it, but it wasn't generally hard to spot the lifestyle/wish fulfillment/drama-loving players and stay well away from them, and for the most part I did. I almost always ended up rolling with a crew of likeminded fellows, it's not like I wasn't social, but it was always clear that there was a large group of players that played for very different reason we were. I think my type of player has largely moved on to muiltiplayer sandbox games at this point, though. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Feb 11, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 21:53
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GlyphGryph posted:Oh noooooo... no no way no way no how no no no... I have a life now drat it, I can't go back... I can't... Anyway, completely ignoring that link... Ahahah, sorry to have tempted you. The free trial has a hard limit. I just like connecting now and again to see the world.
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Feb 12, 2016 01:28
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If someone was at all interested in getting into MU*'s how would they go about it and which ones are the least terrible/active right now? Ever since reading the HellMOO thread on Bay 12 I've been interested in these but never really made a serious attempt to play.
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Feb 12, 2016 06:06
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Talking about MUDs, the one I remember most is IIRC Dungeons of Despair. I'm pretty sure there was a whole bunch of MUDs that would rip whole parts out of DoD and just put their own spins on it. Kind of like a ROMhack, except it's a MUD, so MUDhack? e: looks it was Realms of Despair e2: Oh, and there was Darkness Falls, and the most I remember about that was calling myself Spinal, which apparently was some infamous player's name too, so people would PK me on sight. Also you had to roll for stats and drat did I hate that. Zanzibar Ham fucked around with this message at 08:08 on Feb 12, 2016 |
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Feb 12, 2016 08:00
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Before HellMOO I mainly played various diku type MUDs, but due to time constraints was never involved in roleplaying of any kind (once in achaea I had a valuable flask and gave it to someone much more powerful - it wasn't doing me any good). The combat was the most appealing to me, the quick action and ""roleplay" generated by in game actions. HellMOO had such an impact on me, after a background of diku based muds (which I have published several patches for), that when I went looking for a sci fi game, I couldn't find one, and just started my own: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3647005&userid=140458 It has been four years but the only reason to continue with it has been the amusement I get from coding new systems or features. I think it was LORD that got me hooked, and then playing Realms of Despair, KobraMud, and several other star wars themed muds.
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Feb 12, 2016 11:45
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mcclay posted:If someone was at all interested in getting into MU*'s how would they go about it and which ones are the least terrible/active right now? Ever since reading the HellMOO thread on Bay 12 I've been interested in these but never really made a serious attempt to play. It really depends on what you're looking for. A lot of MUDs are pretty archaic. Among all the ones I've played or tried, HellMOO is probably the most 'modern'. It depends on if you want something more like a text-based dungeon crawler with statistics to monitor, gear to loot, and all that sort of thing - of if you're interested in more freeform roleplaying (which is more the domain of MUSHes). Personally, I've always found MUDs that mix stat-based combat and stuff like that with roleplaying kind of awkward. I'd recommend HellMOO, really. I still log on to check it out every so often (my original charbit is still active) and it's still very active.
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Feb 12, 2016 11:59
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You know... I just remembered a weird sort of MU... I'm not sure if it's even a MU. It was on a website, and it actually sorta had 2 games, but you shared characters between them. The first was a single player dungeon crawler that was most like a MUD, though it wasn't purely text input, while the 2nd was a PvP arena where multiple people would duel each other. You picked a class at the start of the game, and as you levelled up you earned new abilities. You could also get more abilities by unlocking them in the single player game, and I think you could buy equipment with gold you got in both games. I think there was 'Dragon' somewhere in the name of the game or website, but that might be wrong... I tried searching for it some time ago but couldn't because I just had no clue where to start.
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Feb 12, 2016 12:59
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Oh! I remembered another MUD I used to play in high school. It was called Cursed Lands or Accursed Lands or something. It was like a crazy multiplayer WRPG with a million little subsystems, and a non-leveled XP system where you leveled up individual skills by using them, Elder Scrolls style. Its combat was all dice rolls, but it tracked damage to individual body parts. It was really cool. My friends and I used to hang out at this village called Pineview, I think? We mostly hung out and chatted while we leveled our woodworking skills by whittling things. Once you ran out of inventory space for lovely wooden bears, you just had to wander up north to the city and sell them off. You could also make a little more money by actually fighting things. I got my money to buy like actual weapons and armor by killing deer and selling the pelts, which was comically dangerous because the deer would fight back and all I had was a stick that I had sharpened on one end. Anyway, one time my buddy Eric decided that he was going to declare himself the King of Pineview. He put up flyers all over town and appointed a bunch of us his "Knights of the Crimson Cape", and we blockaded the village hall, which was where you had to go to buy food and other basic supplies, trying to charge people a tax to get in. There was full PVP, combat was really deadly, and you had to wait like 30 minutes of real time to respawn at the city's temple, so we figured people had to take us semi-seriously. About, I dunno, an hour into this venture, however, the entire village was suddenly overrun by some kind of dog-sized venomous arthropods that the "examine" function basically described as lobsters. The lobsters started slaughtering everybody in town, and we all barricaded ourselves in the village hall. We figured the lobsters couldn't operate doors... they Kool-Aid manned their way into the building and killed us anyway. For a long time, we assumed that it was retribution from the Gamemasters for attempting to form an impromptu player government without permission. Eric eventually got accepted as a Gamemaster himself and asked the others- they had no idea we had tried to assume control of Pineview- the just saw a lot of players concentrated there and decided to give us an event
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Feb 12, 2016 14:02
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mcclay posted:If someone was at all interested in getting into MU*'s how would they go about it and which ones are the least terrible/active right now? Ever since reading the HellMOO thread on Bay 12 I've been interested in these but never really made a serious attempt to play. Try this thread, too -- http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3647005
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Feb 12, 2016 15:00
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mcclay posted:If someone was at all interested in getting into MU*'s how would they go about it and which ones are the least terrible/active right now? Ever since reading the HellMOO thread on Bay 12 I've been interested in these but never really made a serious attempt to play. Depends seriously on what your interests aim towards. MUDs are *very* different from MUSHes and MOOs (and MUXes), there's huge differences within genres, and setting ends up being important too. Milky Moor is right, we kinda need more info before we can recommend anywhere.
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Feb 12, 2016 19:07
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I spent some time in the early 90s playing MozartMUD. I have bad memories of staying up to try to earn enough money for "rent" so that I could log off without losing my items. I actually liked them more than the later graphical MMORPGs I played.
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Feb 12, 2016 20:33
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I used to play a pvp-oriented MUD where you'd select a class based on the Godwars code but the classes came from video games. This was awesome when I was a kid because there were Saiyans from Dragonball, Citan from Xenogears, Jann-Lee from Dead or Alive, Blade from Blade, Akuma from Street Fighter, Holy Knights from Final Fantasy Tactics, Dante from Devil May Cry, Terry Bogard from Fatal Fury... They were named different things, but the "Lone Wolf" class could Burn Knuckle the gently caress out of people. It was fun for a long time. I also played Age of Chaos which was based on Wheel of Time even though I never read it and it was awesome. I have played a ton of MUDs but these were my favorite. My recommendation for someone wanting an "MMO like experience" from a MUD, I'd probably start with one of the Iron Realm games and use their browser which has a HUD that displays your lifebar and buttons and stuff so it's not just a complete text dump for the uninitiated. There are a ton of completely shallow MUDs I'd liken to Korean MMO games where they are grindy as gently caress for no reason. There's a ton of niche MUDs out there if you like Firefly or Warhammer or Star Trek or whatever but the best tend to be either original worlds or more broad genres. I also tend to like MUDs where the combat system isn't completely automated... if you are like this and want something complicated, try God Wars 2. God Wars 2 lets you control every limb (even extra ones like tails or whatever) to do combat in fun ways. It takes some getting used to, but the combat is probably the "deepest" in any MUD, and plays more like a fast-paced game of Toribash than the random hidden dice rolls where "you punch Giant Rat very hard". There's also games that abstract pencil & paper rules, like that Pathfinder MUD or all the World of Darkness MUSHes. Mudconnect.com is a huge database of MUDs that you can peruse based on genre, population, etc. but keep in mind some games actively reward players for voting and some have an application process that requires a vote even before you've actually played the game. TLDR: Try one of the iron realms games if you're a newbie, the differences between are most in theme. Try God Wars 2 if you like complicated combat. Stay away from insanely niche anime MUDs and poo poo. If you are one of those people who think World of Warcraft is dead because it has 12 million people left to populate the servers, try playing a game with 30,000+ "rooms" that is only populated on the regular by 10 people. MUDconnect will tell you in the info if the world is "stock" (you don't want this, you can basically download an entire stock game and change a few superficial text files and host it). With time you will recognize the quirks of certain codes in the same way you can have an opinion about, say, the Unreal engine or whatever on a graphical game. E: Cleaned it up a little. That's a lot of words about text games. E2: The most fun thing about MUDs is the games that try and do something different or more fantastic than what may be accomplished with graphics. Really taking advantage of the medium will give you a ton of options. Everything is text, so if the prose is good, your game can be as grand as any triple AAA game or blockbuster movie or whatever with just a little creativity. E3: I'd generally avoid MUX or MUSH unless you have a lot of time to infiltrate the circlejerk of whatever power players runs the game. I tried to get into The Reach which is an oWoD MUSH and had my character sidelined and killed for little reason other than "this isn't your story, new guy, and you can't play with us". Firstborn fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Feb 12, 2016 |
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Feb 12, 2016 22:27
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Firstborn posted:
The above is super true and why Dragonrealms always pulls at my heart, since I'd played it off and on since I was in elementary school through college.
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Feb 13, 2016 04:53
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mcclay posted:If someone was at all interested in getting into MU*'s how would they go about it and which ones are the least terrible/active right now? Ever since reading the HellMOO thread on Bay 12 I've been interested in these but never really made a serious attempt to play. DON'T DO IT. You are looking over the side of a hell you cannot possibly fathom. I am the guy who has dug out his own eyes and is saying "save youself from hell" in latin so you hopefully get the hint. Get off the ship before it warps again and you end up someplace terrible like taps where the furs fake-gently caress all day and all night and where there is no goodness or decency to be shared.
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Feb 14, 2016 03:13
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Now now, not all MU*s are bad. Some can actually be quite good. However, yes, the questioner is probably drastically underestimating how much time it takes to find a good MU* and then get into it.
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Feb 14, 2016 17:56
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Milky Moor posted:It really depends on what you're looking for. A lot of MUDs are pretty archaic. Among all the ones I've played or tried, HellMOO is probably the most 'modern'. It depends on if you want something more like a text-based dungeon crawler with statistics to monitor, gear to loot, and all that sort of thing - of if you're interested in more freeform roleplaying (which is more the domain of MUSHes). Personally, I've always found MUDs that mix stat-based combat and stuff like that with roleplaying kind of awkward. Didn't Hellmoo implode and catch fire and split into at least three mutually-antagonistic forks?
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Feb 15, 2016 09:13
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The Lone Badger posted:Didn't Hellmoo implode and catch fire and split into at least three mutually-antagonistic forks? It absolutely did. For a long time, there was HellMOO, After The Fall, and the name of the other escapes me. They split when HellMOO decided that they were tired of rampant griefing and PvP madness and made all combat consent-only. Which, for HellMOO, was basically a wholesale inversion of their combat and PvP model. So, those players made AtF which was basically HellMOO with a few changes and a focus on PvP, drama and griefing. AtF imploded due to one of the admin staff just flipping out one day, but the place was dead well before then. It turns out that constant unrelenting griefing doesn't really keep players interested. And that's coming from me, one of the 'big names' on HellMOO when it came to griefing and loving people up in PvP combat (to the extent that Gilmore made combat system adjustments based around my way of fighting players). However, HellMOO at some point between now and then has brought PvP combat back (albeit only in certain wilderness areas or through consensual fights). Hell still has a decent amount of players and seems healthier than it has been since before the split.
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Feb 15, 2016 10:23
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I used to play Tele-Arena. It was very popular in my area, and for years I had no idea it wasn't the dominant MUD. I miss playing Tele-Arena.
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Feb 17, 2016 21:05
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Alright, so to tell a bit about my story as mentioned earlier, I am one of four sons of a woman who was addicted to playing a MUD. By the way, I'm phone posting. My mother was big into Gemstone4, which is a subscription-based generic high fantasy game. Given the highly insular nature of that particular community I'm going to be as vague as possible, but my mom was paying for two characters and spent the time building up both of them and playing both of them, often at the same time. The amount of effort she invested in the game was such that she was one of the foremost players and had her characters in a significant spot in the official lore. Notable incidents include her getting into petty internet slapfights with other players on the forum and literally being in tears from frustration, then coming to me and using me as a therapist. Another one is her meeting a brief boyfriend through the game who she eventually dragged me ~300 miles on a road trip to see, then when things inevitably exploded she wanted to drag me on another road trip to see him and cause some more drama. By the way, I was about 11 at the time, so I had no idea what the hell what this kind of insanity was doing to me. Often I would want my mom to help me with something or spend some time doing something fun (like hiking, or going to the park) and I was literally competing with the game for her attention. I recall at one point thinking about getting into the game myself because at least then I would get to spend some time interacting with my parent in some way (I did a lot of play-by-post roleplay on forums by this point in time). If anybody has any specific questions about these or other things, ask away.
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Feb 19, 2016 15:50
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I would love to know which crazy gs4 woman is your mom. I dont know anyone who plays personally but I am really curious about the actual people behind these characters who get to level 100 and participate in every storyline. In fact without realizing it I have probably witnessed her actively neglecting you when I played.
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Feb 20, 2016 17:46
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 07:07 |
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So, I know I’ve mentioned this earlier in the thread, but I’ve finally managed to combine the mental fortitude and a bit of downtime to actually put some of my stories down on screen about the.. interesting people that I met during my decade+ obsession with text roleplay. Some of these get pretty hosed up, and I certainly don’t come off well in a lot of them- so I feel like I should stick up a bit of a disclaimer. These all date from the early parts of the noughties, when I was still trying to cope with the aftermath of a very bad accident in 2001 that left me with severe head injuries and a badly disrupted mind. Putting it bluntly, I’m sure a lot of the people who I interacted with back then would have similarly damning or hilarious stories to tell about me (And I know for a fact that several people I know from back in those days read and/or post in this thread)- I’ve come to terms with this, hence me making this post. So, where to begin? I think probably the most insane story would date from summer 2002. This was probably the lowest year of my life- my mental health was basically non-existent, I was struggling (and failing) to adapt to university life, I lost every grandparent in the space of six months and was being hounded by vicious drama throughout my only way of escape- MU* gaming. I was single, isolated, lonely, mentally hosed, ill-adjusted and frankly desperate for both sex and affection. Lucky then, that MU*s are full of people just as broken as I was who were willing to provide both of those. At the time the main game I played on was Star Wars MUSH; I was running a typical mary-sue character in the Empire (Camrath Kizuka, general in the Imperial army) and looking back was spending more time enmeshed in drama than actually roleplaying. But I digress. At the time I was so lonely for attention that I was desperate to find an IC girlfriend for my character (because though it’d just be fictional characters and text on a screen, it would at least a little fill the huge gap I had in my own life). Around May of that year, a character called ‘Sapphire Jones’ turned up in game and joined the Imperial faction. Now at the time I was very good at spotting ‘genuine’ female roleplayers, and knew there was a type that very much used roleplay as a way to attain validation and feel desired (though I didn’t think about in those terms; the clarity and understanding has only come with age, experience and therapy). And this character was the absolute dictionary definition of that- flirty and seductive both in roleplay and OOC chat; the character’s ‘actor’ was Angie Everhart, a soft-porn actress.. You get the idea. Our characters very quickly became a couple, amidst a lot of particularly hardcore roleplayed sex, and we started chatting a /lot/ OOC- using the game, then messanger programs and then on the phone. I learned that she was about my age, from Minnesota with a young son and year-long marriage. I also learned she was blonde, a former dancer with a very nice body (even only six months after having a child) and /enormous/ boobs (she made a point of letting me know this herself). And then she started sending pictures- normal ones first, then flirty ones, then topless and then full-on nudes. I will admit, I wondered for a while if I was getting catfished (not that such a word existed back then) but she started taking requests and I realised she was the real deal. At the start of the summer, we both lost grandparents- her grandfather and my grandmother (who I had been incredibly close to) died within a few days of each other, which I think bought us closer. Anyway, as I tended to do every summer back then, I was planning a trip to America, to travel around by Greyhound and both see the sights and meet the friends I’d made over these games. We started talking about me coming out to visit. I don’t think we explicitly said ‘let’s gently caress’, but that was certainly the driving subtext. So, after much hemming and hawing after I flew out to New York, she told me to come- I hopped on a greyhound and after like 20 hours pulled into her city and got a hotel room. All the while wondering what I was getting myself into- that summer I’ve always described as ‘the one I went mental’, and I think tbh that the insane levels of anxiety I was experiencing during that trip was a major trigger for a breakdown that occurred a couple of months later. I had nightmares both waking and sleeping of vengeful husbands with firearms, of disappearing into the Midwest never to be seen again.. or of simply meeting her and her being disgusted by the fat crazy blob of issues that I was. I need not have worried so much. The very first time we met, we ended up with each other’s hands discretely (or not so) in each other’s underwear within an hour or so, cruising around while one of her friends (who also played on SWMush with us) drove us around. This set the form for the week- though her young son for the most part would interrupt us before things became /too/ heated. For the most part. At one point, I can remember receiving a blowjob from her on her couch, when I felt a hand on my lower leg- after a quick moment of thinking ‘what the hell? I can already feel both hands..’ I opened my eyes and glanced down, to see her seven month old holding himself up against my leg, watching with wide brown eyes as his mother’s head bobbed up and down. I used to tell that story as a dark joke, but frankly nowadays it disgusts me- and horrifies me that I let her fool around with me instead of taking care of her kid. I’m pretty sure he was way too young to remember or understand what was going on, but as I’ve worked through the events of my life on the therapist’s couch I still can’t speak of it now without crushing waves of guilt. We did finally manage to gently caress before I left to continue my road trip, and part of me felt that that would be that, that she’d realise it was just a fling and file it away in her memory to never speak of again. However a few days later I received a message on SWMush saying that she needed to talk to me badly. She refused to say why at first, until I finally managed to get out of her that she had fallen in love with me. Now, a sensible person would have ended things there- I was going back to England, she was married with a kid ffs.. however back in those days I was pretty much anything but sensible. I decided I reciprocated her feelings (though on reflection I think it was just more a case of feeling valued by someone when I held no value for myself) and we decided to continue the affair long-distance. Around this time there was also a fresh crop of massive drama on SWMush which resulted in me changing factions, losing friends and (in part) having a massive breakdown which ended up with me being hospitalised for a few days. Looking back, while some of this can be traced to my own increasingly erratic behaviour I also am now aware that I was far from the only person that she had online relationships (and in some case physical/RL ones) with- a 17 year old boy from North Carolina, a guy from Australia, several from other parts of America.. She was also having her character cheat on my own with approximately a quarter of the MUSH’s playerbase. I was so blind to her faults and messed up in my own head that I didn’t think anything weird was going on when she was saying ‘I love you’ and flirting with at least three different guys (none of whom were her husband, I might add!), but I stood by her and continued to pursue the ‘relationship’ as best that I could. I went out to visit her again that November, and she was freaking out first because her period was a day late, and then decided that said late period was /totally/ a miscarriage- cue all the angst, drama and attention for her you can imagine. I was also starting to come to my senses a bit- not least because I’d started to get to know her husband and realised that he was genuinely a decent, standup guy who had no loving clue what his wife was up to. (TBH I dunno what he did think about all these horny internet dudes that kept coming to visit and spending a lot of time alone with her- I’d suspect him of having a cuckolding fetish, except that he really honestly didn’t know or believe that anything untoward was going on). But while I was put there and saw him pouring love and affection to her after her ‘miscarraige’ I reached the firm decision- it had to end. I ‘broke up’ with her after I flew home (though we remained friendly for at least six months after), and to this day I treat that as the very first sign of my long, slow recovery from being a loving mental. I apologise that this is not more ‘MU* centric’, but this gives you an idea of some of the people that are out there on these games. I may post more stories later (though I think this is both the longest and grimmest of them), but yeah. Hope you enjoy. It was certainly cathartic to get this poo poo out on paper. Edit: wow, word filter I didn't know existed. Camrath fucked around with this message at 12:46 on Feb 23, 2016 |
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Feb 23, 2016 12:22
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