[kilith]

Lands of Chaos is a 10 year old mud created in 1995 and went live in 1996.

This mud has advanced coding for PK and player character creation.

For PC creation:
An easy and very nice rolling system.
Choices on 11 guilds to join:
Warrior, Healer, Thief, Rogue, Tinker, Ranger, Conjurer, Mystic, Battlemaster, Necromancer, and Monk.
You choose the alignment you want to become once you log into the game.

Pick and choose what class you want to go by mixing guilds together:

Guild Combinations:
Adventurer: None
Barbarian: Rangers, Warriors, Tinkers, Battlemasters
Paladin: Rangers, Warriors, Healers, Battlemasters
Healer: Rangers, Healers, Mystics, Tinkers
Rogue: Rangers, Rogue, Thief, Warriors
Wizard: Rangers, Wizards, Conjurers, Tinkers
Necromancer: Rangers, Necromancers, Conjurers, Tinkers
Warlock: Warriors, Battlemasters, Wizards, Conjurers
Monk: Monks, Warriors, Healers, Rangers

There are 9 remorts that you can advance your chracter with. Then you cam ascend to once again get 9 remorts.

There is ascending or to become a more powerful race for a total of 18 remorts once you have ascended.

Advanced PK:

There are 4 different alignments ont he mud. At the moment only 3 are in use. A Good alignment known as whities, an evil alignment knowen as Darkies, and a alignment you can become with enough warpoints, known as Forsaken.

Each alignment has it's own who list. So if you are a darkie you can only see darkies and the same with the whitie and forsaken sides. If you run into someone of the oppsite alignment they look like this in the room +* A Drow *+ is here. You do not know who they are just that they are not of your alignment.

You gain warpoints when you kill someone of the oppsite alignment which will help advance your character by:

Being able to remort, add augments to your character, and once you have enough remorts and warpoints to ascend into a more advanced race.

More features of LoC are:

Mining: You can go and mine for chunks of metal to be able to create your own eq and weapons.

Over head Mapping: There is a very advanced overhead mapping system with this mud. Makes the mud for a very newbie friendly place to learn how to play.

Able to raise undead minions: If you become a necromancer you can raise your own undead army to help you xp and pk.

Please come anc check out the new pwipe of Lands of Chaos at landsofchaos.net port 3222

The mud will go live Tonight 8PM CST Friday April 14th

[the_logos]

Interesting. How have your existing players reacted to a player wipe? Are they excited about a clean slate, are they upset about losing their time investments, or more of a combination of both? What were your reasons for doing one?

--matt
P.S. If any IRE players are reading this, please don't think we'd ever consider doing a wipe. I'm just curious about the reasons a MUD might choose to do this, and how the players reacted. Purely curious!

[kilith]

Anyone want to check out what I am talking about you can log into landsofchaos.net port 3235 and check out what we have going and ready for tonight.

Well it all depends on what is done to the mud.

With loc main reason of a player wipe is we changed the map, changed eq stats, revamped the races, created new races, and tons of other things.

With the changes of races they have different armor classes, different attrubutes, created a new ascending code. So pretty much it has to do with a ton of race changes and map changes.

The players are excited. They have been playing on the builders port and very excited on how the new changes have affected the mud and players creation.

This is only the 3rd or 4th player wipe in 10 years. Sometimes you got to refresh everything, give a new look for new players coming to a mud. I know I somestimes get discouraged when I see tons of high level players and then no one helps. I know that does not happen on all muds but on some muds it does and you just say screw it and leave

We have has posts from players to do a reoation of pwipes and then to give the top players from the previous wipe some sort of reward. This is in thought at the moment however is not our policy.

However for your question there were tons of code changes and race changes so it required a pwipe. It happens sometimes. Everyone is ready for it though (about 30 players at this time) begging to open earlier lol.

[kilith]

Nothing to do with a mud but I have to say my account here is pretty sad being 3 years old and only 2 posts (well 3 now) Used to run a mud on Kyndig.com a few years back I think that is the only reason I had an account lol.

[Threshold]

Originally Posted by (kilith @ April 14 2006,17:26) This is only the 3rd or 4th player wipe in 10 years.

Wow. Only? *heh* It is interesting how different perceptions are in different gaming communities. A player wipe every 2-3 years on average would seem extremely common to most folks. The fact that you label it "only" indicates to me that your game world was probably designed with the idea that you'd wipe it occasionally.

That can definitely work depending on the way the game is designed. Probably one of the more notable recent examples of this is ATITD (A Tale in the Desert) which totally resets every few months (I believe they are called "Tellings.")

It sounds like your players probably know to expect the wipes every few years and so its no big deal.

[kilith]

It is not often this game pwipes the first was after the beta back in 1998 or something (before I was given the mud).

Then the next was when Lonath (the orginal owner/coder) gave the mud up and someone else took it over. They did a pwipe when they made changes.

The the recent pwipe I did about 6 or 7 months ago when I was given the mud. I however was given the mud in poor condition so I took the last 6 months to fix a lot of poor code.

Now this is the first LIVE version of the mud under my running. I hope this will be the last for a while. Unless new code is added which I have no plans at this time to do so.

i guess some MU*'s out there do not ever pwipe. Or they will at some point. I just know when a mud has gone through so many coding advances and changes of owndership they happen.

Decent turn out so far and a few new players to the mud. I am glad of the turn out so far. More players are welcome to check it out.

landsofchaos.net 3222 (even admins that would like ideas are welcome to check the place out.) Our ideas are open to the public.

[Aarn]

I'm pretty amazed at that too. We did a wipe of all of our pfiles in like, 1994 or 1995, and I think I can say with complete confidence that we will never, ever do another one. It totally ruins any continuity in the history of the game. Plus like logos mentioned, people would be upset about loosing their hard work.

If everything keeps becoming lopsided over time, you might consider making some game balance adjustments rather then just resetting it all to zero every few years. Wiping pfiles when things get out of whack seems like it's just attempting to mask a serious game balance problem.

Question, do characters in your game die off, or are they around until the player decides to delete? On Carrion Fields characters can die from loss of constitution or from old age, although it generally takes between 600 and a 1000 hours of playing to do that. If characters are around perpetually though, I can see where things would get messed up in the long run. Our players actually enjoy this feature - since our game is 100% in-character, they die and come up on our forum battlefield, where everyone discusses the character in an OOC manner and gets to see "behind the curtain" so to speak. Maybe adding a feature like that would keep you from having to wipe pfiles every few years?

As for coding changes, it seems like if you plan them out with some detail you should have no problem implementing them without having to wipe all the files. Tie the changes in to a quest for the mortals and make it fun.

Ofcourse, if your players think a periodic pwipe is cool, maybe you shouldn't care about any of that! I would just foresee half our playerbase leaving if we nuked all the pfiles.

[kilith]

yeah i could see if the players are 10 years old they could be pretty upset

With a pk mud like this players think it gets stale after a while and want a new start of it. Of course that is not til after a year or more.

With code changes yes some are easy to put into the game with out problems. When it came to changing the Ascend code and all the races made that impossible for me not to pwipe.

However it is working and good playerbase playing with new players so i am a very happy creator

[prof1515]

Personally, I always felt it's better to either avoid wipes or to completely wipe everything. I played a H&S years ago that constantly nerfed NPC gold and equipment in the name of "balancing the game" yet didn't wipe veterans' gold and equipment. So, a player who played five years before could get uber weapons and an average of thousands in gold per NPC, but new players could get weaker weapons/armor and an average of 10-20 gold per NPC. That's not balancing the game, that's imbalancing it in favor of older players (not surprisingly, at least one of the staff who advocated such nerfing was a veteran player himself who benefited greatly from such changes). This was one of the reasons I quit since it was obvious that such policies were aimed at limiting newer players like myself who through long hours of playing had achieved what veteran players had had come into quite easily before and were beginning to challenge veteran players.

Of course, I only play RPIs now and such wipes don't really make sense in primarily role-play environments. With my own project, we're probably not going to wipe beta characters, or at least give players the option of keeping their beta characters if they made significant progress in developing them.

Take care,

Jason