Question: Player-made Guilds
 

I'm interested in getting into MUD's.
However, I've played MMORPG's in the past and one thing I always liked was having player made guilds and doing in-game events, questing together, etc...

But all the MUD's I've seen seem to have Guilds that are... "hardcoded" (probably not a great word choice) into the game.
So players don't create new ones, you can just join the ones set by the game and advance through the ranks.

What I like about guilds is the dedication players have to them. So my question is sort of multisided.

1) In MUD's where the guilds are set by the game, do players just join 1 and stick with it so there is more of a feeling of brotherhood? Or do they tend to join all of them to achieve "completion" of the game by experiencing all of the guilds.

2) Are there any MUD's with a decent sized playerbase and allows users to form their own guilds?

3) Do MUD's overall just have less 'identity' associated with guilds and focus more on individual player interactions?

I hope my questions make sense :p Any answers are appreciated.

Re: Question: Player-made Guilds
 

Well, what you are calling guilds is typically called clans, or so far as I have seen. If you're talking about "mage", i.e. there's spells associated with it, I'm not aware of any that allow player-made ones, but there's a few floating around with player-made clans, typically involving a private clan channel and some sort of clan wars.

Alter aeon has player-made clans. It will take you some time before you're wanted by most of them, though. Clans compete in pk clan wars, for a trophy. They tend to run together, sometimes, which is why most don't want level 1s.

Godwars2, which is pretty much like no mud you've ever played before and is 99% pk, has pantheons--you're a minor god, and can have other minor god followers. These are based around bonuses: the pantheon leader can say things like "all ice powers get a bonus", for example. Godwars2, in and of it self, well--you'll log on the first time and probably choose to take the newbie tutorial, as it throws out a lot of mud concepts like, for instance, the room. Difficult to master, but fun if you like pk.

Re: Question: Player-made Guilds
 

Thank you Camlorn that answers my questions perfectly!

Re: Question: Player-made Guilds
 

There are tons of MUDs with player-formed clans. Most likely, we invented it long before the games you're coming from :) And most of the implementations I've seen are far more extensive than what you find in modern MMORPGs.

The reason they are called 'clans' and not 'guilds' is probably historical. Most of the MUD codebases already used 'guilds' to refer to the 'organizations' that define character classes.