Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

Nice to see you on here prof, hit me up sometime on facebook and we can chat.

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

That's really informative, Prof, thanks.

My hope is that with the release of Futuremud some new and fresh projects will start.

Of course, I hope Arm continues to hold steady as well.



And although it's staffing intensive, I really think a procedural mud like Atonement works exceptionally well for an RPI - i.e. episodic story-points proceeding forward, rather than a static world, so maybe one will pick up in that regard.

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

AR's had "roleplaying intensive" on its mudconnector description since 1997. But we're not trying to pass ourselves off as an RPI mud. I read a few threads here and I still don't even know what that means. It sounds like bull****. I'd like to see a definition in under 5 sentences.

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

Here's a definition in one sentence:

RPI isn't a mud, it's a category designation encompassing a specific list of criteria.

There you are. :)

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

Thanks for clarifying that, Prof. I can hardly keep all the big players and when they came around straight in my head!

On another note, to the OP: I too will adamantly say that as far as RPIs go, my brief time on Atonement was one of the best experiences I've had. Its spiritual successor, Parallel RPI (linked above in Bogre's better thought out post!) is definitely worth a look. Last I checked on their forums there was some pretty heavy discussion about the state of the MUD, how to keep PKs grounded in storytelling, and other subjects that plague any RP enforced game. Good reads, if you can muck through some of the more hostile posts and want some indication of challenges you might face running a RPI or RP enforced game.

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

I really hate when people express opinion as fact. While Prof1515 is articulate he is no more qualified to say what is good, bad or viable than anyone else on the boards. Arm is doing just fine, as far as I can tell. Of course, I just play it -he's the real authority, what having had a little bitch fest with a friend of his the other night.

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

So in case you haven't noticed these forums created by old Arm players:

It doesn't really matter what you think, the reality is right there.

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

Old Arm Players or no, I log in every day and enjoy myself. There are plenty of old players still playing and the ones who are gone, we manage without.

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

Pretty typical apathetic attitude there. You aren't concerned at all about people/whistleblowers leaving the game you love so much, founding a forum dedicated to ousting the antics of corrupt staff who have little to no empathy for players who were wronged, insulted, even subject to verbal harassment and abuse.

Bleh, why do I even bother with this? You're the typical fanboy; in your little fantasy world your games administration can do no wrong and the fact that you came over to TMS to try and defend Arm shows how much asskissing you're willing to do on your own behalf. Hope you get some more karma for it bud.

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

No need. If Fifi is indeed Barzalene, as I believe I recall (though I could be misremembering), they are former staff and have 8 karma.

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

I think defending something is the opposite of apathy. Unless you mean that I'm apathetic about the fact that you don't like the game or that you've been banned from it, well, that case - yep.

I think going onto boards and bashing something I invest my time in is pretty ****ty. Maybe you think I'm an idiot for loving a game you've been banned from, but calling me one publicly is is rather rude.

I log in, I play, I try to add to other people's experience as a result I tend to have a lot of fun. If that makes me a fanboy (what a stupid turn of phrase, yours, not mine) alright.

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

I was hesitant to respond again because I don't feel it's in keeping with the original post's subject. However, as the above post seems to feel it's appropriate to address me by name, I feel it's only appropriate to respond and elaborate on my earlier statement even if, articulate or not, I probably can't phrase it in words small enough for them to understand.

What Delerak means by "fanboy" is the tendency of some people, ie. those known as fanbois, to view that which they adore with blinders on. Every game has its problems but fanbois tend to ignore the existence of those problems no matter how blatantly obvious they are. However, one can never solve a problem unless they take the first step of actually acknowledging it exists or even can exist. Attacking the messenger because one doesn't like the message doesn't solve the problem, it just ignores the possibility that there might be something in need of fixing. It makes you part of the problem in fact because if one isn't willing to acknowledge the problem exists, it will persist and likely generate more problems, snowballing over time.

Armageddon, like any of the RPIs has problems. For starters, Armageddon's always had the worst *average* RP quality of any of the RPIs. While there are some amazing RPers to be found on the game, there were also players who operated far more as H&Sers and staff tended to let them do so without restraint. The best RP in the world is negated by H&S being allowed; it's the law of averages. In all my years of playing RPIs only once have I ever had the experience of my character being killed by another player without even one bit of RP to accompany it or in response to my own attempts to role-play through it and that was on Armageddon. Staff's response was "it happens". Now, that put me off for a while but I gave it another shot in a different region and found better results but that doesn't change the fact of the staff's response. When a problem presents itself, a game's staff can either address it or not. If they choose the former, how they address it speaks as to their competancy. If they choose not to address it, it's a sure sign that they either don't care about player concerns or they don't really care about maintaining a quality game. The argument that they're catering to different types of players might be used, but the lower quality of player that you cater to, the lower quality of a game you end up maintaining.

In fact, Armageddon's uneven RP as a result of a fairly tolerant policy in regard to H&S-like behavior actually has had detrimental effects on the RPI community as a whole. Trying to match Armageddon's popularity, other RPIs relaxed their standards. This was one of the primary reasons I quit SoI's staff. During my time as an admin on SoI, I banned dozens of twinks and when they were granted amnesty in some pathetic attempt to increase the playerbase, that was a pretty frustrating thing to deal with since every twink allowed in the game was just a potential mess to clean up after and potential bad experience for other players. It was a move that helped increase SoI's playerbase however and seeing that it became a temptation for other RPIs as well. Of course, catering to the lowest common denominator is the best way to alienate the better players as well as staff who get frustrated dealing with the crap. Faced with this, all too often the games accepted the sacrifice of losing one good player for the prospect of gaining three sh*tty ones. However, not only were they losing the very kinds of players and staff which brought people to the games in the first place but also those players whose experience helped other players grow and improve. The bar just kept getting lower and lower and the players and staff coming in, ignorant of what once was, failed to have the perspective to understand what was happening. Years after I quit SoI, I was chatting with someone from their staff who was telling me about the new batch of admins they'd promoted. Amongst the names was only one that I recognized and I was surprised to see a name of someone that, to be quite blunt, would never ever have made the cut years earlier. I asked if this person had improved in the years since I'd left and was told not really. How then, I asked, did they make it on staff? The response, verbatim, "We're scraping the bottom of the barrel to find anyone."

For me, one by one I left each of the RPIs because of problems ranging from staff incompetance to blatant favoritism and hypocrisy regarding their own policies to a lowering of standards regarding both players and staff. What the fanbois and apologists fail to acknowledge is that it's not just one or two players who are fed up with the declining quality of the RPIs though. I can cite eight alone through Facebook and I have never been one to really fraternize that much with my fellow MUDders. I don't think I've ever had more than a dozen people I know via MUDs on my "friends" list so for 2/3 of them to have given up on RPIs for a variety of reasons points to a much bigger problem. If 2/3 of the ones I actually talk to have issues with the games, what about the hundreds of players I don't interact with? Armageddon obviously has a few as Delerak pointed out and I know Harshlands, SoI and others do as well. However, so long as people refuse to acknowledge the problems even exist, nothing will be done to fix them and the snowball just gets bigger.

As someone who loved the RPIs in their heyday and still even after they started to decline, this is both sad and frustrating. From time to time I miss the days when I could enjoy hours on a MUD but I've never been one capable of putting on the blinders that the fanbois do. Call me cynical or negative but I don't see any reason to cater to the lowest common denominator. Screw popularity. Screw bigger playerbases. Screw "playability" as an excuse for appealing to the masses instead of to one's core base. If you have to compromise quality and drive off your best players and staff to attain these things then they're not worth attaining. Quite frankly, though, given that some of the people who own and run the games are the problem it's unlikely that they'll change their attitudes.

I'd like to be able to play a RPI again and enjoy it. I'm not alone as the friends who messaged me the other day expressed the same desire and we're not alone. It's not so much that we abandoned the RPIs as it is that the RPIs abandoned us.

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

Did you forget that the main admin at SoI quit because 5-6 staff published logs showing blatant favoritism by Kite and company. They all left and formed Atonement RPI. Anyway just mentioning that if you wanted a clear cut example for SOI's complete failure. Oh SoI is still shutdown AFAIK. It's been a couple years now.

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

Problems with favoritism go back much further, to a time before Kite was possibly even a player (I don't know what his player name was so I can't be sure). When I was an admin I complained to Traithe about some staff showing favoritism and violating several other policies in regard to players, namely their RL friends and/or partners/spouses. He was aware of it but didn't want to address the problem out of fear that they'd quit if he did and as they were productive he was willing to turn a blind eye to their cheating and favoritism. Quite frankly, dealing with such problems is part of leadership and failing to do so is a failure of leadership. SoI floundered without leadership for most of the time I was on staff and it caused a plethora of problems ranging from miscommunication, favoritism, conflicts of interest incidents and undermined work. I estimate that in the 10 months I was active on staff (was on staff for 12 months but spent some of my time in the hospital following my auto accident) I lost about 120 hours of work due to other staff screwing things up in ways which could have been completely preventable with stronger leadership. I wasn't the only one to suffer this fate as well. I was one of several staff to petition for the appointment of a head administrator after Haiwolfe left and Myrkkridia was fired but Traithe wouldn't do it. After I resigned, he finally appointed a head admin but I hear the favoritism got even worse meaning I'd jumped ship in time or I'd have been even more frustrated and probably unlikely to have been as courteous regarding the problems plaguing staff. As you might have noticed, I'm not one to shy away from confrontation. :-D

I can't really speak first-hand as to what all happened when Kite was in charge as that occurred long after I'd left staff. I've heard several versions of the story, none of them very flattering, and seen the aforementioned logs. I wish I could say that was the worst I've seen on MUDs but sadly it wasn't. Harshlands, for example, had and has continued to have some pretty horrible stuff happen too. As dozens of former HL players and staff have said, Blackhorde is an incompetant, dishonest "douchebag" (which is odd because in person he's actually a pretty nice guy, or at least he was when I met him). I can personally attest to the dishonesty and blatant favoritism as I witnessed that first-hand in the incidents that led me to quit the game. It was just lies on top of lies on top of lies (six in all, one after another, in the course of a short six-sentence conversation) to cover up favoritism to say nothing of the incompetence involved in letting well-known twinks repeatedly engage in twinking and player-killing (seriously, if you've punished a player three times prior for the same offense, the problem isn't just the player).

Harshlands didn't always allow its staff to engage in such behavior though. According to someone who knew him at the time and was an original staff member of SoI, while on the staff of HL Traithe was punished for twinking, ie. creating an unauthorized restricted-race character for himself and then inflating the character's stats and those of the PC's weapons. When discovered, his character's stats were nerfed as were the weapons and his character's race was changed from a restricted race to a common one which was why he left to form his own game. The point is that they took action when staff policies were violated, something which has pretty much become nonexistent since but is sorely needed. Of course, when the people violating the policies are the owners/head-admins like Kite or Blackhorde, it's an impossible problem. A head administrator should be the paradigm of staff behavior, not the biggest violator of policies.

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

Thanks for posting this actually.

Also if you post one that is "sort of RPI" I will still check it out this is just for research and if I can see what is controversial when it comes to the RPI genre it can help me better develop one

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

Well, unwritten legends is similar to an RPI.

Heavily enforced Roleplay, a focus on realism of the world and thoroughness of lore, and the emphasis on consequences for actions.

Where it differs is that permadeath only happens as a consequence for serious roleplay actions, and the fact that there are two ooc channels. Also there is a level system in place.

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

Holy Crap you guys (Delerak, Prof, etc.) If my joke was bending the derailment of this thread slightly, you guys just completely through the train off the track. Create a new thread so we can all argue over the validity or lack thereof in your opinions and the true meaning of RPI.

p.s. I agree with you Fifi, about all the opionions that are posted as fact. It's pretty funny. But I'll hold off commenting for another thread.

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So basically it's nothing at all like an RPI, except that it's a text-based game.

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We did derail it pretty badly. Apologies. Maybe I'm just super excited to be back posting on the glorious TMS forums?

Re: List of RPI MUDs
 

Southlands - The roleplay is very slow and a bit more formal than in other muds, it can make scenes take a while. The codebase is one of the more interesting ones, if a bit bare bones in some aspects. For instance, all the rooms are save rooms, so your entire world is persistent through reboots, up to and including bits of rubbish or foraged items left on the ground, and I really like that, personally. The last time I played it was still just about all elves, but they were opening up the possibility of playing humans. The staff is awesome, very communicative, and will even send emails to you with ideas for roles you might like after you've been playing a while so they have some idea what sort of roles you enjoy. The movement can be slow at times, and it is exceedingly dangerous to leave a city, depending on where you are going off to. The playerbase seems to be low, but the staff tend to animate a lot and seem to be around/available often if needed.

Black Sands - Currently playing. The game is in beta. It has a vague resemblance to Armageddon that is encompassed mostly in how its magick guilds are referred to, though the practice there is actually completely different. Small but very responsive staff. Animates a lot. Handles issues quickly. The main issue with black sands currently, to me, is that there are still some bugs being worked out in the code and the crafting is currently not implemented (though it is damn near finished, as far as I'm aware). Travel can be slow if you are used to getting around without movement delays, but it is not unbearable. The roleplay is interesting and diverse. Of all the games I have played, it is in Black Sands, where I have found the most 'unique' roles. People that aren't playing that 'I -am- the wilderness' ranger, or that sneaky-sneak assassin, but play out their day jobs which can at times be flavored by their coded skills, or at other times stray wildly from them. The playerbase is low, but the game is designed to encourage players roleplaying together, and there are many small touches that help to make it feel crowded.

Dark Isles - I believe this game is currently down. It had its own very interesting and unique feel with different nobles all over the place and sort of a medieval water-front town vibe. They had their own take on werewolves and vampires which was interesting, but the roleplay was maddeningly slow. It was considered polite in this game in particular to use turn by turn paragraph posting which, I've never played one long enough to know, but I understand is the same sort of way a mush is played. The staff experience seemed hit or miss as to attentiveness and promptness in dealings, though they were always polite and level headed. The playerbase was very low, and the differing factions working as they did did not help to make it feel otherwise.

Armageddon - This game, I actually played for half a decade and spent more than a year on staff there. As you can probably tell by the interaction with Fifi there, I've a bit of a bitter taste left by it. The world is beautifully written, at times the code is fantastic, though other places like the brew skill when it comes to things other than tablets, and wagonmaking are utter failures to implement things uniformly or in ways that are even slightly useful in a decade of them being supposedly worked on. Staff is a very hit or miss thing. Many of them are relatively kind and helpful and pleasant to interact with (Natious, Rahneyvahn), others if you cross them once or disagree with them, your entire career on the game will be **** (Nyr, Adhira). The playerbase fluctuates wildly from sometimes 60-80 at peak times to as few as 2 at other times of day. The game world is vast, and game design encourages it to feel like a ghost town surprisingly often for a game with 50 players on, because everyone is in a private clan hall practicing their skills, rather than doing anything together, or risking bad account notes (and thus never being able to play higher end guilds) by skipping out on their training. It can be a great gaming experience if you keep your illusions about you, but hundreds of people have been wronged enough that they actually created a seperate forum regarding it, complete with logs and emails to document places where they've been egregiously wronged.

Those are the RPI's I've played. I got into a game called Whispers of Times Lost that was RP-enforced, and it was one of my favorites, but unfortunately, as far as I know, it's no longer running, which is a shame. That's really the only non-RPI I played long enough to rate at all. I've tried a couple dozen others, but not typically much beyond character creation if it doesn't seem like it will be appealing.