Moving characters between MUDs
 

Over the decades of MUD and MMO development, there have been numerous speculative discussions about setting up multiple game worlds such that it's possible for characters to move between them. Doing so would be extremely tricky for a myriad of reasons, from different database structures to lack of equivalency between items, skills, stats, and everything else that differs between two worlds that aren't clones of each other, such as two different WoW servers/shards.

Though even at Iron Realms we haven't been able to solve those issues, we did implement a system called Character Retirement that allows you to take some of you've spent and earned on a character in one of our five MUDs and apply that to a new character on any of those MUDs. It's proven to be immensely popular so far with our playerbase, as many people had characters they stopped playing over the years, and can roll some of those into a new character with a fresh story arc or just a new character on a new-to-them MUD.

HELP RETIREMENT in any of our MUDs (listed below in my sig) will tell you more.

Re: Moving characters between MUDs
 

I think some time ago Avalon: The Legend Lives offered players from Avalon: First Age to carry their characters over to Avalon: The Legend Lives.

Basically for any of you who are confused, Avalon: First Age was created because several players were unhappy with all the new abilities and updates that had been introduced to Avalon, and reckoned that the un-updated version of Avalon was already good enough. Therefore the old version, Avalon: First Age was created to suit their needs.

Eventually, half-abandoned by Genesis without any updates or whatsoever, and with a lack of new players, First Age began to die out. Therefore Genesis allowed something called a 'voyage of apotheosis'. Players who took that voyage were given a lifetime subscription to Avalon: The Legend Lives at a discount rate (tho its free now, so not sure if they made/lost money lol) They could keep their skills, professions, gold, items and various other stuff.

But yeah, to have multiple game worlds where you can switch your characters around, its rather tough because the MUDs will need to have similar mechanics and such, and therefore it ends up just being one big MUD with the extra hassle of switching characters around if you want to visit different areas.

Definitely a thumbs-down for me.

Re: Moving characters between MUDs
 

For mud codebase trivia fans, you could move characters between multiple servers using Coolmud:

Re: Moving characters between MUDs
 

What an awful idea.

I understand the game designer intent - you want to retain players.

Now you have this unfair competitive advantages that some other players will have over other genuinely new players.

My suggestion would be to focus less on the problem of salvaging old characters and more on being able to provide long-term interest for players in a given game, from the get go.

The only reason where I think that this salvaging is required is because you would have mis-designed the game prior to that, to require players to have to think competitively. But not every player wants to or can be bothered to have to think competitively - some just want to play for fun. And it isn't a lot of fun if they are at a competitive disadvantage when they did not have that big mighty character that others would have had.

Re: Moving characters between MUDs
 

Our players almost unanimously disagree. It's something they'd been asking for for years.


That's the same advantage any experienced player has over a genuinely new player. They're worlds, not e-sports competitions with a start and finish.



Like every successful MUD that's been around a long time, we are very good at providing long-term interest for our players. Many of them created alts over the years though, on our various games, and spent a fair amount of money on those alts that they no longer wish to play. This gives them a way to continue to get value out of those characters, which is the main reason it's been so popular.

In fact, it is probably the single most popular feature we've ever implemented across all the Iron Realms games. No joke.