MUDs with no color at all blur together and are extremely hard to read. People claim that MUDs with colors are poorly done and ugly as hell. Actually I think that all MUDs with no color were built by lazy immortals who don't want to take the time to think of a decent color scheme for their work.

People for some reason are afraid to color their zones because everyone thinks it's bad. They care too much about what everyone thinks. A MUD with color helps you identify items, MOBS and whatever else you want to see in the huge jumble of words on your screen. A MUD with no color just blends together and you have to read every sentence to find what you are looking for. A MUD with color helps you get a feel for the zone, like an ocean colored blue. The reason why people hate MUDs with color is because all the "important higher up" people think colors suck. Why do you people worship these people? Why do you let them stop you from coloring your work? MUDs with no color are hard to read and made by lazy people. The funny thing is that everyone who will post on this topic will claim to hate colors and flame me for not liking MUDs with no color. Very typical if you ask me, everyone on any MUD website forum agrees with everyone else just so they look good online.

More and more MUDs are opening up that use a decent amount of colors. So are you people going to spazz out and boycott all those MUDs because they aren't what you like. MUDs with no colors are a thing of the past and for color blind people. Oh yea, I wouldn't be making this post if everyone on the other color topic didn't talk crap about every MUD that has colors in it. There was not one person on that topic that 100% disagreed with the topic.

So make sure to talk trash about me, my MUD and everything about me. It's what you people do best, so go ahead and make yourself feel better. And I could imagine one of you will say this is making my MUD look bad by posting this, oh well. I still get new players everyday and they aren't going to stop coming because my MUD has colors in it.

And I want to get this out in the open, yeah I don't like any of you. Do you want to know why, you all are trendy and care too much about what the veterans of the mudding community think. Shame on you all.

You should consider the alternate possibility that you're a bozo.

I hate to break it to you, but having a lot of color and the ability to string together largely incoherent opinions about it does not make you some kind of rebel.

Perhaps I was not clear enough on my original post. I DO like color in muds. I would not play a mud that had no support for color, and I'm sure not many other players would either. I just don't like rainbow schemes and muds where every other word is colored differently. Colors are wonderful when they are used properly. As other responses indicated, colors can differentiate rooms from mobs from objects from channels. I find them useful to catch my eye on important things, but when too many things have too many different colors, it's hard to read.

I normally have 3 colors on my screen, although I can have up to 8 colors on it (depending on what happens in the game). So I certainly like my color (I'll also point out my mud offers only one color for 2 different things, so it certainly has very little color). So there goes claim #1

I went and had a look at what this terrible other thread was about, here are the points I found in the first post:
* OP has no problems with muds that use colors in moderation.
* Doesn't like muds that overuse colors.
* Concedes that what they view as moderate use and overuse may differ from other people, and asks what others (especially admins of muds) think.

Here are your points:
* The text on colorless muds tends to blur together.
* Muds with no color are made by lazy admins
* Admins don't use color because they fear how they'll be perceived
* It's popular to dislike colors
* It is only popular to dislike colors because a small select amount of people have decided this and so everyone copies their opinion due to hero worship
* Despite this opinion, more and more colors are being used in newer muds
* Not using colors is an outdated custom
* You don't like us because we're... trendy?

Well I didn't see anything in the OP worth disagreeing with, on the other hand I see a lot in your post to disagree with. But as you didn't seem to make this thread to actually discuss the topic, I won't bother.

In the declining population of the text-MUD community why try to start problems by expressing a mass dislike of everyone in the community over what comes down to being a game-specific design issue?

I tell people not to make broad, sweeping, negative generalizations about Dragonball (and other anime) MUDs because not all of the owners are immature. I tell them they do not know the people and that in the larger scheme of things there is room enough for every genre within the MUD community. Then you come and make broad, sweeping negative generalizations about a diverse group of people as if you know them all. You do not.

If you believe that others cannot make decisions on personal taste for you then you must accept that you cannot make these same decisions for others.

I could care less about "trends" or being part of some imagined click. Genre (punk, horror, fantasy, anime, cartoon, furry, medieval etc.) means little to me. I code games because I enjoy the creation of systems.

Color is a personal taste issue left to each design staff to implement. I like to color my different battle messages, have terrain-specific title color and otherwise use it sparingly for other system messaging. That is my choice and your choices can be different without there being a conspiracy against you.

You hurt yourself by troll-posting.

Best of luck to you.

So do muds with too much colour.

In my opinion, the two most important factors for a colour scheme are moderation and customisation.

Colour is mainly a matter of personal taste, although colours are also tools in the creating of a Mud. In fact, whatever Ozma may think, very few Muds dispose of colour totally.

A fact is that most Muds use colours to accentuate certain things, for instance mobs are coloured differently from objects, exits have a different colour than the room descs, different channels get different colours, or the important things in your prompt are accentuated by colour.

All these things are good in my opinion, and I think only the most hardcore roleplayers are opposed to it.

It is when the colours get 'ugly', (meaning that they clash violently), or when there is so much colour that the intended effect of enhancing the important things gets lost in the blur of different colours on just about everything, that most people, including myself, react negatively.

An example of this is when almost every object in the game has every letter set in a different colour. This serves no purpose except to 'flash in the eye' and as long as it is only used on very few items, it may have that effect. But when every object in the game looks like an overdecorated christmas tree, you lose the 'flash' effect. It's like trying to get noticed in a crowd where everybody else already is screaming at the top of their lungs.

I've actually taken a look at Ozma's Mud, and my impression is this:

A lot of thought and work has obviously gone into the colour scheme there, and although it isn't quite to my taste, I recognise that it is a conscious and consequent design, and not just someone dropping a box of crayons randomly on the floor.

However, the effect of this conscious design is partly ruined by the purely 'decorative' colouring of some, (or most) items. Looking at a player with a full set of good equipment is hurtful for the eyes. Without this overkill on the objects, the colour scheme would have worked a lot better.

And note that I really intend this as constructive criticism, not a flame.

DarkOzma, you've got to kick it down a notch. Ditch the anger, it serves you no purpose other than to color your face a rather unattractive shade of red.

Nowhere in the other thread did I see anyone make any statement that color in muds should be forbidden.

I, and a couple of other players, expressed our preferences for no color, and offered our explanation of the preferences.

I wouldn't play on muds that forced color, because I don't like color in muds. That isn't a boycott. It's simply a preference. Kinda like, the same preference which would keep me from ever playing a Dragonball mud. I don't like anime. Does that mean your full-color anime mud sucks? Nope. It just means I, a mud player and community member, don't happen to enjoy either. You might have the best full-color anime game on the internet, for all I know. It might have won 20 awards, the color scheme might be the envy of all color creators on the planet. It still won't convince me to try it, because I just plain don't like color, or anime.

And the fact that you stated most emphatically that you don't like any of us, well let me tell you something, bub. If I -did- like color and anime, if I -was- the kind of player who -would- play your game, that statement of yours just convinced me that I would never EVER visit your game. That kind of attitude is certainly not what I would want in a game admin.

If you don't like this community, then leave it. Or, reassess your perception, get rid of the childish temper tantrum, get over yourself, and become a part of it.

This is the dumbest rant I've ever seen. Who cares?

Personally, I dislike color in my mudding. I play Armageddon, so it all works out well. I have a few things custom-colored, Magick, certain game echos, certain names of skary beasts, things like that. Trust me, at Armageddon the lack of color is definately not a result of a trend in the Mudding community, or because of lazy Immortals.


Color doesn't bother me, but if you're relying on fabulous color schemes to make your mud work, you're setting yourself up for failure. I would never play a mud that forced color on me, simply because it seems like some muds rely on color to bring their world to life, rather than well-written rooms and NPC's. I would personally rather get a feel for that ocean zone by the imagery of salt-spray, gull-calls, and swell of the waves, rather than relying on a cheezy shade of blue to do my work for me.

-WP

Ohhhh no...everyone came together to argue against me. *shrugs* I was right. *cackles* And I bet someone will quote this "I was right." and ask what I was right about...well figure it out. Well this topic was a good laugh and off to work I go.

Realizing of course that everyone has different preferences, I would just like to throw in my 2 cents worth here.

A MUD that hurts your eyes with way too much color really annoys me, as well as a MUD that has no color at all. It stands to reason that as long as color is done in moderation ( that means not overdone, nor underdone), it is colored correctly.

I myself have tried not to over-do colors and stick to the Diku look and feel. In the course of my almost 12 years of implementing my MUD, I have had both complaints that I have too much color, and that I don't have enough color.

So I figure I did it right! =)

-Myst, Imp Aaezure Odyssey MUD

As far as color's concerned, I find a total lack of color preferable to one whose color scheme is reminiscent of the makeup worn by a clown. Or a MUD run by one.

Take care,

Jason

The MUD I play has no color. At first I was shocked, a mud with no color?! But eventually I got used to it, with the help of some highlighting triggers in my client.
Now when I try out other muds with color, 9 times in 10 I feel that they've overused the color. It seems especially bad to me when equipment has color, and more so when players can add color to their custom equipment and descriptions. Often it seems when this is allowed, having color becomes something of a status symbol, and takes the place of a well-written string or description. Or maybe it just distracts my eye so I don't read all the strings and descs.
In general, I like color when it is used to highlight important things that you don't want to miss, like exits and tells. Also, depending on the speed and importance of combat in your game, a little color can help ease battle spam.

Yeah, I played a game where the screen scroll was crazy whenever a group went to hunt, or there was an invasion in town. And I had a trigger-set just for the purpose. So, when I wasn't hunting, and there was no invasion, I'd have my personal default scheme: Navy blue on extremely pale grey, with no highlights. The trigger-set was toggleable and would automatically set "you" "your" "dead" "skins" and the names of the "good guys" highlighted in a custom fuscia-ish shade.

Once I started playing RPIs though I found it unneccessary, because combat was slower, even during invasions, and I was actually able to keep up and my brain was capable of filtering out the excess and bringing my attention to the same words, without the highlights.

If I ever get back to a non RPI, or if the game I'm building for (not head builder this time, just a grunt) opens and I need to keep close track of game play, I'll probably rewrite my trigger-set. But til then, I'm digging my deep charcoal text on linen-ivory just fine.

Hahaha, well, of COURSE we did, silly! You wrote a post on the attack, and nobody likes a good bit of argument like a bulletin board community!!

Incidentally, when I post an opinion, I post my own preferences, so that game designers can get actual feedback from a player who most likely doesn't play their game. People who play their game obviously like what they are doing. I like to put my opinion out there so they can take it or leave it.

I just felt I'd stop by your rant here and point out the bit of it that offended me personally. Despite what you think, not all of us will ever make the 'cool' standard in this community, no matter what we say...so we might as well speak our own truths. Our posts take up as much bandwidth as the next person's.

Man, if only you knew this site better, TopMud is notorious for almost every poster hating someone or another.  The sheer number of arguments on this forum, they're astronomical.  A topic like the color in MUDs topic in which almost everyone agrees?  I'm surprised I haven't woken up to find it was all some sort of Days of Our Lives dream sequence.

I edited one post and removed a bunch of posts arguing about the OP's age and the OP insulting back. It's irrelevant and off-topic.

Having played Ozma's game once, I understand where he comes from. One of the reasons I disliked and eventually stopped playing his game was exactly what I wrote in a previous post: too many colors that do not add to anything but spam, highly customizable pre-titles and public channel colored emotes without any restriction on color usage, etc. There are many places in his MUD where the colors seems to enhance the experience, but the contrary happens in so many cases that it gets annoying soon.

In my own experience, I was able to play other MUD which uses as many different colors in an orderly way for 10 hr straight and have no tiredness in my eyes. When I played DBE for longer than a couple of hrs with public channels open I would get a headache.

In short, all this probably means is I am weak and his MUD kicks ass, but for this weakling, the preference is still well thought color usage instead of randomly pasting color to every other word in the MUD.

I tend to agree with the OP that moderate use of colour is a good thing, though I prefer its use to be one of heightening atmosphere rather than a (usually doomed to fail) attempt at 'realism'/colouring every keyword their 'appropriate' colour.

That said, yay for toggleable colour options. Each to his or her own.