[camlorn]

Ok, just a few suggestions for hack and slash; I've been playing muds for some time, and generally jump around a lot. I don't know how to make links in the forum, nor do I have the desire to find home pages, so punch these into your favorite search engine; if you search on tms you'll find them all.

Firstly, alter aeon. It's good if you're looking for something really casual, it's got a large playerbase, and has multiclassing. The newbie areas are well-done, however, the quality does go down a bit afterwords. Unfortunately, it's pretty basic, level-based with practices, no crafting, but I do still go back to it from time to time. Also, it's got a soundpack by one of the blind players, which is nice, and can interface with a screen raeder if you use one.

Second, another hack and slash, 3 kingdoms. It's got great classes, mages get armies that follow you around, be careful not to lose control or they'll kill you; I've never found a better implementation of bard, and there's a bunch of sci-fi ones as well, including one that lets you get a parasite installed and cyborgs and such. As is fairly common on some of the lpmuds, however, eq doesn't save over logoff or reboot; this doesn't bother me, but it bothers many. Also, there's a lot of donation going on; it's free to play, but the donation perks, if I recall correctly, are significant.

If you're looking for a good rpi, dartmud's good; their e-mail thing has been broken forever, but you can play without it. Get a wizard (or whatever they call their staff) to send it; unfortunately it has to be a non-free account last I played. There's also armageddon (even more rpi, I don't know much about it), which a lot of people seem to like.


For pk, godwars2 is amazing if you're into that. As I'm not overly into pk, I don't play there anymore, but you'll never find a combat system (or even code base) like godwars2, which throws out even rooms. If you like godwars, which pretty much describes the training style you mentioned, moments of hatred is a good active one, that was supposed to have a new combat system coming online yesterday, but didn't. That should be in any day.

And, i'm going to throw this one out there just in case, with a warning. Dark legacy is pretty much the best for crafting and enchanting and making your own eq, however, the head coder is only rarely fixing bugs and no active development is going on nor is there expected to ever be again. Still, if you overlook the typos and bugs that are around if you look for them (it's not as bad as I make it sound), the final product can almost be called "finished", at least as far as a mud can be called that.

Finally, as this is quite a lengthy post, materia magica and aardwolf can't really be compared. They're wildly different; they only look similar at first. Personally, I don't overly remember aardwolf as being special, but materia magica is decent.

Also, if you look at mudconnect.com, you'll also find promotions and such there that are recent, and the mud connecter and top mud sites top 20 are always a good resource. If you're looking for playerbase, there's mudstats.com, which shows averages and such, sortable by your preferences.