[ymar]

Hi. I'm not a very experienced MUD player. I've only played one MUD seriously, which was the Polish MUD Arkadia.I loved the experience, but I eventually stopped playing. I'll explain why, but I will first describe some of the features the MUD.

Arkadia has a very large number of locations divided into two "worlds", one of which is themed according to the Warhammer world, and one according to the world of Sapkowski's Witcher books. The two worlds intertwine (without much of an attempt at explaining this fact). It is in constant development, has been for like twenty years now (not sure exactly), and new locations are created, rules are changed, quests are added and so on. And it does look a bit like building site from the inside -- you come across permanently blocked roads and unenterable towns.

There is no magic in the game, almost at all. That is magic is mentioned, and you can see some magical things, but players don't do magic, and they don't have to be concerned about it. There are also no bows and no horseback riding.

Now for the gameplay. Roleplaying is effectively obligatory, though I don't remember what the exact rules are. There are no classes to be chosen during character creation. Instead, there is quite a complicated system of guilds and professions for the players. It works broadly like this. There is a significant number of skills available for the players, including such as acrobatics or knowledge of herbology. (Some of them are almost useless due to the unfinished nature of the game.) There is a limit for each skill of how much you can learn without joining some guild or profession. Once you join one, the limits get larger for some pertinent skills. You can leave both guilds an professions, but what happens is that after some time you'll forget all you've learned there, and your skills will go back to the pre-joining state. There are some (even useful) skills that you can't max out simply because there's no place where you can do that.

You can also learn languages, and there are quite a lot of them. For that you just have to get friendly with someone who knows a language and persuade them to teach you. You can also get languages for free by choosing your roots.

One feature that I particularly liked was the presence of "societies" (or whatever the right English word is). There are very many emotions available for players as they are, but by joining "societies", guilds, professions or whatever, you get new fancy ones. One of the societies is the "Society of Travellers". You get a map, and each time you see something new, the map grows, and you can gain "traveller's levels" which give you more and more emotions. The more obscure things you look at, the faster it happens.

Now what I wanted do was become a herbalist in the game. I just liked walking around, making money in various non-violent ways. There are quite many available, for example selling herbs, fishing, working for the postal office, doing quests. I liked doing those things very much. I would sometimes go and kill something, and I wanted to start doing it more often later.

Why I left was because I found that I was close to learning all the skills available pre-join and discovered how little I could learn after I joined the herbalist profession. And I wanted to learn everything eventually, which is impossible because of the skill forgetting thing. Also it turned out as I became acquainted with the world and my character learned to do stuff, pleople started pressuring me to join their various things, and go to war, and do all these stupid things I didn't want to do. They were nice people, but it started to take too much of my time, and I left.

I would like to find a MUD that would satisfy me. Could you help me? I would just like to walk around and watch my character grow and become and omniscient being. I would like to look for herbs, hunt, fish, deliver parcels, do quests and try different professions. I would like the MUD to be similar to Arkadia in many respects. I don't need magic, but if there's magic, it's alright. I would prefer not to be killed by players to often. I would like the players to be friendly but not too much. If there was a measure of your progress in getting to know the world, like in Arkadia, that would be fantastic.

I would just like an Arkadia that doesn't limit me too much. (As the real one does in my opinion.) I can accept limitations on weapon skills. That is you probably shouldn't be able to become a master in every weapon there is. But why shouldn't I be able to learn other skills as well as I want?

Thank you.