[silvarilon]

Um, Darren. This is exactly the opposite of what Jason had mentioned.

He complained that Achaea used to have strong RP, which is now no longer enforced to the extent that asking for RP is punishable.

Your main complaint with Castle Marrach appears to be that they enforce RP so strongly that you feel it cuts into the fun of the players, and feel that they are bullying you in the way they enforce RP and consequences for that RP.

Both games may (or may not) have these problems, but you're complaining about problems from the opposite ends of the spectrum.

All your posts seem to be negative, either finding a complaint about another game, with you replying saying "Castle Marrach also has this problem!" or original posts about how terrible Castle Marrach is. There is very little to be gained from that, Castle Marrach isn't actively advertised on this site, so it's unlikely you are warning away any potential players - all you're really achieving is to help promote their brand awareness, and maybe send some interested players their way. As I've suggested before, instead of taking the negative attitude and talking about what you don't like in Castle Marrach, why not instead talk about what the problem is, why it's bad, and suggest ways that it can be avoided - that way your posts can be useful for other MUD-builders too. Try to keep your comments general, both to avoid looking like an anti-castle-marrach troll, and also because more general comments are useful for a wider range of MUD-builders. You can also give good examples of games that bypass those problems.

... and, to avoid derailing this thread, here's how I came across MUDs...

I was reading Sluggy Freelance, an online comic, and it had a banner advert for Skotos (the company that hosts Castle Marrach) - I ignored the banner for a few weeks, until one day I did click on it. I can't remember the wording on the banner, it was something like "help write our adventure" - I visited the site, logged into the Castle Marrach game and... had fun, for about an hour, but didn't really "get" it. I was playing a character, great. I was interacting with this new world. Great. But what was I meant to DO? There was nothing to achieve. So I played this character for another day or two, and then stopped logging in. In that time, however, I did notice their articles on world building, which caught my imagination. So, a few weeks later, I remembered this whole "MUD thing" and did a bit more research, found a mud client that had a list of muds, and started going through the list trying them out.

I discovered that most of them were empty, and the ones that I did come across were basically just D&D combat simulations. I could be a fighter or a ranger or a rogue, but the only real difference between those characters was the way in which I try to kill the upcoming orc. That's not a character, that's a combat strategy. So I ended up back at Skotos, which had the best roleplay I'd come across, and was just chance that it was the first game I'd tried. (I'm not saying other games don't have roleplay, just that Castle Marrach was the only one with any real roleplay that I'd come across over my first few weeks of trying them out) - I played longer that time, for about a week, and once again got frustrated by my inability to achieve anything. (Yes, I'm hard to satisfy, aren't I? I want achievement AND roleplay both in the same game.)

So, imagination still on fire from the world building articles, I wrote to the person in charge of Skotos, asking if I could help out with their upcoming games as a volunteer programmer. I got told yes, got assigned to a game which had a designer but no coder, and started working. That game failed, partly because I didn't really know what I was doing, partly because the designer wasn't around in contact so we couldn't refine the game design to dovetail smoothly with the code I was writing, and partly because it was designed as a tabletop game, not as a MUD. So when we decided that wasn't going to work out, I got moved to another game, which worked much better. There was a small team there, which meant I had support - most significantly, someone showed me how to turn on the chat lines. Suddenly what was an abandoned world with me as the only inhabitant lit up, and I could see the many worlds, with many builders, all chatting away. With access to that larger community, we worked on our games, sharing ideas and helping with code and building. Some of those games went live, others fell by the wayside. My game's lead left, putting someone else in charge. That happened a number of times over the development, but each time the remaining team pulled together, until we launched the game.

In the process of building (and later, designing) the game, I got a better understanding of what muds & mushes were really about, and how to go about playing them. I got a better understanding of my own personal tastes. And I got an understanding of how achievement in CM works, and how to "play the game" - which is what I was missing my first few attempts. Even when we launched the game, my understanding was still incomplete, and some of the designed systems have since been rewritten to better suit the player's style.

Almost a decade later, I'm still much more interested in sitting on the staff side than the player side - I love to play these games we build, I truly do. But I love to program them even more! I love to design a new system, predict how the players will react, and how we'll need to modify the system to encourage the players to react in ways that are positive to the game. And then I love to implement the system and see how accurate I was, and what needs to be changed, added, or removed.