[khurza]

I've played Arm off and on over 13ish years. I've definitely had some crappy experiences with both gods and players, and I don't mean just your usual crap, I mean downright dickish behaviour. but I've twinked a time or two on a character or two so I expect when I get sloppy, it will catch up to me eventually. I don't think the dickish behaviour was necessary, but I ran a mud myself many years ago and after years of babysitting idiots that can't/won't/don't read, or multi-play, or logon just to make trouble, I just closed up shop. I know many of folks have done that as well, you really take the **** when you are an admin/god/owner of a mud.

Having said that, I still play when I can, and I've had some truly magical moments on Arm. I've met people I will probably never know IRL, because the community works simply because so much of it is IConly standards, you don't have big groups of lame online-gamers that show up one day and start setting everything up so that they can control the game via metagaming and ooc information. Which, in case you hadn't realized, has become a real problem on muds these days. It's never going to be like it was twenty years ago when the average player was twelve yrs old up to about uni age. There's a lot of information to read about gamer mentality and gamer rage on the internet these days.

If you ask me, I'm going to say play it, and if you are true to yourself and the gaming standards they've set, you'll have a great time. Sure you might be betrayed, lied to/about, stabbed, killed, pushed off the shield wall, robbed, have your mount stolen, get raided, be attacked by wind witches that will send you somewhere that nobody will be able to save you from, might discover steinal, get arrested, come down with a spice addiction, get the nasties from a local whore, run out of water alone, in the salt flats, just ten rooms from the gate, get hunted by gickers, get collared, have a finger removed, be afraid to go into your apartment, have your apartment robbed, end up in the arena, take an arrow to the knee, etc... but what the heck, even that isn't always so bad, if you've been given a good scene/death.

I'm sorry someone had a bad time there, and some good ones, but felt they were overshadowed by the bad. I've played a lot of muds in my life, literally in the hundreds, and many of them were just small european (usually danish) muds with maybe ten players on them while the owners/builders struggled to get the game up and running. I've played most of the bigger muds from fifteen to twenty years ago, and recently have been playing an I.R.E. mud. I'm not going to lie about it, it's a decent mud, but the players....shesh, it makes Arm look like pre-school. You've never seen such a group of metagaming, ooc and rumour mongering, players. And mostly, these games are games you can get by on, but if you don't sink real money into it, you won't ever make the higher scores. So there you go, Arm has it's own problem, but so does every other MUD out there, at least according to the complaints online.

It's better to suggest a game you do like to play, than advise against people playing a game you don't like to play. You'll get a much better audience and feedback.