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The review in its entirety:
I shall now offer my rebuttal, which it seems will be rehashing some things I posted in response to the last review.
AR's players are able to choose a race, class, alignment, and ethos. This gives them four different things to roleplay as soon as they create. In addition to that, hometowns have their own personality and players can draw off that for background to represent that they are from the particular hometown, as soon as they create. Now that's the simple roleplay stuff out of the way. I'll move on to the cabals.
Cabals our muds version of clans, and they bring people with a common cause together. Each cabal is associated with a unique hometown. Each cabal's goal is to bring a form of stabiliy to the mud (the only cabal which actually demand killing being the Knights of Valour, who limit this to murderous players only, and under a code of honor). There are four cabals.
Now, since cabals are in the mould of needing to know how to fight, we took the liberty of providing them pacifistic "little brother" subordinate organisations that those cabals are responsible for protecting. So even if you can't PK worth beans, there's an organisation that needs you for your roleplay skills, and its protected by people who can. There are four subordinate organisations, one related to each cabal. These are particulaly rich in roleplaying opportunity, as I'm sure the more experienced rpers of the MUD will happily testify. Not everybody on AR is a great PKer, or even a competent one, but everybody has to learn to use their legs to run. Its the least you can do to avoid being killed by mobs not just players.
That is not to say the MUD is completely cabal focused at all. An independent player is welcome to start up his own clan and we've seen this happen several times recently. For example we had a band of "Darksorrows", which if I recall right was a drow order. We also had an impromptu band of pirates hold the playerbase to ransom simply making them hand over their gold in return for peace. This group was actually more influential than any cabal at some point. Completely ungrouped players can still hang out with the subordinates for social contact and, if they want to play the game alone, then we have "quests" implemented to help them to immerse themselves in the environment.
As if it wasnt easy enough to enjoy a peaceful roleplaying experience on Abandoned Realms, our Justice cabal has been gifted with the ability to make criminals of people who attack within the most popular town. This is not a typically enjoyable experience for any would-be looter, since Justice special guards don't pay attention to the exp-based PK ranges that normally ensure characters in PK are close to each others level. Safety is usually just a recall potion away. Not to mention that every class has a unique guildhall which only their class may enter, allowing them to hide behind a pretty high level mob for added protection. The difficulty of this mob is a deterrent to just about all the low level killing.
Course, there's other ways to avoid the dying, like just learning the way around and using your legs. But basically, given the right conditions (some of which are described above), there is no need.
Players are not required to explain the reasons to their victims to other players when they do their killing, but they are expected to be able to justify them to Immortals upon demand. An Immortal may make such a demand if, for example, a player prays or writes a complaint note about other players engaging in pointless killing. Personally I have banned people from the MUD for pointless killing and I certainly won't hestitate to ban some more when I see that it is required.
That said, there exists a few reasons why no explanation would be given, and those reasons are roleplaying ones. For example guilds that are obviously evil (dark-knights) and obviously good (paladins) are expected to be at loggerheads. The same goes for certain races - elves and drows, and dwarf and duergar both harbinge grudges for each other. Nobody likes vampires, and frankly neither do they. If a player doesnt want to be killed without an explanation, then he can by all means avoid the race/classes that CAN be killed without one. Neutral human rangers spring to mind.
As for the looting, here are some legitimate reasons why people may loot you on AR:
* they wish to sell/wear your items
* they want to stop you pasting them back in 10 minutes
Neither of these reasons require the player to be an #######. That said, we have implemented restrictions on looting to help low level players. If the player is killed in lower ranks, his killers may only take one item from the corpse at a time, and he must use the item's NAME. This gives plenty of time for people to retrieve corpse with nearly everything intact, especially if the victim had used the ever-helpful recall potion and died near where they respawn in town. In addition to that, our OUTFIT command (used in those protective guildhalls I earlier wrote about) provides players with a set of randomly generated items. They're not great items that'll let you rebound as good as you were before death, but it'll get you back on your feet for getting some better ones. Of course, its better to worry about how to avoid the deaths in the first place, then this relatively mild problem won't even need dealing with.
We apologise for Tatsai's disappointing experience, and wish him the best at his next MUD.
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