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Dubthach · 02-18-2004, 06:10 PM

Why I Won't Play Your Mud

This post is basically a rant that arose after becoming frustrated with the dearth of good playable muds. Of course, this is just my opinion, and I'msure that many people have different requirements for the games they play.

Recently, I've been looking around for a new mud to play, and I've tried many of them off this site and mudconnector. I have about seven years experience playing muds, and I just got off a year of playing MMORPG's, mostly Dark Age of Camelot. I've tried at least 20 muds in the last couple months, and haven't found ANY that I wanted to play the day after I first logged in.

As an aside, you'll see that I reference Achaea several times below. This is for a couple reasons: 1) I played Achaea for maybe ten hours while I was evaluating it 2) Achaea is a pay mud that doesn't allow reviews, so I think its good to get some dialog out there and 3) it seemed like a good game
when I was trying it before I was blown away by the attitudes and rules.

You'll also notice that I compare muds to graphical games. Whether you know it or not, you are competing with graphical games. More and more mudders are playing them, and they are getting better all the time. I would guess that muds would want to attract people who are out of college, who don't
mind paying a little money toward a game that they spend a lot of time on, but it seems that this is not the case. MMORPGs are snatching those players up.

You may think after reading this that I am a "problem player". I certainly don't think I am one, and I have never been booted off of a mud, 1212'd, etc. The rules that I take exception to I got from reading help files, not from being yelled at by an Imm.

Anyway...on to the reasons that I won't play your mud!

Reason 1: The reality is not what was advertised.
Achaea, for instance, on both TMS and MC, is listed as "rp encouraged". I tried Achaea, and shortly after I was accepted to a guild, I was upbraided for not being RP enough on the guild newbie channel. Seems like RP enforced, no?

Also, with Achaea, it was too hard to figure out what the deal was with it being pay to play. I don't mind paying for a good game, but I expect the price to be up front and clearly explained.

Another big one here is if you say the world is "Mostly Original" but you just wrote over some stock areas. There are many many muds that do variants of this, and it is annoying. I _will_ play stockish games from time to time, but don't lie about it, cause that just ****es me off.

Reason 2: You have inane rules.
One of the big advantages that MMORPGs have over muds is that MMORPGs are businesses that are run for money. As long as you pay the money, you can play. Muds are full of stupid, random rules that are backed up by the tired excuse "I (the admin) pay for the server, you are here at my whim." That
may be true, but it doesn't impress me. I'm looking for a good game that is either free or competitively priced, that I can expect to use reasonably as I would any other game.

No AFK
Several muds that I have tried lately have had a "no-idling" rule. If an admin sends you a tell, you have a minute or so to get back to them, or they will punish you. Why is this? Is that socket I'm taking up so darn expensive that you need to worry about stuff like this?

One of the big advantages that a mud has over an MMORPG is that you can use your computer for other things while you mud. Most graphical games turn your PC into an appliance for playing their game. I can mud while I code, surf the web, write a document, listen to CDs, and so on. Since I'm not chained to my computer I might also have to stir something on the stove, put the bird in his cage, go talk to my wife, help the kid with his homework, and so on. In other words...I'll be AFK sometimes!

If your rationale for a no-afk rule is that the game has advantages for people who are constantly logged in, you should remove those advantages. Chief among these are xp penalties in ROM for people who do not have a certain number of hours per level. Aardwolf is an example of a mud that has
this just right. When you're in AFK mode, you don't get a lot of the spam that you would normally and you can't do much of anything. That way you can stay afk for huge amounts of time (which people do), and not take up very much bandwidth.

I flat out refuse to play games that have this rule. Perhaps the immortals would be understanding...but frankly I don't want to have to talk to Immortals about my behavior all the time (see Reason 4).

Obligatory Achaea dig
Amazingly, even pay muds have these stupid rules. On Achaea, you can expect to be deleted if you use leet speak at all (oh no! I just said leet, I'm gonna get deleted). Or if you're found to be AFK. Wow.

Reason 3: You cost too much.
Because of my frustration with the inane rules that free muds have, I thought I would try a couple pay muds to see if the code was better and if players were treated more like customers than guinea pigs.

Most of the pay muds that I have checked out are MORE expensive than MMORPGs! This blows my mind. I can't think of any rationale that would explain this. MMORPGs use massive amounts of bandwidth compared to muds. They require more developers to get the job done (let alone QA, marketing, etc.) They are played by tons more people.

No ceiling pay to play
Achaea has no guidelines for how much money is needed to make you competitive. You can pump hundreds of dollars into your character when you first create him. If I pump more money into my toon than you do into yours, your toon may not be able to compete with mine. I have a problem with this model. I think the MMORPG's have the best model: play a month for free, then pay us a flat monthly fee to get to everything in the game. If I'm paying for the game, I don't want to have less potential power than another player.

Flat out ridiculous cost pay to play
I heard that Gemstone3 and DragonRealms were good pay to plays so I checked their websites out. I was a bit shocked that they were as much as $13 a month, but then I was floored when I saw that that was just for the "basic" service. If you want to get to everything in the game it's twenty dollars more per month. One of the things I've become partial to in MMORPGs is having my own house. You'd need to pay the $30ish fee to get a house in these games...and it will still just be text. End result: never logged in.

Unlike Achaea, at least Gemstone3 and DragonRealms are up front about their costs.

Aside: Elysium
I haven't really tried it yet, but Elysium seems to have a workable, reasonable pay to play model in which you pay for each hour your toon will play. At 250 hours for 8 bucks, Elysium is competitively priced with an MMORPG, and would cost considerably less for a casual player.

Reason 4: Your Imms are too touchy feely.
In a perfect game, I never want to have to be face to face with an Imm, especially if the Imm is instructing me on how to change my behavior. If I log in, make a toon, run through the mud school, maybe ask a few questions on channels, and then proceed to whup on the mobs a bit, I SHOULD NOT BE IN CONTACT WITH ANY IMMS. I don't want to hear that I'm holding my sword wrong, or that my description doesn't include my eye color, or my name would look better with a K than a C, or any other stupid thing that might come up.

This happens a lot on RP enforced muds, which I don't play. My girlfriend does, however, and the following story is an example of why she won't play your RP enforced mud. :p

I forget the name of the mud this happened on, but we both logged into a mud one night to try it out. It was fun, a stockish ROM with RP requirements. I didn't really care for it, but she did. She read all the helps she was supposed to, constructed a detailed, well written description and was playing in her first group when she got to level 10 on the second day she played the game. A few minutes later, she was whisked away to a room in the mud school by an Imm. The Imm made her reread stuff in the mud school for several minutes before it came out that her toon's description contained a lot of good information, but didn't have her hair color in it. The Imm's description had spelling and grammar errors in it, but did catalog every physical feature that the help files said were required. While this
conversation was going on, the mud crashed. When it came back up, the Imm was gone, and my girlfriend's character was trapped in the room. Guess where she didn't log in again?

This story is pretty representative of touchy feely Imms. Here are the mistakes that I see:

* Pulled character out of a fun situation. (Grouping with another fun player, seeing new things in the game)
* Placed character in a prison room for no good reason.
* Didn't straight out tell her what the problem was/assumed she hadn't made an effort to read the helps.
* Stressed a catalog of traits instead of good writing.
* Violated the internet law that states you will make a spelling or
grammar mistake when you critique someone else's writing.

I mean, honestly, if you require that everyone specifies their hair color, eye color, height, weight, ad nauseum, why not put it into your character creation process? Then have code that spits out this stuff when another player examines you, and let players specify some other thing for their description?

Players do not want Imms ordering them about. Code the behaviors that you want into your game, and then you won't have to interfere with people as much. Your players will appreciate the effort.

Reason 5: You think you're better than you really are.
<dons flame retardent gloves>
I'm sure this will offend people, but it's true. This one is related
to Reason 1, but it's different enough that I think it deserves it's own little place.

I find it very distracting if I see you extolling yourself as a paragon of some virtue, and then you demonstrate that you are not. The example that springs to mind is spelling and grammar in your mud. I am not, by the way, extolling myself as a paragon of proper spelling and grammar. You can send all complaints of this sort to /dev/null. :)

I tried a mud yesterday. While I was playing, I pulled up their website and read it (unwittingly breaking their one minute no-idle rule since I hadn't read help rules yet!). On their builder application page was some text that said something like:

"Rules for building (I'm sorry if they seem harsh but that's the way it is):

1. You will bear responsability for spell checking all of your rooms.
..."

Whoa! I didn't know that responsibility had an "a" in it. But seriously folks, I wouldn't have thought anything of reading something with a spelling error in it, except that it's right out there in the open where you're telling people to check their own spelling! Then with this little nugget in mind, I go find a custom area, and discover a myriad of grammar errors in each room. I wouldn't be looking for them except that you said you wouldn't have any...and then it goes downhill from there.

Aside: In this nameless mud's defense, I reported the bad spelling as a bug and they fixed it almost immediately.

Reason 6: Your help files suck.
I'm kind of running out of gas on these last two, but I think they deserve mention. If you are running a mud that is based on a stock codebase...have help files for everything that is different about your mud from stock! This seems pretty basic to me, but all too often the help files lag behind the code changes.

Reason 7: Movement penalties.
I tend to spend a lot of time sleeping while I'm exploring the mud because my movement runs out. This isn't a deal breaker for me, but it is very annoying. If you want newbies to run around your mud, explore, have fun, get hooked, etc, consider getting rid of movement penalties for the first chunk of levels. ROMs are particularly bad here, since the "recall" command costs half your moves by default.

02-18-2004, 06:10 PM	#1
Dubthach New Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Posts: 21	Why I Won't Play Your Mud This post is basically a rant that arose after becoming frustrated with the dearth of good playable muds. Of course, this is just my opinion, and I'msure that many people have different requirements for the games they play. Recently, I've been looking around for a new mud to play, and I've tried many of them off this site and mudconnector. I have about seven years experience playing muds, and I just got off a year of playing MMORPG's, mostly Dark Age of Camelot. I've tried at least 20 muds in the last couple months, and haven't found ANY that I wanted to play the day after I first logged in. As an aside, you'll see that I reference Achaea several times below. This is for a couple reasons: 1) I played Achaea for maybe ten hours while I was evaluating it 2) Achaea is a pay mud that doesn't allow reviews, so I think its good to get some dialog out there and 3) it seemed like a good game when I was trying it before I was blown away by the attitudes and rules. You'll also notice that I compare muds to graphical games. Whether you know it or not, you are competing with graphical games. More and more mudders are playing them, and they are getting better all the time. I would guess that muds would want to attract people who are out of college, who don't mind paying a little money toward a game that they spend a lot of time on, but it seems that this is not the case. MMORPGs are snatching those players up. You may think after reading this that I am a "problem player". I certainly don't think I am one, and I have never been booted off of a mud, 1212'd, etc. The rules that I take exception to I got from reading help files, not from being yelled at by an Imm. Anyway...on to the reasons that I won't play your mud! Reason 1: The reality is not what was advertised. Achaea, for instance, on both TMS and MC, is listed as "rp encouraged". I tried Achaea, and shortly after I was accepted to a guild, I was upbraided for not being RP enough on the guild newbie channel. Seems like RP enforced, no? Also, with Achaea, it was too hard to figure out what the deal was with it being pay to play. I don't mind paying for a good game, but I expect the price to be up front and clearly explained. Another big one here is if you say the world is "Mostly Original" but you just wrote over some stock areas. There are many many muds that do variants of this, and it is annoying. I _will_ play stockish games from time to time, but don't lie about it, cause that just ***es me off. Reason 2: You have inane rules. One of the big advantages that MMORPGs have over muds is that MMORPGs are businesses that are run for money. As long as you pay the money, you can play. Muds are full of stupid, random rules that are backed up by the tired excuse "I (the admin) pay for the server, you are here at my whim." That may be true, but it doesn't impress me. I'm looking for a good game that is either free or competitively priced, that I can expect to use reasonably as I would any other game. No AFK Several muds that I have tried lately have had a "no-idling" rule. If an admin sends you a tell, you have a minute or so to get back to them, or they will punish you. Why is this? Is that socket I'm taking up so darn expensive that you need to worry about stuff like this? One of the big advantages that a mud has over an MMORPG is that you can use your computer for other things while you mud. Most graphical games turn your PC into an appliance for playing their game. I can mud while I code, surf the web, write a document, listen to CDs, and so on. Since I'm not chained to my computer I might also have to stir something on the stove, put the bird in his cage, go talk to my wife, help the kid with his homework, and so on. In other words...I'll be AFK sometimes! If your rationale for a no-afk rule is that the game has advantages for people who are constantly logged in, you should remove those advantages. Chief among these are xp penalties in ROM for people who do not have a certain number of hours per level. Aardwolf is an example of a mud that has this just right. When you're in AFK mode, you don't get a lot of the spam that you would normally and you can't do much of anything. That way you can stay afk for huge amounts of time (which people do), and not take up very much bandwidth. I flat out refuse to play games that have this rule. Perhaps the immortals would be understanding...but frankly I don't want to have to talk to Immortals about my behavior all the time (see Reason 4). Obligatory Achaea dig Amazingly, even pay muds have these stupid rules. On Achaea, you can expect to be deleted if you use leet speak at all (oh no! I just said leet, I'm gonna get deleted). Or if you're found to be AFK. Wow. Reason 3: You cost too much. Because of my frustration with the inane rules that free muds have, I thought I would try a couple pay muds to see if the code was better and if players were treated more like customers than guinea pigs. Most of the pay muds that I have checked out are MORE expensive than MMORPGs! This blows my mind. I can't think of any rationale that would explain this. MMORPGs use massive amounts of bandwidth compared to muds. They require more developers to get the job done (let alone QA, marketing, etc.) They are played by tons more people. No ceiling pay to play Achaea has no guidelines for how much money is needed to make you competitive. You can pump hundreds of dollars into your character when you first create him. If I pump more money into my toon than you do into yours, your toon may not be able to compete with mine. I have a problem with this model. I think the MMORPG's have the best model: play a month for free, then pay us a flat monthly fee to get to everything in the game. If I'm paying for the game, I don't want to have less potential power than another player. Flat out ridiculous cost pay to play I heard that Gemstone3 and DragonRealms were good pay to plays so I checked their websites out. I was a bit shocked that they were as much as $13 a month, but then I was floored when I saw that that was just for the "basic" service. If you want to get to everything in the game it's twenty dollars more per month. One of the things I've become partial to in MMORPGs is having my own house. You'd need to pay the $30ish fee to get a house in these games...and it will still just be text. End result: never logged in. Unlike Achaea, at least Gemstone3 and DragonRealms are up front about their costs. Aside: Elysium I haven't really tried it yet, but Elysium seems to have a workable, reasonable pay to play model in which you pay for each hour your toon will play. At 250 hours for 8 bucks, Elysium is competitively priced with an MMORPG, and would cost considerably less for a casual player. Reason 4: Your Imms are too touchy feely. In a perfect game, I never want to have to be face to face with an Imm, especially if the Imm is instructing me on how to change my behavior. If I log in, make a toon, run through the mud school, maybe ask a few questions on channels, and then proceed to whup on the mobs a bit, I SHOULD NOT BE IN CONTACT WITH ANY IMMS. I don't want to hear that I'm holding my sword wrong, or that my description doesn't include my eye color, or my name would look better with a K than a C, or any other stupid thing that might come up. This happens a lot on RP enforced muds, which I don't play. My girlfriend does, however, and the following story is an example of why she won't play your RP enforced mud. :p I forget the name of the mud this happened on, but we both logged into a mud one night to try it out. It was fun, a stockish ROM with RP requirements. I didn't really care for it, but she did. She read all the helps she was supposed to, constructed a detailed, well written description and was playing in her first group when she got to level 10 on the second day she played the game. A few minutes later, she was whisked away to a room in the mud school by an Imm. The Imm made her reread stuff in the mud school for several minutes before it came out that her toon's description contained a lot of good information, but didn't have her hair color in it. The Imm's description had spelling and grammar errors in it, but did catalog every physical feature that the help files said were required. While this conversation was going on, the mud crashed. When it came back up, the Imm was gone, and my girlfriend's character was trapped in the room. Guess where she didn't log in again? This story is pretty representative of touchy feely Imms. Here are the mistakes that I see: Pulled character out of a fun situation. (Grouping with another fun player, seeing new things in the game) * Placed character in a prison room for no good reason. * Didn't straight out tell her what the problem was/assumed she hadn't made an effort to read the helps. * Stressed a catalog of traits instead of good writing. * Violated the internet law that states you will make a spelling or grammar mistake when you critique someone else's writing. I mean, honestly, if you require that everyone specifies their hair color, eye color, height, weight, ad nauseum, why not put it into your character creation process? Then have code that spits out this stuff when another player examines you, and let players specify some other thing for their description? Players do not want Imms ordering them about. Code the behaviors that you want into your game, and then you won't have to interfere with people as much. Your players will appreciate the effort. Reason 5: You think you're better than you really are. <dons flame retardent gloves> I'm sure this will offend people, but it's true. This one is related to Reason 1, but it's different enough that I think it deserves it's own little place. I find it very distracting if I see you extolling yourself as a paragon of some virtue, and then you demonstrate that you are not. The example that springs to mind is spelling and grammar in your mud. I am not, by the way, extolling myself as a paragon of proper spelling and grammar. You can send all complaints of this sort to /dev/null. :) I tried a mud yesterday. While I was playing, I pulled up their website and read it (unwittingly breaking their one minute no-idle rule since I hadn't read help rules yet!). On their builder application page was some text that said something like: "Rules for building (I'm sorry if they seem harsh but that's the way it is): 1. You will bear responsability for spell checking all of your rooms. ..." Whoa! I didn't know that responsibility had an "a" in it. But seriously folks, I wouldn't have thought anything of reading something with a spelling error in it, except that it's right out there in the open where you're telling people to check their own spelling! Then with this little nugget in mind, I go find a custom area, and discover a myriad of grammar errors in each room. I wouldn't be looking for them except that you said you wouldn't have any...and then it goes downhill from there. Aside: In this nameless mud's defense, I reported the bad spelling as a bug and they fixed it almost immediately. Reason 6: Your help files suck. I'm kind of running out of gas on these last two, but I think they deserve mention. If you are running a mud that is based on a stock codebase...have help files for everything that is different about your mud from stock! This seems pretty basic to me, but all too often the help files lag behind the code changes. Reason 7: Movement penalties. I tend to spend a lot of time sleeping while I'm exploring the mud because my movement runs out. This isn't a deal breaker for me, but it is very annoying. If you want newbies to run around your mud, explore, have fun, get hooked, etc, consider getting rid of movement penalties for the first chunk of levels. ROMs are particularly bad here, since the "recall" command costs half your moves by default.