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Old 02-06-2013, 03:39 PM   #1
Hades_Kane
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Join Date: Oct 2012
Home MUD: End of Time
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New here, Veteran Elsewhere

I registered back in October, but will probably be getting more active around here, so I thought why not?

TL;DR Version: Hi, I'm Diablos from End of Time, I've been MUDing since 1996, building since '99, Administrating since '00, and working on EoT since '01/'03/'05 depending on how you look at it.

I post as Hades_Kane on all of the other MUD forums, but am known in-game as Diablos. Hades Kane is a handle I started using in probably '97 or '98 when I was a teenager, and well, it's the name I'm most commonly recognized under in the community, so I've kept it consistent. Many of you probably know me from the other sites.

I've been MUDing since 1996, my first MUD being DragonRealms on AOL. After a couple of months of basically blindly stumbling around that game and getting in trouble after discovering the emote command, and later on losing our AOL access, that was it for a bit, but that itch to MUD never went away. A year or two later, I can't remember exactly, I discovered a website that linked to free online games, and it had a link to the old Zmud that would let you evaluate past 30 days, and started using the MUD List on that to find new games. No real surprise, I started playing a Nightmare LP MUD called Dragon Realm. It was really nothing like DragonRealms, but the game hooked me regardless. It was around this time I managed to get a friend involved in MUDing too.

This was really my first serious MUD, but there was a server issue, and it went down for months. This didn't stop me, multiple times EVERY DAY checking to see if it was back up. In the mean time, my friend discovered Aargh!! MUD (gotta love those cheesy names to appear higher in the listings) which was a Merc based game. I started playing that a little bit here and there waiting for Dragon Realm, which finally came back up, but it had basically started over, all pfiles and areas were lost. I played religiously on that game for months until I was being continually transfered into a PK fight I was trying to avoid by an immortal who I guess was bored or friends with my would-be killer. In a panic, I didn't think to log off, but I got killed and lost literally months worth of exp I was storing for when a certain guild was re-opened. Needless to say, this situation was never addressed and was largely ignored, at least until they decided to delete me and newlock my IP. I checked back in over the next few months, and the same immortal did the same thing another player, but I guess that player was important because they did something about that incident. Whatever

It was in the Merc based game I found gameplay that really clicked with me. The MUD eventually converted over to Native Land under different management, and that was my first experience with the pitfalls of an Admin letting his girlfriend have a high ranking position without any real ability or investment in the game other than dating the owner. Long story short, my death based roleplay of my Necromancer / Drow and Vampire associates was too icky for her, and "no one ever said anything about Necromancers having anything to do with death anyway". After close to a year on that game, and some of the best RP I've ever had on a MUD, we were asked to leave the game with a ban and a character deletion

I left MUDing for about a year after that. It was difficult to see it as anything but filled with overbearing, power hungry megalomaniacs that used the games as their personal ego-trip playgrounds that were incapable of dealing with anyone having a different opinion.

In either '98 or '99... I'm thinking mid '99, I found TMC and started just browsing their categories. I had no intention of actually playing a game again, but the Final Fantasy theme caught me eye and I tried a few. There was a ROM based game called Realmz of Delusion that hooked me nearly immediately. I was floored with the attention to accuracy in some of the areas, and when I could navigate through their Wall Market area based on pure memory of the games alone, that sealed it for me. I loved the gameplay of ROM, pretty much every aspect of it. It was familiar enough based on my Merc background, but even better. The game at this point had maybe 10 or 15 areas and a terribly undeveloped world map, but that didn't matter. The level progression was also painfully slow, I'm not sure that at this point anyone had reached level 30, and during my entire stay with this game, I don't know that anyone ever reached 50. This definitely influenced my belief that a really grindish, slow game is best. After only a few months playing, I decided to learn how to build, because I wanted to give back to and add to this game that I fell in love with.

Edgar was always my favorite Final Fantasy 6 character, and FF6 my favorite game, so I wanted to build Figaro Castle. The name "Hades" wasn't usable (this had been a mainstay of my character names on MUDs prior when I could have it) because of a mob, so sticking within the theme, I chose Diablos, the red and black bat demon Summon from FF. After finishing Figaro Castle, I moved on to Figaro Caves, and then area after area. Eventually, we booted up a blank worldmap for me to work with, and designed, built, and mappped out the entire wilderness map, probably still the biggest map I've ever worked with. As the Head Builder Guion eventually moved onto another project in late '99 or '00 (leaning toward '00) called Genesia, and the owner/coder lost interest in it, me and a couple of other builders basically became the ones running the game. In my off time, me and the friend I mentioned before that I got into MUDing started helping Guion with Genesia, basically crafting a planet themed off of a mythology based MUD idea we had ironed out over the last couple of years. As far as RoD, though, as with any game where the owner/coder loses interest, it was finally going to be going down. We got word in early 2001 and had about 6 weeks to prepare. In the first 3 weeks, Guion donated our work on Genesia as the basis for a new game, and the world map we had made for our planet became the world map/basis for this new game which we ended up calling Cleft of Dimension. The idea behind the name was that the game was to be a blend of the different "dimensions" of Final Fantasy, and in FF5, the Cleft (or The Void) was indeed the space between worlds, so it seemed fitting.

Within those 3 weeks, we got the basis for the MUD up and running. It was tireless, nearly round the clock work as you can imagine. Races and classes were ironed out, skills for all of them arranged or added, and probably at least 20 areas to start out were made. Admittedly, many of those areas weren't any good, and since the owner of the other MUD wouldn't release our areas to us, we did do some manual copying between the games of our own areas, but I doubt more than 3 or 4 were copied in this manner, the majority of the work was original. After the 3 weeks, we posted our information on RoD to try to start migrating the playerbase over to the new MUD, and at the end of that, we officially opened Cleft of Dimension in March of 2001. My previous experiences with the type of tyrant Admin really influenced the Administration style, and I swore to never be that type or let the game turn into that.

I learned the difficulty of having a team of 5 or 6 equal founders with this project. Within two years, most of us had parted ways, with only about 1 or 2 having much of a presence on the game. The game itself was taken over (rather against my will, admittedly) by one of the players of the game during a leave of absence I had taken due to some of the conflict amongst the immortal team, and many changes started taking place. Systems that had been being worked toward for the 2 years were scrapped, application only prestige classes were added that only a favored few were allowed access to, certain races were enhanced while others were nerfed according to the favored inner circle of the admin, a policy of strict agreement with the Admins and keeping any dissenting opinions to your self was draconically enforced. It was about this time that me and another builder/Admin from that game had finally had our fill, and after talking with the other original founders I could still get in contact with (all but 2 if I recall), it was decided the best course of action to keep the peace would be for us to take our copy of the game and run it elsewhere under a different name, and let the current course of CoD continue.

That was the birth of End of Time. The first bit of initial work was set out to roll back much of what was done on CoD. Any areas built after my leave of absence were removed, most of the code added after that was removed as well. We set to work on the color scheme, the general aesthetics of the game, redid some of the races and classes to help set us apart from CoD, finished and expanded other code that was left never finished on CoD. After a few months of good, steady work, the pace fell off, and over the next year, it grinded to a halt, and FFXI hooked the coder and other staff. It would be another year and a half (October of 2005) before I'd give MUDing and EoT another shot. I decided at this point that if I were going to give EoT a shot, I would learn what I needed to be able to rely only on myself. I had some great help from Ryzic very early on, and Midboss coming along shortly after drastically changed the face and direction of the game for the better. It's been up consistently since then. There's been a few prolonged lulls here and there, but things are going great.

And wow, I hit the thread max... continued in reply!
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Old 02-06-2013, 03:39 PM   #2
Hades_Kane
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Re: New here, Veteran Elsewhere

Sprinkled in between CoD and the second/current run of EoT were a handful of other MUDs I built for or lended some form of hand to. Tempest of Time, Setting Sun, Legend of the Espers, Landz of Delusion, Final Fantasy 7: After Crisis, one incarnation of Final Fantasy Tactics Online (that had no real official connection to the earlier version, and I can't remember if I just tested or did anything more substantial). There was at least a couple of more, but their names elude me. I've taken to collecting Final Fantasy codebases as well, more just out of the purposes of nostalgia and archiving than anything. I was actually able to reunite one person with a copy of his MUD this way after he had lost all copies for one reason or another. I brought Cleft of Dimension back up years after it had closed, when I managed to get control of the domain name and such. I had many players looking to relive the nostalgia of that game, so it seemed appropriate to have it running for that purpose and to maintain the uninterrupted TMC listing that's been there since about 2001. I've managed to collect a few other FF MUDs as well, including Final Fantasy Compendium (circa 2004 or 2005). I'd love to eventually have my hands on Trenton's FF MUD, but that doesn't seem to be circulating anymore. I've considered creating a resource for Final Fantasy MUDs specifically, acting as perhaps a repository, forum, and MUD List catering to the specifics of a genre that aren't represented in the other listings. There are a lot of different aspects of a Final Fantasy game a person could be looking for, afterall, from a system based on classes, or job changing, or materia, or magicite, along with specifics on what games the world draws from, how purist Final Fantasy the game is, whether characters from the games are allowed to be played, etc. Overall, though, I doubt both the success of such an endeavor and the level of interest/participation there would be from the other games that I suppose would be direct "competition."

Anyhow, I was bored at work and typing on this off and on throughout the day. It's probably long enough
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Old 03-24-2013, 12:15 PM   #3
Lorana
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Re: New here, Veteran Elsewhere

wordy much? welcome :-)
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Old 03-25-2013, 07:50 AM   #4
Darren Brimhall
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Re: New here, Veteran Elsewhere

Sounds like you too were a victim of Metagamers on CoD.

Welcome back to the Word of MUD's.


Darren Brimhall
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