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Old 10-18-2010, 03:56 PM   #1
Threshold
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Mudding Communities Are Alive and Well in Alter Aeon

Article:

This guide/news article is primarily about Alter Aeon but also speaks generally about MUDs and how they appeal to blind gamers.

This article was researched, written, and published as part of the initiative that began here:

Milawe put a lot of work and research into this article, so it is not exactly the sort of article I discussed in that thread. It would certainly be easier on the writer to publish a general new player guide or getting started guide using information supplied by the mud devs. But I still think this is a nice first article and hopefully it will drive some traffic to Alter Aeon and MUDs overall.
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Old 10-18-2010, 06:06 PM   #2
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Re: Mudding Communities Are Alive and Well in Alter Aeon

I just wanted to note that the Alter Aeon players helped a lot with the personal interviews, and I got a great experience logging on anonymously as a player.
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Old 10-19-2010, 10:05 AM   #3
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Re: Mudding Communities Are Alive and Well in Alter Aeon

The article certainly got me to AA for a look, and I was pleasantly surprised at how much fun I was having after creating a chracter, however a little dip deeper in (which I always do before I start getting into a game) revealed you can buy credits which can be used for items, clan housing and storage (NICE!) but also for buying practices which are used for increasing stats (Boo!).

So sadly I said a goodbye after a brief flirtation as I believe in pay for perks or even paid subscription.. but, I do not believe in pay for player power in any format where money can give an advantage.

BUT the article got me there and was a great read, and the game looked like a nice traditional MUD and was great fun.

Re. the article.. I have often mentioned how muds are so perfectly suited to the visually impaired (only a few days ago actually on a completely unrelated forum) and love that historical part of this game and spent an enjoyable hour or so just reading the AA website, guides, helpfiles etc.
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Old 10-19-2010, 04:55 PM   #4
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Re: Mudding Communities Are Alive and Well in Alter Aeon

Thanks, Milawe and Threshold, for the time and effort you spent on this. It's a great article and will hopefully raise visibility across the whole genre.

Milawe, I figured you were probably playing at some point, but I never heard anything about it or had any idea who you were. Your sneak and hide skills are excellent.

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Old 10-19-2010, 05:15 PM   #5
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Re: Mudding Communities Are Alive and Well in Alter Aeon

MudMann,

Thanks for the kind words. I've tried to collect and archive historical information in addition to current guides and howtos on the Alter Aeon web site, and it's good to see that at least someone finds them useful and interesting. The historical archives and articles contain more than a few pieces of mudding history which might be of general interest in the future, even if a lot of it is AA specific right now.

Regarding your concerns about practices, I wanted to give you a bit of background.

For years, since about 1997, players have had the ability to buy strings and decorative things, as well as items called 'weightless containers'. These let you carry some amount of stuff around in a pocket dimension, regardless of weight. There is a limited analog of a weightless container in the 'floating disk' spell, but those are smaller and vanish over time. Later on, we also added storage lockers, again for holding equipment.

While weightless containers aren't a direct purchase of power for a character, they're pretty close. There's an active market/trade of weightless containers in the game, and new ones get purchased fairly regularly. Most really high level players consider them critical items, though I'm not entirely clear on why (I've become a minimalist, small-set player over the years.) Because of the amount of stuff you can keep in them, we've had to make changes over the years to keep things sane.

When weighed against this, practices really didn't seem like a very big concern. Players get practices with every level and can buy them directly with experience; the vast majority of practices in the system come from these in-game options. It also takes a lot of practices - make that a bloody huge number of practices - to completely max out your character. At total 100, you'll have acquired about 500 practices out of the 1500+ total that you'll need to raise all your stats and learn all skills.

With the understanding that it would take a thousand or so extra practices to completely deck out a character, we intentionally set the practice price high enough that it would be unreasonable to buy that many. All the purchased practices so far don't even remotely add up to that. And as a result, it's turned out to be less of a game impact than weightless containers have been.

I doubt you'll agree with this conclusion, but perhaps you can understand where we were coming from with it. The final decision was mine, and it took me 10+ years to convince myself it could be done without screwing up the game.

-dentin
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Old 10-19-2010, 06:19 PM   #6
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Re: Mudding Communities Are Alive and Well in Alter Aeon

Bigger containers is a perk as its more about convienience than power, and I suppose if you can match a paying player practice for practice without paying then I suppose thats also a -timesaving- perk, but thats a whole other subject that I dont want to open.

My issue with paying for something that can boost player power is how horribly tempting it is to pay for that extra to save on grind.. good for YOU bad for my bank balance :-)

I suspect I will be back for another play, it WAS fun
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