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.

If you've not already, stop by Necromium and check us out. necromium.com 4000 I'm certain we don't share any of the negative aspects you've pointed out above. Should you find something to critique, I would be more than happy to hear from you.

Ok, this is a preemptive strike for the rest of you.  This shouldn't be an advertising thread!

Interesting post, knowing where some players stand on these types of things can be very beneficial to MUD administrators.  Other than going into a long rebuttal about some of your opinions ( many of which I agree with) I will just point out one flaw with the text community vs graphical game comparisons.

Although not always by the game companies choice, nearly all of the MMORPG out there (most definitely the more popular ones) have a "buy your way to power" mechanic in place.  It is pretty common to find players in these games who have acquired things by paying rl cash through auctions or broker services.  Also expansion packs for MMORPGs increase the available content at additional costs, much how the DR / GS games charge for extended services.

Best of luck in finding one that suites you.

I'm going to sleep now, but I'll reply more fully tomorrow.

Spazmatic, you are absolutely right that there are a lot of muds out there that don't want players like me. Time and again in your post you talk about "only RP muds". If you read my post, you'd see that I don't play RP enforced muds. The only point in my OP that dealt with RP muds was the hair color story. So, um, care to respond in a manner that actually addresses the topic that I brought up? IE, these situations in non RP muds?

In general though, I don't want to play those games that you are talking about. I demand good code and good documentation. Removing help files so that characters will have to bumble around is probably amusing to the admins, but it is not fun for most players. I was targetting any muds that are trying to get new players, and can't seem to get them. There are many, many muds out there that make these basic mistakes. In most cases, I don't think they do it intentionally. Perhaps in your cases, they do it intentionally to drive off loony guys like me who like gameplay and not RP. Which is good, because they succeed and I don't end up wasting time on a game that I won't like.

Dub

Wow, Eagleon...that was quite a gushing defense of mudding in general.

I'm not attacking muds as a genre. I enjoy muds. I understand that there are difficulties with muds. I did not defend botting in my OP, I'm not quite sure where you got that from... I did not suggest that muds have NO rules, just that they don't have silly rules like I described.

In all ways, muds are spurring MMORPG's on. It is very obvious when playing SWG , for instance, that it is based on an idea that started with muds. It even has a DIKU command option. What I was trying to say is that muds should adapt and compete with MMORPG's at the same time.

I don't accept your statement that muds are not state of the art. Except for graphics, muds should be able to have better gameplay than MMORPG's because there are no limits to what you can describe with text. Spazmatic kind of touched on this idea with his defense of GS3.

Dub

Hey there, Dub. I'm going to address a couple of points you've made, but not all.

Re: the whole thing about how MMORPGs are stealing mudders - they're not. They're taking people who prefer graphics over text. Text-based entertainment is a niche market, and will always have its staunch supporters who have no interest whatsoever in graphical venues. Text games as a whole aren't going anywhere. As long as there exist people who like to read books more than they like to watch TV, there will be text muds. The day the last text-based mud in the world disappears is the day I start reading -more- books than I already do. I will never play graphics games. I just plain don't like them.

Re: your concerns with RP-encouraged games -
I realize you are not referring to RP-intensive or RP-required or RP-enforced (whatever the catch-phrase of the day happens to be). But in an RP-encouraged game, there exist people who WANT to roleplay, albeit in a more relaxed atmosphere than an RPI.

Imagine the person who -wants- to roleplay - coming across your botting character. Imagine perhaps that this is me and you. Imagine that we have had run-ins in the past, that we are adversaries. Imagine me trying to start something with your character. Imagine your character doing nothing about it - because you're watching a movie on TV in the other room. Imagine my disappointment when I realize that the only thing I can do is PK your character with no RP at all, or pretend your character isn't there and move on to something else. Imagine me trying to move on to something else, and running into 10 out of the 25 people playing who are -also- botting. Imagine how little fun I'm going to have, all because I actually decide that day that I'm in the mood to RP in an RP-encouraged game.

This is why games have no AFK rules. Some rules are less strict than others; Gemstone has a rule that says you can be AFK all you like, as long as you're not absorbing experience or scripting to gain new experience at the time. For an RP-allowed (I won't even go as far as to say it's encouraged because it isn't) game, I think that's a very fair rule.

All rules can be broken, all can be bent, all can be worked around, and all can be abused. It's just the nature of rules in general. Perhaps instead of "demanding" strict criteria in your search, you might ease up slightly and allow for exceptions. There are dozens of games that -almost- fit what you're looking for, though within each game there might be a player or two who breaks the rules and you -will- at some point run into them. Or perhaps the game breaks -your- rules only marginally, a shade of grey that most people wouldn't even notice.

For what it's worth, those are my thoughts and opinions on the points I wanted to discuss. I wish you luck in your search.

(necromium)
Some very good points, and very true.
I couldn't agree more about the imms who interact with newbies promiscuously. "Enforcers", as some pathetic piles of fly-ridden human failure call themselves, serve absolutely no purpose.
I found it amusing that people were immediately filled with the burning, insatiable urge to rub their dicks all over our computer screens by replying to a genuine post with advertisements.
I have made a mental note to avoid Necromium like the plague, and any mud whose name even vaguely resembles Necromium. Also, I have made a mental note that Hephos' MUD is not worth the bytes required for his DNS service to store his address.

A couple of points:
First, he doesn't say he was botting.  Being AFK does not imply the implementation of scripts, and it's quite silly to think that way.  I can leave my other games on pause while I go make dinner; it has absolutely nothing to do with my circumventing poor game design.

Second you describe a scenario in which one person who wants to roleplay is coming across people that are AFK.  You're essentially stating that no AFK rules are there to accommodate the RPers in such a situation.  I think that's backwards.  Why are the RPers deserving of special attention in a mud in which RP is not enforced?

Yui... You were right. Please ecxuse my inexperience in these forums which resulted in the inapproriate advert. Of course, to those of you who went out of your way to be nasty and childish, you may suck what you suggest I rubbed on your computer screen.

Yes botters are AFK. But not everyone who is afk is botting. Got it? :p

I suppose this could just be a terminology problem, but in the muds I've played, a character is botting when they program their client to play the game for them while they are not there, usually to gain xp or items. Its a shortened form of "robot". Most muds have rules against this, although not all. I'm ambivalent about it. I have run bots where it is legal to do so, but that is not what I was addressing in my OP.

IMHO, Aardwolf has a #### good AFK rule. You can stay afk indefinitely. Beyond that...I think not having an official rule would be best, with maybe the Imms pulling your plug (but no more than that) after you were gone too long. "Too long" could be 30 minutes or more, or tailored to the circumstance. In no case should being AFK require any official punishment or face to face with an Imm.

Someone else mentioned special protection for AFK people. I don't think this is appropriate, and was not arguing for it. If you play a full PK mud and are AFK, expect to be full looted if you are not in a safe place.

Dub

Why does it bug you to not be able to respond to the presence of someone? You obviously can't respond to their presence if they're not even logged on, so what's the deal? Perhaps you're just saying that it's a good idea to kick people because you lack the willpower to ignore someone who's ignoring you. I think that's ridiculous.

No it doesn't. It's a one-liner to disallow hostile actions against a player that is AFK, and similar code is already in place to keep them from quitting if they've recently been in battle, so this can be applied to those that are AFK as well. Since it's a coded rule there is no possible abuse.

This thread is interesting to me, because it brings up two thing is Muds that I personally loathe, namely
1. Muds that pretend to be 'totally free to play' while in effect players can get advantages by doling out RL money, which will take a player who doesn't pay a very long time to achieve,
and 2. muds with excessive and silly rules.

I am not going to get into point 1, since too much has been said on that subject in the past, and most people on these boards know my opinions about it already.

About point 2, I have some comments however,  both from the player's point of view and the Admin's.

The first Mud I ever played was of the kind with tons of rules. When you logged on to the Mud you where 'required' to first read a long list of helpfiles, titled HELP POLICY, HELP RULE, HELP RULES and so on. Most of these rules were unnecessary in my opinion, and many of them were downright silly. Since the Mud was described as a 'family environment', players were muted for weeks for saying things like the four word letter for 'urine' on open channels, and even rather mild jokes with the slightest implication of sex were  banned. On top of that, the imms snooped and spied on players and reported every comment that could be interpreted as negative, even if it were over tell.

The head imp was a control freak, and all in all the situation instigated a sort of desire in me and my equally unruly friends to break as many rules as possible as openly as possible. In fact, baiting the head Imp soon became our favourite pastime. Childish? Yes.  In retrospective I can see that we were totally immature, and it is actually surprising that we didn't get banned quicker than we were.

Much later, after becoming an Admin and  Imp myself, I can at least see things a bit from her perspective. Most of the Staff in my present Mud came from that other Mud, and that is probably why we started out with the ambition to have as few rules as possible. From the beginning our only rule was the old biblical proverb; 'Do onto others what you want them to do onto you', which in our somewhat profane transaltion became; 'Act like a jerk and you'll be treated like a jerk'.

It all went well for a very long time, and even though  the language on the open channels could be a bit rough at times, our players were mostly mature enough to handle the freedom of speech with some responsibility. Until the day when some new players arrived, who were so bad-mouthed that a number of the older players started to complain about it, and in the end it got too much even for my own pretty wide-stretched tolerance. And suddenly I found myself implementing a rule called 'Common courtesy', which had more or less the same wording as the one I so detested in my first Mud. We don't need to enforce it much, but a fact remains, the rule that I swore I'd never have is now there.

Next item: idlers and 'botters'.
I have no problem with players that just go AFK, those can easily be handled by letting the code transfer them to some sort of limbo room, after 5 minutes of idling. The problem is
players who set up scripts to advance their char while being AFK, whether it be by endlessly practising spells, doing the same simple quest over and over again,  or by what is commonly referred to as 'camping' (which means that you place your char at a spot where some reasonably easy aggressive mobs spawn, and then just leave it there while you go do the laundry, walk the dog or watch television, The mobs will respawn and attack, and your char will get exp). Most Admin dislike this type of playing style and I am no exception.

Since many things in a Mud that is at least partly based on hack'n'slash gets repetitive by nature, sooner or later you get some players that use botting to an extent that makes it downright irritating. In my mud we try to fight it mainly by throwing in the occasional nasty surprise, and by making the Quests non-repetitive, but it's still hard to stop completely.

I can actually understand Admin that have a rule against this. But you should never set up a rule unless you are prepared to enforce it, and in order to enforce a rule against botting, you either need to snoop the players, or to adress them in the manner that  Dubthack described.  And since I hate playing Mud Police myself, I'd rather not have the rule, and let a few the botters get away with it instead. Still, if my Mud were to be invaded by a gang of totally shameless botters... Who knows, maybe I'd change my mind in the same way that I had to do about the free language.

Finally; Bug abusers.
All new code has bugs, and most new zones have building bugs. However much you try to test everything to make it cheat proof, sooner or later there will always be a player who tries an approach that you didn't even know existed. Usually I am pretty tolerant against bug abusers, partly because the players that find and exploit the bugs usually are quite a bit more intelligent that the average, and partly because basically it's our fault, for allowing the bugs to exist.

We also have a sort of rule against bug-abuse, going something like; 'If you find a bug and report it, expect to be rewarded, if you abuse it, expect to be punished'. But naturally that isn't enough to stop players from abusing bugs. There even are some that take it as an excuse to keep abusing it after they reported it. So our main policy is of course to fix the bug as soon as possible.  

But there are times when the fixing isn't all that easy. Here's an examle that occurred recently on my own mud:
Our coder went away for three weeks vacation over christmas, after having installed some code that wasn't thoroughly tested. Pretty soon after he left, a player discovered a bug in the combination of two spells, that made the effect ridiculously powerful. It took some time before I was aware whart was going on, and even after that I wasn't sure what the exact bug was.

I am no coder myself, and there was no way to fix it, or even to disable the spells, until the coder came back. So I did the only thing that was left for me, I talked to the player and asked him to stop what he was doing. This would have worked with most of our players. Unfortunately this one turned out to be a 'Mud Advocate' of the worst kind. After arguing with me for about 2 hours about the nature of the bug, and the difference between a 'bug' and a 'feature', he kept right on abusing it, as soon as my back was turned, for the next weeks, right until the coder returned and fixed it.  

He was 'punished' in a way retroactively, by losing some of the levels and gold he had gained on it, but not nearly enough. And in retrospective I realise that I should have been a lot more hardhanded. So if something similar happens again, I'll most likely freeze the culprit until the problem can be fixed, regardless of how long it takes.

Now the above examples illustrate how our values and rules can get affected by a certain type of twink players. And of course, the bigger playerbase a mud has, the bigger  the chance that it picks up players of that type. So if a Mud has a lot of rules that seem stupid and unnecessary, there just might be some similar explanations behind them.

Or then again, there might not. After all, control freak imps and powertripping imms do exist.  And even the best of imms can have a bad day at times. We are none of us perfect.

You bring up some good points I guess, but wouldn't most of your complaints be remedied by adjusting your search criteria for muds to play?  

The AFK rule is almost always a byproduct of a rp-enforced mud.  Barring a situation like Achaea's, which you felt was misrepresented, an rp-encouraged mud, 9 times out of 10, won't have that rule (I knew they existed, but I've never played a mud with such a rule- I think you'll find the proportion really is quite small).  Incidentally, an rp-enforced mud is more likely to have 'touchy-feely imms', as they are required to enforce certain standards for the sake of rp.  

The pay schemes are regrettable but you seem to have found at least one alternative and there's the ever exciting option of completely free- it's hard to tell if you visited any free muds at all.

The point is there are thousands of muds out there and the problems you described are not by any means inherent to muds or wide spread in the mudding community- they just happened to be problems with the muds you played, which may have been selected poorly in the first place.

Implement a command that allows you to ignore messages from other players. Problem solved without vague rules.

In other words, you're a RPer.
That explains the different viewpoint.

Typing afk, and having a flag set, is simply a matter of common courtesy, IMHO. I agree with dub on this matter, no afk rules are bad. In most cases they've been added to prevent exploitation of gametime rules and botting. Why not change the base layout of the game, so you can't just idle your way upwards, if that's a concern.

About going afk in RP muds - if it's a big deal that afk people interfere with the immersion, do as someone else suggested, and send them to a non-access 'afk' room, so hapless RPers don't bump into them.

Most rules can be coded around, the no afk rule is no exception.

Welcor

Your Mud has cooties.

Yours,
Pris

PS None of you are going to play another mud because you're already addicted to one. The entire discussion is kinda moot since the only time anyone from these forums would log into another mud is to make themselves feel good about the mud they've invested so much of their time in:
"Oh, this mud doesn't have as many levels as my chosen mud."
"This mud doesn't format speech nicely like my mud does."
"This mud blows goats."
And so on and so forth until you feel justified in logging back onto your regular mud and reassuring everyone that, "Yes, we're easily the best mud out there. All those other muds are frightening and scary and populated by strange people who don't speak our language."

The end.

Also...your mud still has cooties.

Pris

Bahaha. That's easily the funniest post I've read in a long time, Pris. ^.^ Dunno how serious you were, but still...

Hmm. Ok. My comments...

AFK - It can be odd to find someone hidding in an obscure corner then looking at the who output and seeing that they are idle. However, on the mud where I play there is always to option of going back to your house and sitting there. There is also an AFK command, so players trying to talk to someone (even is the Idle timer hasn't kicked in yet) know that they are not there. This imho makes a lot more sense than kicking the person off, but then if you are kicked off, you would drop everything you are carrying/wearing, which would be quite bad.

In general, it isn't a major issue unless you are on some mud that requires you to be in front of the machine 100% of the tiem to respond. Which is impractical and bloody stupid imho.

Movement - There was a recent comment by someone on my mud about having ships or horses, etc. added. Right now if you have climb and swim skills or can fly, you can go pretty much anyplace in the amount of time it takes to type the commands or execute a speed walk. In some respects this is quite dumb. However, my first thought was, 'hmm.. what if players had a certain number of moves they could make per minute?'. Thus you would still take a long time to get from point A to B.

The one thing I would have never thought of is the insane concept that you should be able to basically run 50 rooms (at the same pace as everyone else) and then have to spend hours recovering before moving again. Huh?!? How does this even make sense? Yeah, so someone that is 'faster' could move farther in terms of distance, but shouldn't that then be considered indurance? Speed means tow people starting in the same room at the same moment and both travelling 10 rooms should 'never' arrive at the last room at the same time, unless they both have the same speed.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I consider this an example of the BS method many designers use of implimenting the easiest solution to a problem, instead of the right one. It is much easier to limit how many moves someone can make in a day, but that isn't the *right* solution to make it even barely realistic and the end result is ****ed off players that find themselves camping out for a day, just so they can move again.

Note: Using a x-moves per minute scheme also allows you to track cumulative exhaustion. If you have 20 moves a minute and use all 10, then the next time you may only be allowed 19, until eventually you are forced to rest in order to 'recover' completely. Moving at a slower pace to avoid this becomes a choice, instead of forcing you to stop periodically for no reason, as it seems some of these muds make you.

See, this is exactly why some people think that most RPers are elitist. You're suggesting that there be rules and penalties for people that don't pander to the RPer style of gameplay. This leads me exactly to the question that Jazuela wisely avoided answering: Why do you get the special attention over the other guy?

Another flare of brilliant ignorance. The concrete problems the original poster gave does not equate to something as undefinable as "cooties". Your post is just another example of a completely inadequate "internet analogy".

Sorry, such a rule is a penalty against non-RPers. This is a form of negative reinforcement that places a mud squarely in the realm of RP Enforced, which is synonymous with "Non-RP Discouraged". RP Encouraged implies positive reinforcement of RP, not negative reinforcement of non-RP. It seems like splitting hairs to the uninitiated, but the difference is deeply significant.

Next time, I recommend you use less prejudicial language if you are trying to not come off as "elitist".

Seems pretty clear that you are, in fact, elitist. You characterized non RP'ers as pathetic fools who are interested in mindless activities.

Dub

In regard to the first comment, if someone else were already there, entering a room and mindlessly (if the action didn't entail any extensive thought beforehand regarding the situation, that pretty much consititutes mindless) killing the NPC that the other person might have been interacting with within the atmosphere of the room description is perhaps not the action of a fool.  Substitute "ass" instead.

Concerning the second statement, please see my above comment about mindless activity.  It doesn't take a lot of thought to type "kill <mob>", then direction "x", then "kill <mob>" again, etc.

In reference to the third comment, I take it you don't see the irony.  Maybe you just didn't think about it.

As for the fourth statement, read my earlier comments again and you'll see that I said that they are "occassionally played by pathetic people", not exclusively.  Most RP MUDs actually weed out those types because they are unlikely to stay within the confines of their role and the RP world in favor of doing something completely unrealistic (like slaughtering everything in sight just because it's there).  So, taking some of my words out of context may fit your purpose, but it doesn't make me an elitist.

Finally, in regards to your belief that I'm elitist, Eleanor Roosevelt said that "noone can make you feel inferior without your consent."  If for some reason you feel I'm elitist, ask yourself instead why you feel the way you do.

Take care,

Jason

I tend to try and make a lot of joke posts here 'cause I think a lot of topics get a bit out of hand and a bit of light-hearted humour is sometimes required.

Sometimes however it may come about that I wish to write a serious note.

Just so you're all aware; this is one of those times.

prof1515, you're a complete knob.

Honestly, those have got to be the worlds stupidest posts on any forum, ever. When neaderthals were writing notes to each other on cave walls they still came up with better responses than you did. Obviously the only thing you can RP is a troll.

Actually, I take that back, you could probably RP a troll but that's nothing compared to what is obviously your favourite RP character: The half elf, half vampyre prince of the elves who was outcast from his tribe as a youth but struggles through adversity and misconceptions every day in an effort to reach his birthright of the lost sword of R0X0RiNG!!11!!

Oh well, you have fun, maybe one day you'll be able to RP a polite, considerate person and then one of your lives might actually be able to engage the rest of us in some sort of proper conversation. Obviously it's never going to happen to your RL entity.

Don't reply, you got the flame you were trolling for. Just walk away and let everyone else continue the discussion they were having.

Yours,
Pris

I tend to think of them as follows:

1) Non-RP: You shouldn't roleplay.

Example: If you roleplay here, we'll point and laugh at you.

2) RP-accepted: You can roleplaying if you like.

Example: Some people like to roleplay, and that's fine, but you don't have to.

3) RP-encouraged: You'll be rewarded if you roleplaying.

Example: We award bonus exp for roleplaying, and only proven roleplayers are allowed to become guild leaders.

4) RP-enforced: You'll be punished if you don't roleplay.

Example: We'll freeze and ban you if your roleplaying is bad, and if you talk about OOC things we'll send the lads around to your house to break your kneecaps.

Sounds like you've got it the wrong way around - a HnSer is someone who is simply playing the mud as a game. It's the roleplayers who often try to make it more than that, and people like you who wish to ban those who do treat the mud like a game. If it's possible to go around slaughtering mobs and benefiting from doing so, then clearly the person doing so is playing the game, while you are trying to enforce behavior that goes against the intention of the game. In this case you should clearly look for a game which isn't geared that way - for example a mud in which killing NPCs for no reason gives the killer no exp, and makes other (powerful) NPCs hunt them down.

There is nothing wrong with RP, nor with HnS. Some players insist on one extreme or the other, while others prefer something of a middle ground - fortunately there are plenty of muds available so everyone can find something that appeals to their own tastes.

I should also point out that a mud doesn't have to be either RP or HnS - it can be both, or it can be something else entirely. Nor does "combat-oriented" have to mean "mindless HnS", any more than "roleplaying" has to mean "mudsex".

IMO no - you're not enforcing anything, you're just changing the coded rules of the game to reflect a more realistic approach to cause and affect. Something which any type of mud (RP or not) could benefit from.

In fact in my opinion, based on what you've wrote here, I probably wouldn't even consider you "RP encouraged" - from what you've said, you don't appear to actually offer any incentives for roleplaying, and therefore would fall into my interpretation of the "RP accepted" category. The additional quests, crafting, etc that you offer are likely to appeal more to a different crowd entirely from the typical HnSer or RPer.

I'll make sure and tell the chess club to cease their mindless slaughter and stop to think about how a rook would feel about the tiled warfare.

In case you didn't detect my sarcasm, I'm obviously telling you that the opposite of "RP" is not "mindless slaughter". There are countless strategic games out there that require a great deal of brain power, making your polarization completely foolish.

I think the main problem with some of the more ardent roleplayers is that they tend to take themselves way too seriously. If they could losen up a bit and try to apply some humour to the absurd situations that sometimes occur in a Mud, they would do not only their co-players but themselves as well a big favour.

If a Mud contains combat code that allows you to score exp. points from killing mobs, obviously some players are going to kill those mobs. If you cannot handle that without sneering at the players that do, you should find a mud where all actions, including combat, are emoted.

A fact is that quite a few Muds that announce themselves as RP mandatory still have a strong element of hack'n'slash, and this sometimes can lead to funny situations. The example below is from Threshold.

(Disclaimer: This is not meant as any flame over Threshold, which I actually think is a pretty good game, in spite of my frequent clashes with Aristotle on these boards. It could have happened in any Mud of a similar type. Anyhow, here goes:)

One of the Newbie areas in Threshold is a small farm with some chicken and cows and other animals, that you obviously are supposed to kill. I was in a room with a cow. I was not 'interacting' with it (not even in any indecent way), just studying it, contemplating whether or not it would be safe to kill.

Now in Threshold you don't see the name of other players until you have introduced yourself to them (a somewhat lengthy procedure, but very IC). So in from the left comes a player, who on my screen looked something like 'a brown-eyed Dwarf' since we hadn't been introduced. Next this Dwarf opens his mouth and says:
'Fair maiden, would you mind if I kill your cow?'

Sure - it was bad roleplay. But after all, the Mud WAS RP enforced, and he obviously didn't want to take any chances, in case some nitpicky imm was lurking in the background.

And it gave me one of my best laughs on line that week.

Kavir, I was referring to players that go beyond treating it as a game.  I'm talking about players that are so obsessed with getting or (even more so) staying ahead of everyone else that they resort to behavior that is not considered acceptable behavior in society such as stealing, cheating, lying, etc.  Now, in an RP MUD, where one assumes a role and portrays it, such things are "acceptable" because they're being done in-character, not because the player wishes to have the best equipment or the most money.  That player could then go on to later play another character who's a charitable priest or something.  It's about portraying the role.  But what I was refering to was not in-character behavior, it is player behavior.  Playing the game is one thing; wanting to outdo others to the point of cheating or spoiling their enjoyment even though they're not interfering with you is another.

Now, as for your accusation that "people like you who wish to ban those who do treat the mud like a game", I do not believe in punishing players that stay within the bounds of a MUD's rules.  Players that want to punish someone for simply playing a game by the rules is not something that I condone.  That applies to RPers trying to force RP on a non-RP-enforced MUD and H&Sers trying to justify random killing on RP-enforced MUDs.

Now as for there being a MUD for everyone, I agree completely.  But my point is that if you want to RP, why do so on a MUD that isn't really designed for RP?  After all, there are plenty of MUDs out there.  I mean, if you saw a restaurant and a hardware store next to each other and you happened to be hungry (and you've got plenty of cash), why go to the hardware store to eat just because they've got a vending machine inside?  Same goes for RP.  Nothing says you can't play more than one MUD, one for RP and one to indulge your appetite for H&S.

In regard to talking to mobs, Molly, no it's not all that there is to RP, but it is a good element of RP.  Why?  Well, because the mobs are there to add to the RP environment.  If an RPer's not going to interact with the MUD environment, why not just RP over AIM?

I started MUDding five years ago on H&S MUDs.  After a while, I branched out away from H&S and began playing RPI MUDs as well.  Over the years, I've migrated to RPI MUDs, solely playing them for well over a year.  I quite H&S MUDs because I didn't like playing a game that had veteran players cheating and acting vindictively just because they wanted to get ahead.  And for me, I'm just not a competitive person.  I play MUDs to relax.  The leveling and killing mobs just didn't appeal to me.  In fact, I recently realized that on one RPI MUD I've been playing for 11 monthes now that I haven't killed anything at all in all my time on the game!  I haven't had characters that had any reason to kill anything, be it hunting or self-defense.  But on an RP MUD, you don't have to do that.  That's pretty much the point and you're surrounded by players that understand that because they're the same way, they're trying to portray their character, not race to kill as much as possible.

Personally, I feel that levels and experience points have no role in RP.  With the software running things, all the calculations and data can be stored and processed without the PC ever seeing it, allowing them to focus on their role, not their statistics.  But that's a different discussion entirely.

Yui, strategy has its place in everything.  But I'm talking about the difference between assuming the role of a character and portraying it (RP) and not.  Both can involve strategy.  But there's a big polar difference between doing something because your character would do it and doing something because you would do it.  For example, on one of the MUDs I play, my character has more than enough money to purchase a house.  I would like to get a house for the character because it would make playing the role so much easier (easier to travel, easier to logout, etc.) but I have not purchased a house because my character wouldn't do it.  Their occupational requirements are contrary to settling down in one place long enough to do so and even if that wasn't the case (and I know that there are several good justifications that I could come up with for doing so), my character still has personal reasons for why they wouldn't want to buy a house and settle down in the area.  Hence, while buying a house would be easier for me, the player, I won't do it because it doesn't fit into the personality of my character.

Pris, you've either got some issues or I touched a nerve.  Whichever it may be, I hope you eventually figure it out, because it's really unbecoming.

Take care,

Jason

Duh, I know the difference between IC and OOC, and I certainly know that both can involve strategy. The polarization I'm talking about is your reference to RP as if it were the only alternative to mindless gaming activities. It isn't.

Prof1515, you quit H&S muds because you couldn't stand the cheating and the way some people played. That's fine, I would do exactly the same. I think all of us would. Where you go SERIOUSLY wrong, and why I label you a troll, is because you then take that experience and use it to canvas every H&S mud in existence.
That's like me saying that every RP mud is filled with the half-elf/vampyre creation that every teenage AOLer wants to make. It's gross misrepresentation designed to garner exactly the response I gave you.

You had a bad experience on a H&S mud. That doesn't define H&S muds everywhere. Any decent H&S game smacks cheaters down as harshly as any decent RP mud slaps down people who refuse to RP. You just found a bad game. It wouldn't matter if it was RP or H&S. A bad game is just a bad #### game.

Yours,
Pris

Ok prof1515, but I get to be the insane maniacal armsman tactical genius +2134087, who is truly psychotic and just wants to kill everything in a personal quest for total domination. I'll play it in character, I'll keep to the basic storyline, but you will all die by my hand. Repeatedly. And suffer horribly every time. I'll even emote the branding of your genitals and hot poker to eye part.

But....I don't think you want the insane psychopathic master of arms +2134087 on your MUD. You want to reenact your favorite fantasy novel, or create one of your very own based on the unique interactions of the people who MUD with you, and that's cool.

Just don't come to my MUD. And I won't go to yours. (Usually; sometimes it's fun to run in on a MUD with a bunch of thugs and beat the place bloody until we get banned, but my days as a cowboy are numbered. I'm too old for that stuff anymore.)

To address the "if it ain't RP, it's HnS", there is a MUD called Groundzero. Rarely is it alive anymore, because the learning curve is a bit steep and with the dropping off of MUDders who like to run around and hit things all day as their only means of entertainment, we simply don't get newbies anymore.

Groundzero doesn't save equipment. It reboots about every 90 minutes, depending on some hard-coded infrastructure that can (and should) be subverted occasionally. It has nothing to do with levelling, powereqing, etc. The entire point of the game is tactical combat. RP is *not allowed* simply because it has no place in the game, and because the average maturity level of anyone who plays there is far below that of an accomplished RPer.

I've been realizing the limitations of how deep you can get into the social aspects of a game without RP as of late; I'm mellowing out. However, not everyone is looking to have an in-depth conversation with a Lamia over in Old Thalos. For us, it's more interesting to play with ever-developing MOB AI, create large armies of players and MOBs, and go have a war or three to see what kind of combat tactics we can surprise the other guy with.

You talk about moving beyond the game itself, and I agree with you - it is possible to do so. But not just in an RP fashion; military tactics, spying, subversion, valor, strategy are also thought excercises that move above and beyond a simple interaction with a game. Instead of being reactive to the game, you take advantage of the inner structure of the game, at the code level through testing and experimentation. It's simliar to RP'ing with the entire world, but takes another path. The starting and ending points, in my opinion, are similar enough to be called the same.

This thread started with a different problem: bad MUDs. Our hero (and thread-starter) is simply expressing frustration with overzealous/extremist focuses on a specific way of playing the game, or a specific demographic of game-players. I think he's basically justified in his gripes, and to him I say: make yer own, keep looking, or go back to the MMORPG where WYSIWYG. Especially with the complex nature of MUDs, it's rarely even possible to hold to WYSIWIG, because even the IMPS don't know what some crazy 13-year-old is going to do tomorrow. And whether or not the code will be able to stand up to their intellectual ramblings.

-Visko

Heh, most of the complaints sound a lot like me, except for I am the exact opposite and prefer rp enforced, since if it is not, there tends not to be much rp.


I'm currently working on opening my first mud ever, and the primary goal I have is as few rules as possible! LOL I mean, that is the MAIN driving force in my design process. I am SICK of muds with reems of rules trying to get you not to do things that come about because the game is designed in such a way that that is exactly what you think you ought to be doing to enjoy it!

So, bravo this thread, as far as I am concerned.

To be quite certian, an RPI MUD or an RPE MUD is a mud which caters to those who desire strictly IC play. It is designed for those who do not wish the outside world (or, real life, as it is sometimes called) to interfer with their excursion into a fantasy world.

Those who do not wish to be involved in this depth of play should not play an RPI or RPE MUD. And ideally, RPI and RPE and RPM should mean the exact same thing. That they do not is why the MUD that I play takes care not to call itself RPE or RPM, but rather, RPI.

Whoever said, "Different strokes for different folks," was very wise.

This sentiment to me has always begged the question, if you don't want folk killing npc's just for xp, why give xp for it and why so much, and why, in fact, even make the ones killable that you want treated more like citizens than monsters or invaders or whatever?

I mean on the one hand yes, that is extra work, but at the very most the rule should be temporary until the code has caught up to the rp theme of the mud. Then, if you want combat to be part of how people go about advancing, let them seek out the invaders, thieves, monsters, demons and whatnot that are good rp to kill.

To me, a fundamental flaw in most muds though is the reliance on rules to enforce what is essentially poor coding in relation to the intended theme of a mud. This I find more especially offensive in muds where I am asked to pay to play, then run through the wringer for not obeying one of about 1000000 rules that are there solely because the admins have not done their job and customized the code to fit their intended theme.