MUDs

[Nerf]

I'm really disheartened by the lack of red named posting in this thread.

Mark Jacobs, I'm looking at you damnit, the people have spoken, and we want a groundzero arena in WAR!  I'm sure you can figure out how to work tanks and 'The Button' into the lore.  Oh, and airstikes, and napalm.  Thanks.

[Raph]

Medievia, blech. I was offered immortship on Medievia when it had a playerbase of four. The fact that they didn't know how to stop a basic dupe bug made me say no. Then i watched them become insanely popular.

The Susan Wu you always see in all the "VC funds MMOish thing" articles these days was on Arctic, that's how I met her.

EmlenMUDs! Never hugely popular, always broke to bits as the code got crazy, but some awesome innovative stuff! :)

I think I played (briefly) maybe 30% of the ones mentioned. Surprised nobody mentioned HoloMUD for a pure PvP experience.

[Stephen Zepp]

Shades of Evil -- my brother was into this mud thing, and suddenly wound up with ownership of a fledging mud that crashed every 45-60 minutes.

Talk about baptism by fire--he knew I had a CS degree (I had not programmed in 7 years), and asked me "to help with the crashes". 3 years later ACK!Mud 4.3.1 came out, and I retired from mudding.

[Lentil]

I tried several. I think I'm overly picky. These are ones I've played longer than an hour.

LegendMUD - Still keeps me interested after all these years.
Legends of War - Fun, mindless PK. Glad to see it's back.

[Lantyssa]

Shades of Evil -- my brother was into this mud thing, and suddenly wound up with ownership of a fledging mud that crashed every 45-60 minutes.

Good times.  I remember how happy we were to get Mozart up times of several days.  And again when we pushed it to weeks and finally desired reboots.

[Oracle]

MUD1
Avalon
LambdaMOO
MediaMOO

[azimuth]

MUD1
LambdaMOO
Realms of Despair
Achaea
Dragonfire
TempusMUD (which I'm still on)

[Draegan]

I'm surprised no one else has mention SojournMUD.  It's the basis of EQ and all of it's mechanics.  Brad basically copied almost everything from that game minus the lore.

[Wershlak]

I'm surprised no one else has mention SojournMUD.  It's the basis of EQ and all of it's mechanics.  Brad basically copied almost everything from that game minus the lore.

I played Sojourn/Toril on and off for years. That along with SneezyMud were my favorites.

When EQ came out I was turned off by how much it was a complete rip off of Sojourn. Also, my imagination was way better than the EQ graphics!

Now after years of playing MMOs I can't go back to text based games. I tried to play Sojourn a couple weeks ago but I think I am just dumber than I used to be.

[Draegan]

SneezyMUD!  That's the game I was trying to think about in my first post in this thread.  I loved that MUD.

[Trippy]

I tried SojournMUD after Arctic closed down since that's where a lot of Arctic people went (different setting but still D&D) but I could never get into it. I remember leveling was really painful in the early goings (sounds oddly familiar) and I couldn't stick with it.

[Signe]

There was one pvp mud where you started out as a ghost in a room, waiting for a team.  I can't remember the name!  I used to play the lhell out of that game.  I'm not surprised people aren't mentioning a lot of good muds... there were, and still seem to be, SO many. 

[Draegan]

Which muds arn't people mentioning that were "good"?

[satael]

NannyMUD -the first mud I played
SumuMUD -the MUD I played the longest

[Spielermacher]

Scepter of Goth!

Funny story. I didn't know that MUDs actually existed except for Scepter (played it in the mid-80's in the DC area). Some friend and I tried to license it so we could have our own Scepter world to control, but the business deal feel through; so we decided to write our own. We didn't even look around to see if there were others (and had never even heard the term "MUD"); we just assumed there weren't any, and a couple of years later we launched Tempest (later renamed Darkness Falls), which we had available in the DC area for a few years (dial-up: 1200/2400 baud) in the early 90's.

[Lum]

...which, Mr. Spielermacher is far too modest to mention, was the direct ancestor of DAOC.

No, really. It was freaky finding 10 year old comments in MMO server code.

[Stephen Zepp]

...which, Mr. Spielermacher is far too modest to mention, was the direct ancestor of DAOC.

No, really. It was freaky finding 10 year old comments in MMO server code.

I hear that--took us quite a long time to remove all the "If you see this, go smack Dave Moore" asserts from Torque.

[Soukyan]

Which muds arn't people mentioning that were "good"?

There were a lot of smaller playerbase MUDs out there that were just plain awesome. I never played any of the big ones for long because they were either too impersonal, too grindy, or just didn't engage me. And then I started administering and coding (as I'm sure everyone has), and never really made it back to playing again.

[Nerf]

There was one pvp mud where you started out as a ghost in a room, waiting for a team.  I can't remember the name!  I used to play the lhell out of that game.  I'm not surprised people aren't mentioning a lot of good muds... there were, and still seem to be, SO many. 

Genocide was like that Signe, I'm sure alot of others were too.  Do you remember people saying nog alot?

[Draegan]

nog was prevalent all over the MUD communities back then.  Forgot about it actually.

[Signe]

There was one pvp mud where you started out as a ghost in a room, waiting for a team.  I can't remember the name!  I used to play the lhell out of that game.  I'm not surprised people aren't mentioning a lot of good muds... there were, and still seem to be, SO many. 

Genocide was like that Signe, I'm sure alot of others were too.  Do you remember people saying nog alot?

That was it!  It was a MudOS tester, too, when it switched over.  I think.  I have shit for memory.  Discworld, Nanvaent, Genocide and a few others is where I met most of my MudOS friends. 

[Nerf]

Genocide was the one where different areas would randomly load every cycle, when it started you got dropped off in amain area and had to run around frantically grabbing shit to sell for heals and gear, then fight.  Winners got points, when you got 5,000 points you achieved regulator status, and got a dev char so that you could build your own area.

[lamaros]

Medievia, blech. I was offered immortship on Medievia when it had a playerbase of four. The fact that they didn't know how to stop a basic dupe bug made me say no. Then i watched them become insanely popular.

Big population made it much fun. Was very up and down in parts, but it had some great zones, a fun guild v guild system and fun CPK areas. For a while. Autoquests/MLRs/etc gradualy destroyed the fun and just polished the shit.

I played Achaea for a little while but aside from the politics system it was a bit bleh (and the politics system was a little bleh there too because of un-RP croneyism). Worst pvp system ever. Imperian was the same code but better politics, so I played for longer. (City and guild leadership stuff was fun and meaningful).

Probably played half the other mentioned here but I was never much taken unless they had a good population and political shenanigans so I didn't play much.

[Raph]

Because of this thread, I assume, someone edited my Wikipedia entry to mention that I played MUME. 

[setarkos]

BSX Regenesis by Bram Stolk. The only graphical MUD on the internet 1991-1996 (well, unless you count crossfire and xpilot), and it was nonviolent too!! (because doing the graphics for fighting was too much work...) Bram also created Kobra - Star Wars, which already has been mentioned.  I believe Regenesis was hosted on the same computer as  NannyMUD on Lysator. And I'll tell you why I remember this. That's because the fucking morons nuked Regenesis whenever they felt Nanny needed more speed and memory...    The name Regenesis is of course a tribute to Genesis the original LPmud. Cheers!

[Thur]

Act of War Memorable times on this MUD, as it was the first where I began to learn how to handle myself in an online world. It's where I created my dwarven warrior archetype, and still use it 10 years later. I played in the first iteration, when Nimbus and Warcry were the administrators.

[Rendakor]

Act of War Memorable times on this MUD, as it was the first where I began to learn how to handle myself in an online world. It's where I created my dwarven warrior archetype, and still use it 10 years later. I played in the first iteration, when Nimbus and Warcry were the administrators.

I'm not the only one to call AoW!  Not that I played anywhere near the beginning, I dont think...I played in Kael when I did. What kingdom were you, oh lurker?

[Thur]

Kael, then remade into a Balrog remort in Undermountain.

[Sunbury]

Is there a writeup on the web somewhere that explains how MUDs worked?

I don't mean technically, but from a user's point of view, things like:  you enter N/S/E/W to move, you enter a 'room', you read a description, etc.

I just can't picture how combat works with multiple players and mobs in a 'room' that isn't turn / positional based.

[Roac]

Is there a writeup on the web somewhere that explains how MUDs worked?

I don't mean technically, but from a user's point of view, things like:  you enter N/S/E/W to move, you enter a 'room', you read a description, etc.

I just can't picture how combat works with multiple players and mobs in a 'room' that isn't turn / positional based.

Look at the chat window for most MMOGs - that was what a MUD was.  It is positional based in that it's room based, with rooms being arbitrarily sized based only (or usually only) on the description.  It could be a closet or an entire field, but everybody could see/hear/attack everyone else in the room.  So if we're in the same room, you type "kill roac" or whatever, and we'd be at it.  After that, the numbers (or descriptions) of combat would flip by, with every round taking some predetermined amount of time, such as a second or so. 

Or you could just try one out to see what it's like.  Will take you five minutes. 
telnet towers.angband.com 9999
Make an account, skip the tutorial (say yes, you have played before) and e/n/s/w until you find something and attack. 

[Merusk]

Is there a writeup on the web somewhere that explains how MUDs worked?

I don't mean technically, but from a user's point of view, things like:  you enter N/S/E/W to move, you enter a 'room', you read a description, etc.

I just can't picture how combat works with multiple players and mobs in a 'room' that isn't turn / positional based.

Simple mobs would attack the first player in the name list. ("look" to see what that was.)
Some muds had aggro control, apparently.  None of the ones I played did.   If the tank got in last, several muds had a "rescue" command that would "Pull" the rescued player 'behind' the tank.  You did this until you were at the first-in-room list.

  (Or if you were a tool, you did it out of combat because you wanted to be first on the room list.)

Any special skills had to be typed in.  'kick'  'trip' 'sweepingstrike'  They had timers and a countdown would show how long until you could do them again.

But yes, it was entirely like staring at the chat box in EQ/WoW/Whatever.  The upside was you learned to read (and type) fast, and fights tended to be a LOT shorter than even 'quick' fights in MMOs.

[Viin]

But yes, it was entirely like staring at the chat box in EQ/WoW/Whatever.  The upside was you learned to read (and type) fast, and fights tended to be a LOT shorter than even 'quick' fights in MMOs.

And that is why tintin++ was a godsend prior to folks embedding ANSI color codes in the text output - finding key words was a b!tch with hundreds of lines combat scrolling by. Color and triggers, all you needed to survive back in the MUD days!

[Draegan]

I completely FORGOT about this game:

http://www.kaldana.com/index.php

Revelation

I'm playing this now at work.  Fun Fun Fun.

[Jayce]

But yes, it was entirely like staring at the chat box in EQ/WoW/Whatever.  The upside was you learned to read (and type) fast, and fights tended to be a LOT shorter than even 'quick' fights in MMOs.

And that is why tintin++ was a godsend prior to folks embedding ANSI color codes in the text output - finding key words was a b!tch with hundreds of lines combat scrolling by. Color and triggers, all you needed to survive back in the MUD days!

Wow, tintin++.  I forgot about that program.  Apparently there was a unix version before it simply called tintin, written in C vs C++ but I'm not quite that old school.

I played a little known mud named FredMUD, pure diku but modified, mostly in content.  It was also called HenryMud and JudyMud at different times, depending on where it was hosted (indstate.edu).  A professor there (who still teaches AFAIK) was the imp.

[sidereal]

Battletech 3056 MUSE and most of the later Battletech MUSHes and MUXen
DuneMUSH
TinyTIM MUSH

Once you played on a codebase that allowed softcoding (MUSE/MUX/MUSH), you never went back to that Circle/LP/Diku garbage.

Clientwise, I still run TinyFugue.  Mainly to connect to IRC these days.