Come help save mud history

[schild]

Matt and Raph just posted in row. The prophecy has been fulfilled.

My face hath instantly sprung a beard.

[Sjofn]

I clearly need to make Ingmar write up an Ancient Anguish article, since I am far too lazy to do it myself.



Also, without MUDs, I'd probably be a spinster aunt. 

[Matt]

Matt and Raph just posted in row. The prophecy has been fulfilled.

My face hath instantly sprung a beard.

Hmm, I know Raph is full of beardy goodness, but I couldn't grow a beard to save my life. All I manage is a little bit of perpetual stubble that would resemble some sort of mangy, post-chemo werewolf were I to try to grow it out.

[sidereal]

Fun.  I added an entry on softcode, chock full of Weasel Words and missing citations. I might hover around and touch up the MU* branch of the family tree.  Mostly MUSHcode and the Battletech servers.  Maybe I'll even turn over the rock under which hides the worms of the World of Darkness  branch of the MUSH/MUX family.

That was you? I left a note saying "hmm" basically. The line between softcode & scripting is interesting and should be clarified. :)

I hrmed back.  It's a nontrivial distinction, as long as we agree to kick out tinyfugue macros from the discussion.

[WindupAtheist]

Forced downtime DOES promote socialization. You just don't care. There's a difference. :) (It's been widely observed -- not just by me! -- that WoW is one of the least social virtual worlds ever made).

Look, of course things have evolved. But evolution and progress are not synonymous. Losing sight of where we have been is a mistake, and there are many alternate paths of evolution that are compeltely orthogonal to those four observations.

I'm not seriously arguing that documenting all this MUD history isn't a good thing. I'm just saying that the whole old-school "straight outta MUDs" developer culture needs to produce something unequivocably awesome before people will stop throwing the occasional tomato at it. Right now it mostly gets associated with the stone-age of MMO development and the mistakes that were made back then, unfair as that may seem.

Or to put it another way, less telling me what it has to teach, more showing me what it's learned.  

Edit: Er, in general that is. Not in this thread, since it's, you know, explicitly all about history.

[Venkman]

Forced downtime DOES promote socialization. You just don't care. There's a difference. :) (It's been widely observed -- not just by me! -- that WoW is one of the least social virtual worlds ever made).

Yes and yes. To the former: it's a magic circle thing. Players don't want to know when the game is gaming them. To the latter, WoW provides a valuable insight into just how much interaction the average player actually wants. WoW is the Facebook of MMOs: almost entirely self driven voluntary outward facing interaction. And where it's not (Raiding, Arenas) is also probably where the least percentage of players are.

[schild]

Honestly, this seems like an impossible exercise in masturbation. There aren't enough people on the internet to really, REALLY document all the weird and crazy shit that has gone on in the mudworld. Considering the weird and crazy shit is far more interesting than the mundane well-known (around these parts) bits, it's probably safer for everyone involved to not create the dinosaur exhibit for the Natural History Museum of Gaming. Also, it's too easy for people to avoid work when nostalgia strikes them.

[sidereal]

I'm just saying that the whole old-school "straight outta MUDs" developer culture needs to produce something unequivocably awesome before people will stop throwing the occasional tomato at it.

BattletechMUX was unequivocally awesome a decade ago.  You had large factions warring over resource points, salvaging each others mechs, a resource/repair system, a fully functioning economy with defendable factories, dynamic weather (that actually had an impact on gameplay), detailed comms system that supported range effects and decoding, etc, etc.

The problem is that the feature that led to that incredible amount of productivity and experimentation is the same feature that prevented it from ever growing beyond a small userbase:  the text interface.  It turns out most people would rather play Mechwarrior 2 with maybe 1% of the functionality of the MUX if they could get some 3d rendering on top of it.  And as soon as you do that, every feature has to run through the fucking art department, and you're done.  I wrote a chessboard in MUSHcode for kicks in about 2 hours.  An official chessboard in World of Warcraft would take 100 hours to implement, mostly in animations and rendering the board.  All the fun stuff in WoW is going on in Lua, like the holdem poker mod that plays over chat (which is. . a text interface).

In short, text ftw.  Now excuse me while I play some Dwarf Fortress.

[Matt]

Honestly, this seems like an impossible exercise in masturbation. There aren't enough people on the internet to really, REALLY document all the weird and crazy shit that has gone on in the mudworld. Considering the weird and crazy shit is far more interesting than the mundane well-known (around these parts) bits, it's probably safer for everyone involved to not create the dinosaur exhibit for the Natural History Museum of Gaming. Also, it's too easy for people to avoid work when nostalgia strikes them.

As someone who is still intimately involved in text MUDs (as opposed to, with all due respect, virtually every other commenter on the topic, including Bartle and Raph) the funny thing is that I agree, sort of. I think the whole kerfuffle over Threshold is misplaced because I do think that Wikipedia's rules are fairly rational and I don't think that Threshold (with all due respect to its admin, who I consider at least a casual friend) is really all that notable. It's been a moderately successful commercial MUD (by MUD standards, obviously, not by MMO standards) but beyond that it hasn't really done anything first or had much influence, as far as I can tell, on other games that became bigger. That's the case for almost all text MUDs (of which there have been thousands) though.

At least one of Iron Realms's MUD listings was removed and I expect the Lusternia listing will be removed at some point too, though I suspect Achaea is safe (otoh, who knows). I also don't care that much whether or not they're on Wikipedia and think that the effort on Wikia is a much more appropriate place for almost all info about text MUDs, minus ones that have done something particularly notable and documented.

[schild]

That and - mmog developers aren't even learning from mistakes or new things from MMOGs in the past 10 years, let alone yesterday. Why should we go back to text games? Is 20 years of rosey colored bullshit necessary? Particularly during work hours?

[Matt]

The problem is that the feature that led to that incredible amount of productivity and experimentation is the same feature that prevented it from ever growing beyond a small userbase:  the text interface.  It turns out most people would rather play Mechwarrior 2 with maybe 1% of the functionality of the MUX if they could get some 3d rendering on top of it.  And as soon as you do that, every feature has to run through the fucking art department, and you're done.  I wrote a chessboard in MUSHcode for kicks in about 2 hours.  An official chessboard in World of Warcraft would take 100 hours to implement, mostly in animations and rendering the board.  All the fun stuff in WoW is going on in Lua, like the holdem poker mod that plays over chat (which is. . a text interface).

Art is a huge part of it. So is needing a UI. If you want 3d as well, the problems compound quite a bit. Beyond that, just having a heavy client is an inhibitor. Text MUDs that are client agnostic (almost all of them, even if they have "pretty clients" alongside them) require no client patching and thus allow for incredibly fast iteration. Just update the server and boom, everyone's code is instantly updated. Achaea probably gets updates four or five times each day on average, every day, 365 days a year. Most of them are small fixes, of course, but as you point out, it's wonderful to able to implement a new feature and have it in the players hands in the space of hours.

Before I started Sparkplay (doing 3d MMOs) I figured that a 3d MMO would be about 10x as much work feature-for-feature, but now I'd estimate it's somewhere between 100x and 1000x as much work/cost when you factor in all the systems that have to be there on a 3d MMO to support simply existing in 3d. I was amused at first (in a "this is new and interesting" way) by having to worry about stuff that is irrelevant in a text MMO like clipping, shadows, texture memory, performance, etc. Can't say I find it very funny now, 3 years later.


--matt

[Matt]

That and - mmog developers aren't even learning from mistakes or new things from MMOGs in the past 10 years, let alone yesterday. Why should we go back to text games? Is 20 years of rosey colored bullshit necessary? Particularly during work hours?

Well, if all you want is an evolution of WoW, I don't think there's any big reason to look back at text MUDs except as history. EQ and WoW already did that for you.

--matt

[Ratman_tf]

Forced downtime DOES promote socialization. You just don't care. There's a difference. :) (It's been widely observed -- not just by me! -- that WoW is one of the least social virtual worlds ever made).

But is it desirable socalization? Or is it people getting bored and yakking at each other. Why should they play "your" game when they can just log off and hit the bar/anime expo/cyber on myspace?

The problem with forced socalization through downtime and grouping is that other games don't have to feature it, and will drag your players away where they don't have to put up with it in order to do what they signed up for... play the game. (See: Our favorite example, EQ around the time of WoW's launch.)

On topic: My only exposure to MUDs was CalvinMUD when I was going to community college. I can see why and where a lot of DIKU ideas come from, but MUDs never really grabbed my imagination.

[Venkman]

That and - mmog developers aren't even learning from mistakes or new things from MMOGs in the past 10 years, let alone yesterday. Why should we go back to text games? Is 20 years of rosey colored bullshit necessary? Particularly during work hours?

We don't want to learn from past MMOs. Like Matt said, EQ and WoW have done that for us. We want to learn from other genres. But I suspect you think the same way so this is borderline insulting to tell you this 

This doesn't diminish the need for a MUD history. Because even if you take the fun combat from a console game and mix in the itemization of Diablo II, you still have social conditions that already have been explored and should be learned from.

[Fordel]

But is it desirable socalization? Or is it people getting bored and yakking at each other.

I always felt it the socialization was brought about by shared misery. Like when a subway car stops in a tunnel for a long time, or a elevator gets stuck, or that really long line at the checkout or even just the damn weather while waiting outside.


Little difference between:

"Fuck it's cold out, hope the bus gets here soon!"
"Fuck this spawn takes forever, I hope it shows up soon!"

In both cases the socialization is forgotten as soon as the situation is resolved. I remember that guy at the boss stop I was talking too no more then I remember the dwarf that was camping the spawn with me.

[Matt]

Little difference between:

"Fuck it's cold out, hope the bus gets here soon!"
"Fuck this spawn takes forever, I hope it shows up soon!"

In both cases the socialization is forgotten as soon as the situation is resolved. I remember that guy at the boss stop I was talking too no more then I remember the dwarf that was camping the spawn with me.

It saddens me that in the games you're playing the only socialization you can imagine is in downtime between spawns and that it is utterly meaningless regardless. (Not meant as an insult towards you, but an expression of disappointment at how small the box is in MMOs.) Modern MMOs are richer than MUDs in some ways but this is one way where MMOs may as well be in 1975 by comparison to even mediocre MUDs.

--matt

[schild]

Little difference between:

"Fuck it's cold out, hope the bus gets here soon!"
"Fuck this spawn takes forever, I hope it shows up soon!"

In both cases the socialization is forgotten as soon as the situation is resolved. I remember that guy at the boss stop I was talking too no more then I remember the dwarf that was camping the spawn with me.

It saddens me that in the games you're playing the only socialization you can imagine is in downtime between spawns and that it is utterly meaningless regardless. Modern MMOs are richer than MUDs in some ways but this is one way where MMOs may as well be in 1975 by comparison to even mediocre MUDs.

--matt

Pft. People do the same thing in muds. Using an example from this thread, waiting for the griffon in telearena when you were on a new toon always resulted in talking to whoever was there. It's as if developers have developed a case of stockholm syndrome and their systems and established practices are the ones holding them hostage.

[ezrast]

Why do so many people go around saying DIKU all the time? It was DikuMUD, not DIKUMUD.

I've been trying to work this question in without looking like a moron for something like a year now.

[sidereal]

Datalogisk Institut Københavns Universitet

[Fordel]

Little difference between:

"Fuck it's cold out, hope the bus gets here soon!"
"Fuck this spawn takes forever, I hope it shows up soon!"

In both cases the socialization is forgotten as soon as the situation is resolved. I remember that guy at the boss stop I was talking too no more then I remember the dwarf that was camping the spawn with me.

It saddens me that in the games you're playing the only socialization you can imagine is in downtime between spawns and that it is utterly meaningless regardless. (Not meant as an insult towards you, but an expression of disappointment at how small the box is in MMOs.) Modern MMOs are richer than MUDs in some ways but this is one way where MMOs may as well be in 1975 by comparison to even mediocre MUDs.

--matt

Who says that's the only socialization available?

What I was saying is the socialization provided by the old school 'downtime' is crappy and forgettable.  

[ezrast]

Hmm, okay. I just wasn't sure if there was some other connotation there - it never seemed quite right that the place name should be synonymous with the legacy of one particular product developed there in the early '90s, but whatever works.

edit: there. their. they're. damn.

[Slyfeind]

It saddens me that in the games you're playing the only socialization you can imagine is in downtime between spawns and that it is utterly meaningless regardless. (Not meant as an insult towards you, but an expression of disappointment at how small the box is in MMOs.)

Interesting point. I hardly remember any conversations I had waiting for spawns in WoW or EQ, just as I hardly remember any conversations I had while braiding hair in the cantinas of SWG. And yet, SWG is considered quite different than WoW or EQ. Hair dressing was meant for the socializers...and yet it had the same effect as waiting for spawns.

However, I remember many, many details about a conversation I had in UO, in a tavern on the Lake Superior shard in the Grey Company village, far to the east of Yew. A young man had been dumped by his girlfriend earlier that day, and was telling us all about it, tears in his eyes, while a couple was flirting in a corner and I was sitting there drinking ale. The flirtatious man was reciting poetry to the lady, while she emoted *blush* and so forth. The scorned young man made sure we knew he was crying in real life. I was drinking and burping yet listening to them all. Orcs spawned outside, and nobody cared.

To SWG's credit, however, I vividly remember the day I learned about /bandflourish, fuck yeah. Sometimes we make the choice to socialize, and sometimes someone else (the devs) makes that choice for us.

[Ratman_tf]

Little difference between:

"Fuck it's cold out, hope the bus gets here soon!"
"Fuck this spawn takes forever, I hope it shows up soon!"

In both cases the socialization is forgotten as soon as the situation is resolved. I remember that guy at the boss stop I was talking too no more then I remember the dwarf that was camping the spawn with me.

It saddens me that in the games you're playing the only socialization you can imagine is in downtime between spawns and that it is utterly meaningless regardless. (Not meant as an insult towards you, but an expression of disappointment at how small the box is in MMOs.) Modern MMOs are richer than MUDs in some ways but this is one way where MMOs may as well be in 1975 by comparison to even mediocre MUDs.

--matt

Exactly. Downtime is not creating interesting socalizations regarding the game space, it is dead time to be filled up with trivia and fart jokes.

[Jain Zar]

Little difference between:

"Fuck it's cold out, hope the bus gets here soon!"
"Fuck this spawn takes forever, I hope it shows up soon!"

In both cases the socialization is forgotten as soon as the situation is resolved. I remember that guy at the boss stop I was talking too no more then I remember the dwarf that was camping the spawn with me.

It saddens me that in the games you're playing the only socialization you can imagine is in downtime between spawns and that it is utterly meaningless regardless. (Not meant as an insult towards you, but an expression of disappointment at how small the box is in MMOs.) Modern MMOs are richer than MUDs in some ways but this is one way where MMOs may as well be in 1975 by comparison to even mediocre MUDs.

--matt

Exactly. Downtime is not creating interesting socalizations regarding the game space, it is dead time to be filled up with trivia and fart jokes.

People don't play videogames for downtime.  Downtime is  CRIMINAL.  Hell, when I want to socialize and shoot the shit I hop on IRC and hope the channels aren't full of lurkers.  I post on forums.  Making me sit in one point for more than 30 seconds while I med or wait for a black bar damage to heal or some such fuckery doesn't make me start socializing.

You know how RP broke out in UO?  Tools to build places to hang out, and gamers actually INTERESTED in roleplaying there. 

Guess what almost every other MMORPG fails to have?  Cool player made, easily reached buildings to hang out in.

You know what RP WoW has?  People chatting over guild chat in RP guilds.  And WoW has almost zero downtime outside of traveling time.  But it still happens with the right players and the right guild.

Forcing players to spend 20 out of every 60 minutes with a thumb up their butts doesn't do it.

[lamaros]

Here is where I suggest people have different ideas of what they mean by 'downtime'.

[Yoru]

Little difference between:

"Fuck it's cold out, hope the bus gets here soon!"
"Fuck this spawn takes forever, I hope it shows up soon!"

In both cases the socialization is forgotten as soon as the situation is resolved. I remember that guy at the boss stop I was talking too no more then I remember the dwarf that was camping the spawn with me.

It saddens me that in the games you're playing the only socialization you can imagine is in downtime between spawns and that it is utterly meaningless regardless. (Not meant as an insult towards you, but an expression of disappointment at how small the box is in MMOs.) Modern MMOs are richer than MUDs in some ways but this is one way where MMOs may as well be in 1975 by comparison to even mediocre MUDs.

--matt

This, a thousand times over. I used to code on a number of MUDs, and one of them had some of the best socialization I've ever seen in an online game. It did not cause this through downtime, purely, although there was some of that. The game mechanics themselves made the most efficient and predictable methods of character advancement (use-based/skill-based system) to interact with other players.

Fighters had to find other fighters, know how to work the fighting system (which was ridiculously complex) and then spar with each other, taking care to take breaks if either combatant got too badly hurt. If they did it right, both participants would gain skill quickly. An advanced fighter who really knew how to work the system well could act as a sort of "master" for one or more students, and both the master and student benefitted.

Mages had to find other mages of similar skill levels, set up properly, and then perform certain magic actions at each other with fairly precise control over their environment.

In both cases, you could find NPCs to fight with, and "progression lists" of NPCs to use for advancement were written up and circulated among the players. However, it was never as efficient as having friends to practice with.

There were boring, slow tasks that were sped up significantly through cooperation - particularly cooperation between crafters and mages. However, again, both sides benefited from this equation - the mages could practice their magic by refreshing the fatigue of crafters, and thus the crafters could practice more quickly.

All of this synergy drove cooperation and socialization, but none of it "forced" grouping. You could call it "forced" if you were a crazy achiever sort who only ever wants to follow the most optimized path available. Those people, however, will never be happy anyway.

[WindupAtheist]

There were boring, slow tasks that were sped up significantly through cooperation - particularly cooperation between crafters and mages. However, again, both sides benefited from this equation - the mages could practice their magic by refreshing the fatigue of crafters, and thus the crafters could practice more quickly.

So, what exactly are we talking about? One player spamming "make chicken fajita" for 3 hours while another one spams "cast stamina spell" the whole time? Man, people praising shit like this makes me think that maybe this whole MUD culture really does deserve to disappear into obscurity. Everytime people start talking about it, this "promoting socialization > providing fun gameplay" attitude comes bubbling to the surface.

[Draegan]

Downtime socialization is ass.  Downtown, as many people have said already, is terrible.  No one wants to sit there and do NOTHING.  I want to play the game.  It's sad that devs still think in a video game that contains 99% fighting, looting and winning at something that sitting down and recovering during trivial moments is a good thing.  Stop it.  Fire yourself.

I socialize pretty well all the time on vent with my guildmates and friends.  Or barring that in IM windows with people I'm playing the game with, or in guild channels.  So what if I don't talk to other people in the game on a regular basis.  Hell I don't talk to strangers when I'm out and about in my daily life.

I never got the argument of the "death to the community" argument people bring up about WOW vs. a game like EQ.  There is no community in WOW!  It sucks!  Why, I remember back when I was camping a spawn for 42 hours in EQ I had the greatest memories of..."  Your rosy memories were induces by lack of sleep and to much Mnt Dew. 

Sorry for the rant, I hate this argument.

[Yoru]

There were boring, slow tasks that were sped up significantly through cooperation - particularly cooperation between crafters and mages. However, again, both sides benefited from this equation - the mages could practice their magic by refreshing the fatigue of crafters, and thus the crafters could practice more quickly.

So, what exactly are we talking about? One player spamming "make chicken fajita" for 3 hours while another one spams "cast stamina spell" the whole time? Man, people praising shit like this makes me think that maybe this whole MUD culture really does deserve to disappear into obscurity. Everytime people start talking about it, this "promoting socialization > providing fun gameplay" attitude comes bubbling to the surface.

Not precisely, there were some variables that had to be tweaked sometimes, but it boils down to the equivalent of that. However, did I not note at the beginning of that paragraph that this was a boring task as opposed to some awesome system that everyone should copy?

Don't be more of an obtuse douche than usual.

[Merusk]

Funny, my wow server has a great community.   You just have to be young enough to chat on the forums all day or know someone who'll tell you the right chat channels to join.  Alternatly you can do enough PUGs to meet up with folks, drop them on your friends list and run more stuff with them later.

However, it takes a desire to socialize and be a part of a community and the time to dedicate to forming relationships, just like in real life.   The proclivity of older players (which everyone here is.) to quit general chat because of "the damn kids" probably also adds to thoughts that the community sucks.   It doesn't suck you're just 10 years beyond the peer group of the greater community.  You'll have to seek-out folks of your own age group, which will be a problem since most of them ALSO have quit general chat and hate running PUGs.  

No, forced downtime just means your players will find something else to play.  As has been mentioned, I have plenty of other options these days.

[WindupAtheist]

Not precisely, there were some variables that had to be tweaked sometimes, but it boils down to the equivalent of that. However, did I not note at the beginning of that paragraph that this was a boring task as opposed to some awesome system that everyone should copy?

Don't be more of an obtuse douche than usual.

Yes, I R retorded to think you considered it a good system. Should I have quoted a different part than the one where you describe some boring tasks and how this system (yay!) sped them up?

This, a thousand times over. I used to code on a number of MUDs, and one of them had some of the best socialization I've ever seen in an online game. It did not cause this through downtime, purely, although there was some of that. The game mechanics themselves made the most efficient and predictable methods of character advancement (use-based/skill-based system) to interact with other players.

[Matt]

Downtime socialization is ass.  Downtown, as many people have said already, is terrible.  No one wants to sit there and do NOTHING.  I want to play the game.  It's sad that devs still think in a video game that contains 99% fighting, looting and winning at something that sitting down and recovering during trivial moments is a good thing.  Stop it.  Fire yourself.

The difference, I think, is that you're playing a game whereas a lot of people playing MUDs don't really look at it as playing a game. Instead, they're existing in a world that has some game elements within it. When there's downtime, you're not spending your time making fart jokes or whatever. You're talking about the issues of the day for the most part - "Should the city of Shallam go to war with the alliance of the cities of Ashtan and Mhaldor? Does Shallam have the manpower to resist them?" "Are the forestals really going to put an herb embargo on the Occultists?". Whether this kind of thing sounds painful or fun to you probably depends on how interested you are in roleplaying and participating in the larger plots/schemes/story threads going on around you. It's really a completely different mindset from the "bash monsters to get equipment to bash more monsters" model that WoW devolved to (not that I blame WoW for doing that, as it's clearly fulfilling the desires of a lot of people).

--matt

[Yoru]

Not precisely, there were some variables that had to be tweaked sometimes, but it boils down to the equivalent of that. However, did I not note at the beginning of that paragraph that this was a boring task as opposed to some awesome system that everyone should copy?

Don't be more of an obtuse douche than usual.

Yes, I R retorded to think you considered it a good system. Should I have quoted a different part than the one where you describe some boring tasks and how this system (yay!) sped them up?

This, a thousand times over. I used to code on a number of MUDs, and one of them had some of the best socialization I've ever seen in an online game. It did not cause this through downtime, purely, although there was some of that. The game mechanics themselves made the most efficient and predictable methods of character advancement (use-based/skill-based system) to interact with other players.

I thought the way the fighting system encouraged social interaction by making sparring partners the primary method of training - and how properly training required fairly deep player-knowledge of the system - was a good aspect of it. There was no downtime inherent in the system unless one of the players screwed up and injured the other player.

Since it was text based, it was obviously not twitch-intensive. This left some time during the combat free to chat with your sparring partner(s).

Further, for the antisocial, there were NPC sparring partners available, but they were suboptimal compared to a good player opponent. Player cooperation here didn't reduce downtime, it accelerated advancement. Further, if you knew someone was a good opponent for you, you had an incentive to make friends and seek them out again.

(Aside: Twitch-intensive stuff in MUDs tends to encourage the use of macros and triggers instead. Text, while easy to develop for, is also just as easy to parse mechanically. While I can't say it for certain, this may have also contributed to the development of macro-like UI mods early on in WOW. I recall hearing about a mod that automatically parsed a priest's raid to find a heal target, for example.)

The magic system was interesting but flawed, and it ended up being grindy. (Albeit one requiring careful player manipulation of the system.) The crafting system, which is what you seized on, was clearly a grind.  In those two systems, player cooperation reduced tedium and downtime. Should they be tedious and grindy from the outset? Not necessarily, no.

The fact that a MUD is inherently a smaller system than most MMOs probably also contributes to the community and socialization aspects. It's a lot easier to get to know almost everyone when you're dealing with PCUs under 100 and total active userbases under 1000.

[Mrbloodworth]

Little difference between:

"Fuck it's cold out, hope the bus gets here soon!"
"Fuck this spawn takes forever, I hope it shows up soon!"

In both cases the socialization is forgotten as soon as the situation is resolved. I remember that guy at the boss stop I was talking too no more then I remember the dwarf that was camping the spawn with me.

It saddens me that in the games you're playing the only socialization you can imagine is in downtime between spawns and that it is utterly meaningless regardless. (Not meant as an insult towards you, but an expression of disappointment at how small the box is in MMOs.) Modern MMOs are richer than MUDs in some ways but this is one way where MMOs may as well be in 1975 by comparison to even mediocre MUDs.

--matt

Exactly. Downtime is not creating interesting socalizations regarding the game space, it is dead time to be filled up with trivia and fart jokes.

But that's only if, during that "downtime" (what i am taking to mean, no combat, or questing going on) there is nothing else to do but chat. I'm going to duck after i say this, but i think that UO and SWG were the best examples of giving people things to do during this "downtime".

I agree with you if there is nothing else to do, but if there is.. its a great thing, chat, socialize, work on something non_combat_related.

I miss the SWG cantinas......

/runs off

[Nebu]

I think MUDs will remain a victim of nostalgia.  I think back on my MUD design/development days with great fondness, but wouldn't want to relive them.  I feel exactly the same way about being a participant in the early EQ years.