I played some MUDs back in the days of modem, my parents didn’t like it very much though 
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Heh, I was a MUDer as recently as 2003… I wrote and hosted my own MUD even… two of them -.-
But MUDs are a dying thing really, or certainly they’re becoming a niche thing.
Cliffski: I agree there’s some abominations in Secondlife but you’ll prolly find if you hand around the sims owned/run by the skilled people then the quality is much, much higher… See here:
That’s all player made texturing, modelling and animation.
oh and yes, secondlife.com is the correct address
MUDs, (or MUSH, MUDD, DIKU, MESH etc…). THE first non-productive application for the web (invented soon after email and file transfers). I rememebr being on MUDs as far back as 1991 (sounds so long ago, doesn’t it?). Plus, really, the first, or a precursor to, the modern day MMORPG.
So old, soobsolete, so basic, yet can easily fill up a huge niche market.
Low banwidth requirements, text only, and if there’s any graphics, you’re limited to ASCII graphics. Anyone can play it, won’t lag down your PC with high end graphics, etc…
God, I need to pull out zMUD and do a search, I miss them. That was a great way to spend an entire afternoon, maybe miss a class, maybe miss a test, maybe, even, miss a final… 
zmud is a hideous sack of bloatiness nowadays. You’d regret it. I mean when a MUD client starts coming with an integrated web browser and mp3 player I start to get suspicious.
And the first MUD was something like 1979 I think
SWG was a good mmorpg before they ****ed it up. there were no levels, just a very complex tech tree allowing u to be more origonal in what you do, unique houses and cloths. If they took the new combat system (which is more like a 3rd person shooter) with the old proffesion system itd rock.
But you can tell a shift in gamplay amung non-mainstream mmos, most are just charging for in game money instead of montly, which I’m indiffrent to. If it’s a good game, I’ll pay the 10-15$ a month…
i really dont want to accumulate anything, not gold, not armour, not new weapons. I want to exist in a virtual world, roleplaying. Thats what would make the game such a challenge. If there are no levels and no money, then what becomes of value? ironically its kudos! The kudos of being accepted into a certain group or clan. If the only way that can be achieved is by good networking, social and roleplaying skills, then the game has finally become what they were supposed to be, massively multiplayer roleplaying games.
The current MMOs are massively multiplayer high-score tables, where everyone worships at the altar of the level grind.
Just because of this thread I been looking into MUD/MUSHs again.
Right now I’m playing at accursed-lands.com/ which seems to have some really good RPing going on and some nice systems to support it. The emote system is great.
Also trying to get an account at bloodshed.org/.
But I would be happy to play something that cliffski describes.
but with a completly even playing field would it just be bf2 with a few thousand people on 1 server? it’d still be a high score table, because whats the purpose of joining a clan but to win and/or hang out with a group of people… so irc?
It’s not about chatting, it’s about living another life/roleplaying. That’s the whole point and that is what brings joy in to the RPGs for RP people as me.
My last session at accursed lands I was walking around in one of the citys and after a while I sat down on a bench to drink some water. When I sat there drinking a Goblin runs by. As a human I was glad that that smelly creature was just passing by but after just a minute he was back and started looking at me.
I quickly closed my canteen because I don’t want his smell to make the water taste bad. He approached me and started to swear about the guards who picked on him although he didn’t do anything. Don’t know why he was telling me this but I just smiled and said that it was maybe because he smelled so bad. He started to try to convince me that he didn’t smell and so we started to talk. After about 20 minutes I had learned that his name was Grub, he was from a city called Arama (or something) and that he was doing works for the Bramans.
I don’t like the bramans because they use all this hard words and always think that they know everything and that everything they say is soooo intresting.
Grub told me that he was feeling the same thing, but if you just nod and pretend that they say something important then they are gladl to pay alot for help on simple tasks.
After a while he was feeling that he stayed to long in this human city with all it’s (as he thought) human bullys so he started to walk away, but told me if I ever visit his city I should ask for him because he would be glad to show me the city, even though I was a human.
He waved and walked away and I could continue with my drinking and I also took some bread before I started to explore the city again.
I didn’t kill anything, I didn’t gain any XP or something but I did get some information, I made a new friend (ok, not really) but most importantly, I had some good time roleplaying. That would never happen on WoW or anything.
This sounds like a lot of fun, i agree, however what you just described is a chatroom/message board of people who like to roleplay. MMORPG, as you know is a Role Playing Game. And theres a big diffrence between a RPG and just regular RPing. In a RPG you are a hero, you collect items, fight monsters (as you do, you gain levels thus gaining power) and you follow a story to defeat evil. so a MMORPG would allow you to do the same along side others, giving you more options and the ability to socialize.
The problem is balancing, because of pvp and fairness of the time it takes to level any profession needs to be equal all other professions. This is where the old swg failed and ultimatily why it was changed. Sure there were no levels, but if my smuggler/pistoler went up against a carbanier/ranger, who should win even if we have the same number of skill boxes filled. The problem was the pistoler always won. This is why the everquest template is so popular, its nearly impossible to completly balance that many diffrent carrer choices for pvp, solo, and group players. It is however possible to balance 4 proffesions that have 8 variants at a higher level, and as they evolved they were willing to put more and more choices when they feel comfortable everything is balanced. Thats why they have levels so they can simply say that a level 34 ranger would be completly evenly matched to a level 34 pistoler.
So as for a social mmo, or mmorp without the g, that will never sell with the big publishers. “So you want to make a game where people just talk, no objectives, no collecting items, just talk??? HAHA, you’re crazier than Peter M.” With the cost of game development as big as it is now and the production time of about 3 to 4 years for the quality considered standerd for mmos there’s no way anybody at a major company would greenlight that project, not to mention the resources needed for the servers and the teams to update it after release. Esspecially considering every person who RPs has a diffrient favorite genre, sci-fi, fantisy, etc. The only way this would be made is if it was a privately ran 3rd party game heavily supported and contributed by fans, and thus you have Second Life.
Could MMORPGs be better and do more to promte the RP spirt, hell yes, yet with the 15$ a month they’re rakingin from EQ2, WOW, SWG which all follow the same basic design idea, publishers wont be doing any major changes anytime soon. And indie developers don’t quite have the resouces to take on a project as big as an MMO anywhere near as effective as the big dogs do it. So for now RPers will have to stick to muds and message boards, atleast until the suits wise up.
No, I was talking about a RPG/MUD where we do have skills, we can kill stuff or others players, can collect stuff, make stuff, explore and so on. I think they have more skills, items and places to visit in Accursed Land then they do in WoW. In that small session with the goblin we could have started to fight instead because maybe he had a bad temper and felt to insulted about my remark on his smell. On a good RP place people don’t just attack people though, and also that makes the balancing issue a little less important. The world ain’t balanced.
And I don’t agree with you. In a RPG you can RP and you don’t have to be a hero, you don’t have to fight monsters and you don’t have to follow a story. But I guess for a RPG to be a RPG you need some game rules and such and most MUDs have that.
But in good RPGs (that I think is good), you don’t have to be a hero (or pretending to be), you dont have to kill monsters to gain levels and beat bigger monsters.
You can be an salesman, a thief, a musician, a storekeeper, a farmer, a begger, a guard, an hunter, a forester, a smith and so on. That is what RPGs is about for alot of people, including me. What you describe sounds more like a hack & slash RPG and yes, almost all MMORPGs out there is hack & slash even though some developers/publishers tries to say something else.
I have played P&P RPGs, Live RPGs (don’t know what they are called in english), SP RPGs, MMORPGs, MUDs, MUSHs and other MU*.
But I think you do have a point it that maybe we will never see such a thing from a big game developer and maybe the roleplayers that wants more then hack & slash have to stick to MUDs and player run shards and such if they wanna play online.
On a sidenote, now when I started playing MUDs again yesterday I found out some things that I missed when I played UO, NWN and so on. Even when I played on smaller, player run servers with only RP people. And it’s the way you can exrpess yourself on a MUD. You can easily describe how you move, express feelings more then just wave, jump and smile and you can even describe how you do things.
AL have a very good emote system where you could also interact with the world, characters and items around you in your emotes. So when putting down that knife you could describe how you do it instead instead of just “drop knife”.
It adds alot to the atmosphere.
Live RP? I assume you mean LARPs (Live Action Role Playing)
Role playing is all about stories. I read a small essay from a what sounded like one of those biz-skills-personal-dev magazines suggesting that while modern literature thinks it has exhausted the artform of storytelling, all the narratives in the business world are still based on the traditional myth of Joseph Campbell, Star Wars, St George, etc. Author suggested Beckett as a potential target for cannibalism and went on to try some plotlines. (Our hero attempts to segue, Natural 20!~!) Anyway I do think that no framework behind a (mmorpg) is probably a difficult idea, but they are starting to get quite dull. To advance the genre a little a good start would be to avoid quests, gold, levels, skills, possessions, training, making things, any killing (and elves). Perhaps politics? The social revolutions of the 18th-19th centuries have always seemed like a promising field in which a game could be set. A handful of tottering, corrupt governments on a humid colonial continent, the players able to choose their own roles in the coming crisis. Obviously I haven’t thought this through as it seems I am about to suggest a game in which everyone plays a civil servant, but…
right now I’d settle for any MMORPG thats not sci-fi or fantasy. Thats what attracts me to pirates of the burning sea, but I’m preparing myself for a let-down.
While I agree, non-sci-fi / fantasy MUDs / MMORPG would be fun, I don’t think it would sell well. While Kudos seems to be doing well (I haven’t gotten into it yet) and The Sims has taken off, it’s only for a small miche market. We play games to escape reality, so why play a game based on reality other than being able to play different kinds of people, even ones we wouldn’t be in real life (and then, technically, wouldn’t it be a fantasy MMORPG?)?
Even a pirates based MMORPG is still a fantasy, historical and possibly accurate, but still a fantasy.
There’s a specific fantasy he’s talking about:
Ones with dragons, elves, magic, and the like.
You’re talking more of fiction (As opposed to the genre of fantasy)
well people also watch TV or movies to escape reality, yet soap operas and films set in modern day situations also sell masively well.
Some people like to be the elf warrior. Other people can’t identify with the elf warrior. But they can identify with someone in a simialr job to their own, who just takes a few more risks and has more fun.
I thought the Sims online could have been good, but it sounds like secondlife was more interesting.
Secondlife must be doing something right to have 150,000 registered accounts on there… Not to mention the number of people buying their own land despite the insane costs…
Get this… In secondlife if you want to buy an entire square on the grid (they’re called ‘Sims’ actually =p) which is about 32,000 Sq. Meters, you have to pay a 1000 dollar initial set up fee plus 200 dollars per month. And yes that’s real money not the in-game money. And yet there are hundreds of sims. Some people owning several each. Insane that people are willing to invest so heavily in what is still essentially a game/escape from reality no?
True you can resell parts of your sim as ‘parcels’ and some people make a profit at it but those that do just seem to go right back around and buy another sim. They aren’t really making a living from it, just expanding their land ownership without making a loss either.
I used to be really into MMOs, I played Runescape as if it was a 9 to 5 job. Spending hours clicking on a certain spot to keep fishing, just to increase my level. When I look back on it, I feel stupid for spending so much time on such a poor game.
I think those games are popular because they give you an opportunity to be ‘someone’. People play those games to be the highest level, or the get ‘respect’ from their peers by being a higher level or having a certain item.
I also think that, the games sort of become what the community wants them to be. For example, if you attract a community of genuine ‘role-players’ then youre not gonna see much ‘grinding’. You could make a MMORPG with the greatest story/quests but if your players are only interested in being at the top of the high scores board then they will play in a certain way to achieve that goal.
One thing you shouldn’t overlook about ‘grinding’ is that people do it for genuine reasons sometime. For example, in Runescape people would train for hours to be strong enough to fight a King Black Dragon which was the strongest monster in the game. I think this sort of grinding is ok because it adds value and importance to the final monster and makes it a goal worth achieving.
Those sort of ‘sidebosses’ often give you a better fight than the storyline’s final boss. Which motivates people to train themselves up to fight them.
An example of this is Final Fantasy X, the storyline final boss was very weak and I killed him in 2 hits, but then there was side-bosses which were very strong and required me to train up just to survive their first attack!