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Classic Games (Games) Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

Saving MUDs? 94

Posted by Cliff from the resurrecting-your-favorite-game-world dept.
chewedtoothpick asks: "My absolute favorite game of all-time, Exile [Archive.org mirror], is a MUD that is about to be shut down, and I've noticed that MUDs have been diminishing in number, especially lately. Why are they all quitting, and what does it take to resurrect them? Is it a matter of buying the code off the creator? Is it a matter of making your own and hope it comes close to the one you want it to be like? Is there nothing we can do to save the classics that define multi-player games?"
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Saving MUDs? More

Saving MUDs?

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  • O "Realms of Mit'uen", wherefore art thou?

    A.
    (who spent many long winter hours there)

  • Who needs a MUD when you have Slashdot? (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @10:47AM (#6040272)
    Who needs a mud when you have Slashdot, our beloved MTF (Multi-Troll Forum)?

    "Argh! I just took 3 points of mental damage from a Jon Katz post!"

    "Does the vorpal sword work against the ravening Goetse?"

    "In Soviet Russia, orcs stab YOU!"

  • Everquest? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Albert Pussyjuice ( 675113 )
    Forgive me if I make any outrageous errors in my comment as I never took much interest in the MUD world BUT is a MUD any different at this point than, say, Everquest? As far as I know, the basic ideas are the same and your experience is still up to you - whether you want to use it just to chat with new people or actually go on adventures. MUDs are probably easier to modify and add items and such to for the end user, as Sony dictates most of the Everquest world but that seems like a small sacrifice to make i

    • Price? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Isn't there a big difference of price; MUDs are free and Everquest is very expensive?

      • Re:Price? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by sebi ( 152185 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @11:00AM (#6040329)
        Isn't there a big difference of price; MUDs are free and Everquest is very expensive?

        And Everquest is sticking around while MUDs are shutting down. Coincidence?
        • And Everquest is sticking around while MUDs are shutting down. Coincidence?

          That doesn't really prove anything. The number of muds are statistics. I don't know how many there are around nowadays, but there used to be at least more than ten thousand.
          Everquest is one. One. In other words, it's impossible to base any statistics on it. Either it's there, or it's not. It happens to be there, but if even if it wasn't, it could still be seen as an anomaly.

          • Re:Price? (Score:2, Interesting)

            by Drey ( 1420 )
            Could you provide some basis for your statistics? I've been mudding as a player since 1989 and as an admin since 1994 and do not ever remember there being more then 10K muds in existence.
            • Could you provide some basis for your statistics?

              No, I'm afraid I can't. This is just a figure I remember from my most active days (~1995) when searching the mud listing sites. There were many thousands on each of them, and they didn't overlap entirely.

              The figure wasn't really meant as a scientific fact. I'm sorry if it looked that way. The magnitude, however, I'm sure is correct.

    • Re:Everquest? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Cecil ( 37810 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @11:39AM (#6040478) Homepage
      The big difference is that people without hundreds of thousands of dollars can succesfully start, build, and maintain a MUD. In many cases, if you can find people willing to donate hosting (there are some), you don't need a cent.

      MUDs are also not generally "massively multiplayer". The largest MUD I've ever been on had a record of around 300 connected players at once. While some people prefer to have thousands or tens of thousands of people connected at once, some others do not. Personally, given the choice, I prefer a smaller, more social environment.

      Also, with free environments, there's no burgeoning need to get more and more and more people connected. You get all sorts of freedom that you wouldn't if you were running a pay-for-play game, allowing you to push the envelope and try new things if you want.

      As an example, if you find a particular player's roleplaying style to be lacking (whether it's simply "hahah lol i pwn j00 n00b!!!11!", or one of what EQ has termed a "griefer") you can kick him off with relative impunity, knowing that he doesn't really have a leg to stand on if he goes out and complains to everyone he sees. You get what you pay for. With cost comes the expectation of being able to please everyone.

      On a slightly OT tangent: I was expecting that Neverwinter Nights was going to be the sort of graphical MUD (ie, non-massively, but still multiplayer online RPG) that I've been hoping for. With Quake-style user-run servers, user-mod support, and plenty of other things it was looking really good. Unfortunately the D&D combat system was really hardcoded in there, for one thing. They also provide no persistent world support at all (any persistent worlds have been a nasty user-made kludge so far). It's really unfortunate, NWN was very close to being in a genre all of it's own. Instead they ended up with a D&D-rules Diablo. Too bad.
      • "Instead they ended up with a D&D-rules Diablo."

        And that statement is even a stretch. Their implementation of 3rd edition D&D rules makes it look like they got their 3rd edition PH from the middle of the road after a flash flood.

        • So I've heard. I am not really a fan of the D&D rules myself, (I know 2nd Ed, but NWN has been my only experience with 3rd Ed.) so I can't say personally, but I've certainly heard that their implementation of the rules leaves a lot to be desired.

          Again which could've been solved by ambitious users if only they had coded the rules into NWNScript instead of hard-coding it into the game.

      • Re:Everquest? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by 2Flower ( 216318 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @03:04PM (#6041410) Homepage

        Actually, NWN has a persistent data storage system coming out with its next patch. It's in testing right now and a number of persistent world developers are gleefully hacking away at it -- the end result should be what you're looking for, a small-scale, MUD style world with full graphical support.

        The D&D combat system is entrenched but that hasn't stopped many people from coding their own enhancements and replacement subsystems. For instance, I'm making a Final Fight / Golden Axe style arcade brawler using NWN, thanks to some custom spawning, treasure, and weapon systems.

        • Too little too late, as per usual with game developers? The user base possibly has moved, leaving the diablo junkies clicking madly away. :o) It will be interesting to see how that patch changed the community.
        • Ah, hm. I had given up my copy of NWN for dead. Knowing that, I might have to take another look. I agree with the other guy who replied though -- it may be too little too late, we'll have to see (like the Mac and Linux clients *sigh*)
      • The amusing thing of course, is that in general MUDs can get a higher concurrant user per CPU. Remember when everquest has 80,000 people on that's across 40 instances of their server each one being made up of about 35-40 machines. In general one zone = one CPU. As such, at max EQ probably only has 150 people per CPU and able to interact with eachother where it was pointed out that some MUDs (BatMud for sure) has peaked over 300 players per CPU.

    • Re:Everquest? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Omestes ( 471991 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {setsemo}> on Monday May 26, 2003 @05:00PM (#6041917) Homepage Journal
      MUCH! MUDs had the nice property that they were for the most part self-limiting, meaning that you didn't have the average EQ person playing on them. Also muds, do to lower player amounts, could evolve their own personality, either for good or ill.

      Also on MUDs, the line between Admin, and "end-user" was much more blurred, since the Imp of the mud was usually a player, and hence accessable to comments and suggestions. If you schmoozed enough, you could become a builder, or and admin yourself. Not so in todays MMORPGS.

      Also being that there was a body of MUDs (as opposed to a handful of MMORGS) you had CHOICE in what you wanted to play. Today I could be playing Alter Aeon, tomorrow Vurt, the next day a nice Shadowrun MUSH. I'm not stuck in the swords and socerty crap forever.

      Oh... and they were (mostly) FREE. Yep, no $50 to buy the game, then $20/mounth to have the privalege to hang out with the average MMORPG folk. Back in the day I paid $10/m for MBBS access, this MBBS had Tintin,telnet, and dialup support. Plus random inane chat possibilities.

      Also muds had a sence of family, and fond memories, they weren't just another profit driven game, they were labors of love, a union between players and admin. Ask any old school MUDer and they will recount their favorite MUDs, with a gleam of nostalgia in their eyes, and how many of us will be doing that for EQ. I dare say most of us will try to keep that little phase in the closet ten years from now, with damn good reason.

      Also, MUDs invented clans. REAL clans, clans that mattered.

      For the record, I used to play on Bad Trips, Alter Aeon... And of course my two favorites, Genocide, and the ripped port NeoGeno. Plus I built on verious muds (including NeoGeno), and MUSHes.
      • For the record, I used to play on Bad Trips

        Do you mean Bad Trip? I used to have a mud called Bad Trip that I started with Coby/Akinyele and Velveeta. Coby/Akin has been running it solo for a long time. It's a great mud, easily findable on mudconnector.
        www.mudconnector.com [mudconnector.com]
        • Yeah, Bad Trip. Used to be hosted on Battlegroundz. com... or somesuch... badtrip.battlegrounds.net 6969, no? One of my old BBSer freinds moved to Texas to marry one of the admins.
          • Yeah that's the one....yeah battlegroundz spelled their name all 1337 with the 'z'. I was an admin....there was someone that moved from Wisconsin because we were dating, but we didn't get married. good to know BT is still remembered.

    • Re:Everquest? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Dreetje ( 672686 )
      Is there a difference?

      Apparently there is. Some differences have been named already by others, things that come to mind are:

      Price, lots of muds are free (not all)

      Cheap to set up yourself (which is the reason why there so many out there.

      Freedom. This one is the most important issue for me. I played muds since 1998. I have also played mmorpg's (beta's mostly or free games) and although they can be fun, mostly they are just limited in the things you can do.

      I always compare muds to books, and mmorpg's t

      • Strictly speaking movies leave a lot to the imagination only. Everything that takes place between scenes, off-camera, in characters' heads, and before and after the film are constructed in your mind. Visual images are so powerful howevever that they can lead us to think they are presenting everything to us.
    • Personally I think the biggest differences in a text MUD and a graphical MUD like Everquest parallels in the same differences between a book and a movie. In a movie, like the graphical MUD, everything is drawn out for you. You get to gawk at pretty graphics and special effects, and you have a very good perspective of what exactly is going on. A book however, is much more developed in its ideas, because it doesn't have to spend time creating graphics and what not, it just gets to the core ideas that are i

  • MMORPGs vs. MUDs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JorenDahn ( 670270 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @11:23AM (#6040420) Homepage
    MUDs are essentially MMORPGs without graphics. MUDs allow for greater developer depth (the Avatar MUD [outland.org] has 23 races which can be mixed with around 10 classes, and a huge world to explore) and player depth (you can be a lot more creative in a game with text instead of graphics), but it's not easy to go up against the fancy graphics and content factories of big companies like Sony Online. It's not just fun to look at better graphics, but can be easier on the eyes, and a lot easier for people with mild dyslexia (a surprisingly common problem). I think a lot of MUDs are going to dissapear, but I also think that they'll be around for a lot longer, and maybe never fully dissapear.

    • Re:MMORPGs vs. MUDs (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @12:25PM (#6040701)
      "MUDs are essentially MMORPGs without graphics."

      Actually, MMORPGs are MUDs *with* graphics. That will become a more and more important distinction the more kids start playing online games without understanding the several-year history (very late 80s, not counting other local UNIX-based network games that came before *that*) that brought about their favorite games.

      I'm pretty sad that MUDs are disappearing, too. I was brought up on BatMUD [bat.org]* from back in '94, though since then I've played EQ and DAoC. Old MUDs still have their charm, when you can find one with a lot (150-200) of people online at once, but they simply can't compete for the limited attention spans of today's youth.

      Still, I am pretty stoked about some of the things on the horizon for the MMORPG market (SWG, most notably).

      *Link was down when I tried - BatMUD might be dead now, too :(
      • Actually, the correct site requires the www. [bat.org] like so many other dumb sites. Although in this case, it might actually be fair -- they could have their webserver running on a different computer than bat.org itself, which I assume the MUD runs on.
      • Batmud! Heh wasted life on there, was one of the first persistent lpmuds where items and such were persistent as well.

        I didn't like the changes they made (not even goin into that) and that was enough for me to rip myself away. EQ seems alot like a 3d enabled diku mud sometimes "GRATZ!!!".

        the Text was alot easier to script, that was for sure, how many people had mud-bots (tinyfugue) that did many "chores" for them automaticsally despite the muds anti-bot laws. Heh buncha programmers using telnet to a tex
  • MUDs have been diminishing in number, especially lately. Why are they all quitting...?

    Because with Yahoo chatrooms and IRC, you can get all the cyber-lovin' you want, without the pretense and baggage of "character classes", "gold pieces", and "elves."

    Oh, ok, except that I expect there are a lot of disappointed elf fetishists sitting in their mothers' basements, fondling their, uh, "miniatures".

    Yep, it lends a whole new meaning to "Dungeon Master".
    • Because with Yahoo chatrooms and IRC, you can get all the cyber-lovin' you want, without the pretense and baggage of "character classes", "gold pieces", and "elves."

      You must think I am some teen perv out for cybersex.

      I like MUDS better then MMORPG's because, as an earlier post pointed out, the lower ammount of simultaneous users makes for a more personal environment with a more in-depth draw. I also don't like graphical MMORPGs because of the logics behind how you have to pay for then, and because havin
    • Because with Yahoo chatrooms and IRC, you can get all the cyber-lovin' you want, without the pretense and baggage of "character classes", "gold pieces", and "elves."

      the RFC for Internet Relay Chat goes back to around the time that MUDs were coming around too. They've always been competing for the online lovin, and it's clear now who the winner is. IRC, where you're not restricted to 16k of aliases for 'automated lovin.'

      Oh, ok, except that I expect there are a lot of disappointed elf fetishists sittin

  • Let them die (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by KDan ( 90353 )
    They're bloody great wastes of time. If I could get ten bucks for every hour I've wasted on MUDs, I could buy myself a Jaguar.

    Daniel
    • Why do you want Atari's old system? Lik-Sang has them for $59.00 but alas it is the PAL version
      http://www.lik-sang.com/info.php?category =179&prod ucts_id=2142&
    • And if I had $20 for every hour I "wasted" coding for an awesome MUD all the while improving my algorithm design and coding skills, not only would I have an awesome job, but I'd be even more l33t then I am right now.
    • If I had $10 for every hour I've wasted on a MUD, I'd have enough money to develop and host my own for a few years.

      MUDs are the backbone of role play on the Internet. They should not be ignored and left to die like a starving animal in the wilderness.

  • Because MUDS are run by people.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Palos ( 527071 ) * on Monday May 26, 2003 @11:46AM (#6040507)
    Having had some experience on both sides of a MUD (both playing and running) I can say that no single factor kills a mud, or keeps it alive besides the actual people who are running it. Usually it is a small group of people who have been working together for years, and eventually decide that it is just enough. They grow up, have a family, have other interests, or just realize that they can not devote the amount of time necessary to run it to the level that they would like. Sure some admins are willing to let other people take over, but how many are capable and have the experience? Generally it's better to just take it down.

  • TinyCWRU (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cei ( 107343 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @12:58PM (#6040823) Homepage Journal
    I'm still amazed that TinyCWRU [tinymush.org] is still online after 13 years with the same database. All this time, and I can still login with my old character, not that I remember any of the building commands or anything. Probably for the better, as I'm sure the MUSH led to me failing out of Case in the first place.

  • Downfall of muds.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 26, 2003 @01:40PM (#6041011)
    I work on a fairly old DIKU/VieMUD based mud called NCMUD (www.ncmud.org). The way we keep it running (11 years and counting now) is that when the current implementors get bored we just promote two more implementors from the immortal ranks to add new features and run the game. That's how we have kept going this long.

    Some problems I have had with running a mud:
    A) Hosting... I'm a broke college student and so are the other implementors of NC(at least the ones who currently run it). So we really can't pay much for hosting. When it comes to hosting a mud as large as NC, we transfer about 11 gig up and downstream a month, take up about 2 gigs of harddrive space, and chew up and spit out memory, it's hard to find anyone willing to host us. Right now we might be going off line for the first time in 11 years because we are about to lose our free hosting and can't find another.

    B) Player Base... The player base is aging we aren't getting as many young players any more. Most of the people who start NCMUD are old verterns of muds or foreign teenagers. Seems like Everquest is kicking the mud communities ass in this area for sure. Eye candy seems to make up for a lot.

    C) Implementors... Most MUDs are started by high school or college students who want to play around. This leads to an inflation of shitty muds. It's extremely hard to find a good mud, and even harder to find a great mud to play out there anymore. Everyone is using a codebase and adding patching, not a whole lot of people are doing their own thing.

    That's a few thoughts from me.
    - John

    • B) Player Base... The player base is aging we aren't getting as many young players any more. Most of the people who start NCMUD are old verterns of muds or foreign teenagers. Seems like Everquest is kicking the mud communities ass in this area for sure. Eye candy seems to make up for a lot.

      I absolutely concur with this statement. While everyone knows what turn-over is, the problem comes from people expecting "more" than an environment that's 99% text. While I understand the advantages of such an environ

    • Have you had a look at RPG-Works.net [rpg-works.net]? They're not free, but from ten bucks a month upwards you get very good MU* and related website hosting.
    • Ah, good old Northern Crossroads.
      I remember when NC was just a little baby, still crawling around at the U of Toronto.

      *sniff*
      It's good to see it still alive and kicking, even if I don't play there anymore.

      DrWho...

    • Re:Downfall of muds.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by baka_boy ( 171146 ) <<lennon> <at> <day-reynolds.com>> on Monday May 26, 2003 @07:49PM (#6042871) Homepage
      The hosting issue is definitely one problem with MUDs, MOOs, etc. Starting and running a web-based community can be extremely cheap these days, (at least with the kind of userbase that most MU* servers deal with) given the prevalence of $10 web hosting packages with PHP, CGI, MySQL, etc. However, to run a MUD or similar, you need a server with full shell access, support for persistent processes, and at least some control over the firewall rules, to allow client connections to the odd port numbers that the servers tend to use.

      Of course, there are technological solutions to this problem: use a Java applet that directly connects to an XML-RPC/SOAP CGI server, or to the database backend; build a DHTML-based UI for a traditional MUD-style environment; or even just pool resources with other MUD admins to get one of the cheap "virtual server" accounts somewhere like JohnCompanies, and share it amongst several running game server instances.

      Personally, I'm very interested in the second option, and have been hacking together pieces of a MUD-style backend that could use a browser-based interface to do real-time chat, building and development, etc. Looking at systems like the Zope Management Interface, and other OSS content-management and thru-the-web development tools, I think it should be entirely possible to migrate the MUD experience to a web interface, which would simplify both hosting and use by a wider range of players.

    • Re:Downfall of muds.... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Drey ( 1420 )
      A) Home DSL connections work great if you go with an ISP that has no trouble with you running game servers (www.speakeasy.net).

      B) My Envy-based MUD has gotten tons of new players over the last 2 years, most of them from high schools. One person finds the game, others seem him or her and beginning playing. There's usually a 2 week "AOL Chat Room" period where you have to break them in a bit to get rid of the offensive names and the "lolz!1!!1!1" syndrome.

      C) No argument about the profiliferation of shitty M
    • I've had lots of good experiences with Forsakenlands: www.forsakenlands.org.
    • Actually I run a MUD, and still do. My player base is small, it is split about 50/50 between the 25-35 crowd and the under 20 crowd.

      tempestuous.net:2020 as a matter of fact.

  • Diminishing MUDs? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NiTr|c ( 130325 ) <hackop.inumbrate@net> on Monday May 26, 2003 @02:00PM (#6041111) Homepage
    I'm not sure if MUDs are actually diminishing all that much. If you look at sites like mudconnector [mudconnector.com] there are quite a few MUDs listed. The same goes with MPOGD [mpogd.com]. I, myself, am an active participant in a MUD that has been running over thirteen(13) years now. The player base has only increased, as has the complexity of the MUD itself. I know others that have followed somewhat of the same path as well. The only reason MUDs may be diminishing, is that the maintainers lose interest, or go on to do something else. However, it seems that if the MUD is programmed well, and has a strong playerbase, it isn't going anywhere. I know for a fact, that if the MUD I play opens donations, almost every player will donate at least $100 US Dollars without flinching.That clearly shows some dedication. (Note that one doesn't ever HAVE to donate money.)

    If anyone is curious, or wants to play, the MUD I'm on is Bat. www.bat.org/

    • Oooh, wow. Batmud has a new web site, and uses user accounts straight from the MUD itself. Very cool. This is how you're supposed to implement single logon =)

      And they haven't deleted my character either. Time to go rat-hunting...

      You miss Nasty rat.
      Nasty rat misses you.

      I've clearly been reading too much Slashdot if I find that amusing. Got to play BadMUD more often. =)

  • MUD's need to innovate (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bwt ( 68845 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @03:07PM (#6041423)
    There is absolutely no reason why MUDs can't keep going. It just seems like they have been out innovated lately by the commercial world.

    The simple truth is that open source MUDs need to start helping one another more and start pooling resources to come up with better 2D and/or 3D graphics. People understand that when you pay a monthly charge to a game like Everquest that you are going to get some really nice eye-candy. Still the lack of a monthly charge is a huge advantage towards free games. All MUDs have to do is offer decent 2D/3D graphics to go with the existing quality storylines. This can be done. Go look at a game called Wyvern to see an example (in 2D).

    The obvious thing to do is to develop a large base of graphics tiles and skins and that can be shared across different MUDs that use common APIs.

    • Re:MUD's need to innovate (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Drey ( 1420 )
      We don't want graphics. If we did, we're be working on some of the open-source MMORPG engines at SourceForge.

      Part of the point of a MUD is that it is in text. Yes, when MUDs first began that was about the only choice. Now it's part of the charm for those who still play. The graphics are limited by the video card of your mind and the people who build for the MUD, not by the hardware of your system.

      • Re:MUD's need to innovate (Score:3, Insightful)

        by bwt ( 68845 )
        We don't want graphics.

        If you exclude the majority of the game playing world, then don't complain when your player base slowly evaporates and nobody wants to subsidize your bandwidth needs. MUDs are dying because of the kind of attitude that doesn't listen to what people want.

        A better solution is to make a game in which graphics are optional. They don't have to be cutting edge graphics either. A simple 2D map with tiles for players, NPCs, and objects would bring a whole lot of people in.
        • The point that you're missing is MUDs are text-based. As soon as it's not text-based, it's no longer a MUD. While you might consider it "attitude", where would cars be if motorcycle users dictated the features cars needed to support? People who have to have a picture in front of them are not who we cater to. As soon as people stop reading in favor of movies and television only, I suppose MUDs will die out completely. As long as we have people who want to read and use their own imagination, we'll have player

  • People are Lazy (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Honestly, I don't see any way to "save" MUD's when they don't have a wide enough player base to support them.

    If we go off the base assumption that people are lazy, then the biggest problem with getting people to play MUD's instead of MMORPG's is that an MMORPG is more intuitive for new users, because of their graphical interface. If you're a younger player who just wants to jump into a game, are you going to learn a new style of language just to be able to move around, or are you going to go for the game

  • MU*s and MMO(RP)Gs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Khamura ( 664892 ) on Monday May 26, 2003 @03:52PM (#6041624)
    It's not really as bad as it might seem in the first moment when one learns that one's favourite MU* is going to shut down. There are bazillions of them out there, and though I'll grant that most aren't that great (most seem to be ego-trips of their respective creators), there is still a great deal of stuff happenin' out there in the MU* world.

    The "threat problem" that MMOGs pose to the MU* community is not so bad once you realize the limits of the graphical medium: you are, in all instances I have so far tested, limited in the choice of avatars to what the design team made available to you. Also, the expression of emotions and even just facial expression themselves are limited to a couple of macros, which are the same for all people playing the game.

    All these leave the bitter taste of limitations that I don't want or need on my tongue. Though "MUD" is still associated with the hack'n'slash variety -- and no mistake, a lot of them are --, there are as many out there, especially when you get into the MUSH, MUSE, and MUCK codebases, where roleplay is stressed, not "rollplay".

    While the fact that these games are text-only can be seen as a disadvantage, it's to be kept in mind that so are books -- and no one has yet proclaimed the absolute end of the written word as a medium of its own. For people with a leaning towards these things, text can be an expressive medium that can rival any other -- and more than that, because of its very nature, it leaves the entire world open to your interaction and modification, without the need for a feature-laden editor or other modding tool.

    It begins with the fact that your characters are at your proverbial fingertip: from their background stories to their appearance, their mannerisms and speech patterns, it's entirely up to you and your imagination. The only limits you operate under are the limits set by the MU* canon -- but even those are open to change for those who have the creative energy to put into the history, physiology, philosophy, and whatever else there is to know about any given city, nation, world or race in the game you frequent.

    There are enough people who love these games, and enough to keep themalive. These people frequent The MUD Connector [mudconnect.com] or Top MUD Sites [topmudsites.com], which serve as a place from which to plunge into the MU* of your choice.

    Granted, it takes a while to find a place that suits your taste, your imagination or style; but the rewards can be well worth it.

    I myself (not being above a shameless plug besides the two resource sites given above) am a player and staffer on the games found at JoinTheSaga.com [jointhesaga.com], which include OtherSpace, an originally themed SciFi MUSH that's been going since 1998, Reach of the Empire, a Star Wars-themed game where Luke and Leia have died way before the start of the original trilogy (and where the prequels are disregarded), and Chiaroscuro, a newly opened work-in-progress centered around an original Fantasy theme. The former two are completely free to play (though donations are welcome, and merchandise is available), while the latter follows a monthly pay-to-play approach like most MMOGs do, but with a guaranteed close connection to the staff -- and also offers the option to play a lowly peasant for free (only the higher social classes require you to pay to be set up).

    The games run 24/7 on reliable servers, and staff is available for your questions if you drop by as a guest and want to have a look around.

    As a final note: the entrance bar for these games tends to be high (you have to submit a biography and skill list of your character for approval, which you can all set up in-game), and the expectation is that In-Character Actions have In-Character Consequences. This is to keep grievers, "theme idiots", and similar people from ruining the fun of our other players. Elitist? Yes, but for a good cause.

    ~Khamura
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • It's no game running a MUD, it is a way of living. I was hooked first as a player on a specific LPMUD called Genesis and spent like 32 days(!) on-line time the first year. I wasn't in it for the points but for the role playing and distraction of RL which I needed at the time (just prior to the divorse) Anyway, after a while I was picked up as a developer and stopped playing the MUD. I got responsible for developing an area of about 50 "rooms", a small village with hobbits, quests and stuff to poke around fo

    • the tools used for developing the MUD is hard to maintain for legacy reasons... Maintaining 20-30.000 rooms by writing code for each of it, no matter the object oriented paradigm used, is simply too time consuming

      You might note that you describe only the experience of an LPMUD, and potentially a limited subset of LPMUDs. Although in LP all rooms, objects, and mobs are objects in their own right, potentially with unique code that needs to mesh with the underlying, shifting lib, many MUD codebases have

    • Only 32 days? lemme look up Coren's bio on Nightmare... Biography for High mortal Human Coren the Restorer of Hope [Larstown Militia] Level: 49 Age: 46 years You are neutral. You were born on the 3rd day of Ketralki, year 24. You married Fiona the th of Kantki 55 in Nepuraz. You have 192 days and 29 minutes of online time. You began your adventures on the 3rd day of Ketralki, year 42. Your native town is Larstown, and you are Bokan in faith.
  • Generally, as head-wiz for a muck, and major staffer and player on a few others, MU* in general are alive and well, but are making a slow decline.

    One day, there'll be MMORPG's that will facilitate enough creativity to allow for truly interesting character interaction.

    Ultimately at present, what we're seeing is a great deal of people finally moving on, and going on with their lives. Player-bases get older, and your primary source of players (students and 20-somethings) grow up and move on to dealing with t
  • MUDS used to attract techies but not casual users, I think, because they were 'difficult' to use. Well, okay, 'difficult' meant 'point telnet to a specific site _and_ port' and 'use a console'. Not big barriers for slashdotters, but kinda big for, say, my mom.

    Companies like Skotos (skotos.net [skotos.net]) and... hmm... okay, maybe just them, do web-based MUDs. They (plug plug) bought a friend of mine's larp (the Galactic Emperor is Dead) as a recurring/resettable one, and they do some long-term open ones.

    The downs
  • ... they just fail to respawn.

  • Running a MUD is not particularly rewarding (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Illusion ( 1309 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @04:47AM (#6045834) Homepage
    To have it feel anything other than stale, at least a few people have to be regularly adding to the world and the code, fixing bugs, policing the players, helping newbies, etc.

    Unless you are running a pay mud, you get nothing for it. Not even appreciation most of the time, as the players have no sense of how much effort it takes to run a mud well. Most of their interactions with you are to bitch about fellow players or even minor changes to the game that they feel are not in their favor.

    While you might get away with running a small MUD on your home cable or DSL, you basically can't use it for anything else without offering massive lag to everyone playing. So unless you happen to own an ISP, the chances are that you'll end up paying at least $50-200/month to have it hosted somewhere. Which isn't a big deal when its all you do in your spare time, but after you get a life and don't have the time to put into it, that could start looking like an unnecessary expenditure.

    But then the vast majority of the people running them opened a cookie-cutter MUD by grabbing an existing codebase and world and adding some patches and a few hundred rooms to the world. When they get bored and fold, they won't be missed; they had nothing unique to offer anyway.

    To top it off, MUDs have lost their "cool" factor. For someone used to first person shooters and MMORPGs, an online text adventure looks more than a little dated at first glance. So you end up with a mixed player base of people who have been playing longer than Quake has existed, and those who are too young or too cheap to afford an MMORPG. Not exactly a booming populace.

    Not that I'm jaded or anything. (I've been running Ishar [ishar.com] for 9 years and actually do still enjoy the small amount of time I put into it.)

  • I have run a mud for about 9 years. In that time I have seen many other muds begin and end. Lots of these muds have very innovative code in them. I think it is sad to lose everything that these muds have worked on. Does anyone know of a repository for "unwanted" or "unused" muds? (If none exsists, maybe a smart slashdotter could start one :) ) I know personally that when my mud closes, I want to post the code for anyone that wants it.
    • How much space would the files for each archived mud require? I run a small web hosting company, I would consider donating space if someone is actually interested in creating a mud code archive.
      • Well, it obviously depends on the number of areas, players, and the codebase. But on my particular mud this all compresses to about a 20MB file once you have removed all of the binary files. This is a ROM based mud, so a fairly common derivative.

        Kyndig.com may be a good option for this, but the different MU* admins would need to 'donate' their code to any project like this.

        I just know from experience, that when a piece of code or an area from a MU* that you like is lost, you spend tons of time wishing
    • www.kyndig.com has lots of mud codebases and snippets for download. They might accept an entire "unwanted" MUD.

  • It's a good thing (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Skalizar ( 676291 )
    I can't comment on the relative number of total MUDs out there, as I have never kept track. I can say that as a former player and now Implementor of a long lived MUD, that the number of players that we attract hasn't changed much over the years. For the last couple of years we have had fewer *characters* online than in the past, but we switched to a non-multiplaying policy and the number of actual players online has remained fairly constant over the years. It has its cycles, some we understand, others we

  • Dying? (Score:1)

    by Drey ( 1420 )
    I question the premise, actually. www.mudconnector.com has 1,927 MUDs listed. Nearly daily in the MUD Promotions forum someone announces they're beginning a new MUD. Certain types of MUDs do seem to be in decline but as a whole we're still thriving and we're getting a lot of new player interested in the highschool grades.

  • I have been MUDding since '94 and have mainly played and immed on DIKU-based MUDs. I started out on Sojourn way back then. I was fully hooked on Sojourn, and accumulated nearly massive amounts of playing time, and the game eventually helped lead to the demise of my college career. I followed Sojourn through it's split into Toril and Duris, following the Toril path due to my disdain for true pkill MUDs. When Toril shut down due to imm issues and conflicts with a few players and all sorts of other things,

  • ...about MUDs.

    First off, the basic premise of this post is wrong. MUDs were always a niche type of thing. There were a few 10 years ago when the Internet was small. There are a lot now that the Internet is big. It's hard to say which has grown faster.

    Of course, there are many more long-running MUDs today than there were 10 years ago. When a favorite goes dark, it doesn't mean they are fading away (although it may SEEM like it at the time). When Cats closed, it didn't mean Broadway theater was dead.

    Mor

  • The reason _THIS_ MUD shutdown (Score:4, Informative)

    by hexile ( 589538 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @06:33PM (#6052179) Homepage

    Being one of the four people who founded Exile, I can tell you exactly why it shutdown.

    The first and foremost reason is drive. Exile was founded by four people, all of whom loved MUDs. We all mudded for years, and then decided to create our own. Eight long years later, three of the four happily moved on to other pursuits leaving only myself.

    I was happy to apply my broken knowledge of C and Perl to building the MUD (I'm a sysadmin by trade, if that gives you any clue as to my programming skill, or lack thereof). But then we lost our "free" hosting. Now I'm presented with a hard choice -- dish out money that I don't have for NEW hosting, and continue on, or quietly let the MUD pass and direct my players to other promising MUDs.

    To be honest, if I had the spare cash at the moment to pay for hosting, I don't think I would. Running a MUD isn't easy. There's all the hassles for any medium sized coding project, but there's also creative worries, and game-play worries, and the worst of all PLAYER WORRIES.

    All the issues above pale in comparison to having to deal with a player-base. To be blunt, players are a complete pain in the ass. They're always wanting more, and always unhappy with the current state of things, and very vocal about it. I can understand those types. But then there are the cheaters, and the misanthropes... Believe me when I tell you, even though I'm sad to see my MUD go, there are a million things I'll never miss. Maybe I'll even stop turning gray... maybe.

    By the way, if any of my non-pain-in-the-ass players are reading this, THANKS for a FUN time, and a ton of great memories. I'll miss you people!

    -- Hextall, founder of Exile from 6/1/1996 to 6/1/2003

    • I have had the pleasure of working with Hextall and the other founders of Exile for many years now. I know very well how deep of an emotional attachment one can develop to a MUD, and it is not an easy decision to close Exile after all these years.

      I would like to thank everyone who has visited us and enjoyed the environment Exile provided. It has been a very satisfying run, and I'm proud to have been a part of a little niche in the Internet universe that was truly unique and our own. Moreover I'd like to
  • I used to play some MUD's online, but i got bored with all of them after 2-3 weeks of playing. Only bash-for-the-exp games i have ever liked is Nethack and Adom.

    Except for our very own MUD, it was run from my computer on school network. There rule of the game was: Do not kill the MUD. =)

    Every single player had ability to do anything in the MUD, that means everyone could code whatever they wanted. It was really hilarious. People greated short text-adventure houses for others to play. We had Chess etc. in i
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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