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PC Games (Games) Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

Achaea Switches To Anarchaea After HD Crash 47

Posted by simoniker from the looting-panic-death dept.
Daki writes "Achaea, the flagship text-based MUD of Iron Realms Entertainment, suffered 'a massive hardware failure', and all of the current player and world data was damaged early last Friday morning PST. After sending the damaged harddrive to a data recovery firm in Toronto, it seems as if the world of Achaea will once again be up and running by Tuesday morning at the earliest. In the interim, they decided to roll back to a week-old copy, but the info gained on this backup version will be wiped when the recovered data is loaded. This has caused the birth of a world dubbed 'Anarchaea', where rules have no meaning, the gods fry the players at request, and players are killed by homicidal butterflies and socks. During Anarchaea, the text-based MUD even reclaimed the number one spot on Top Muds, which is quite a feat."
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Achaea Switches To Anarchaea After HD Crash More

Achaea Switches To Anarchaea After HD Crash

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  • Lets try this again (Score:5, Interesting)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @12:30AM (#8506574) Homepage
    Thanks to slashdot, they're about to suffer another massive hardware failure.

    But, seriously... Until I saw this article, I had honestly thought the MUD scene was dead.

    Never really ever did get into muds. Maybe once their HD is back up, I'll create a character... (who in their right mind doesn't use RAID?)

    • Re:Lets try this again (Score:5, Informative)

      by E_elven ( 600520 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @12:57AM (#8506784) Journal
      www.mudconnector.com

      There's a lot more out there than Achaea. Use the search feature.

    • Re:Lets try this again (Score:5, Interesting)

      by b0r0din ( 304712 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @01:26AM (#8506964)
      There's no pretty much. The MUD scene is dead.

      I used to play MUDs a lot. And by a lot I mean the fail out of college type. But this doesn't really seem like news to me. Sure, it's nerdy. But this sort of thing happens to MUDs all the time, and there are about 1000 of them, and aside from its mild popularity, it's about a maintenance window. Equipment failures, bad HDD, etc, that's not news. IMPs going and making a crazy server for a week, that's not news either. I remember when we were switching over to new code on a game I used to play, he made a non-PK mud PK, and gave people all kinds of weapons and NPCs were switched into and killing people. That was a lot of fun. But I wouldn't announce it as news. So I guess for about 10 people who care, you just made their day :)

      But just for the record, who here still actively plays? And who doesn't? Who did?

      • Re:Lets try this again (Score:1, Flamebait)

        by Synic ( 14430 )
        Anyone who used to play MUDs either got bored, grew older and out out them, lost the time to jobs and other obligations, or moved on to graphical games like 3D MMORPGs. The only people who still play are usually just bored people making their own MUDs still, and the friends they pester into playtesting them.

        Back in the day I used to play on Sojourn (a decent Forgotten Realms world MUD), and also tried to play on a Werewolf MUSH with very little success.
        • How is this flamebait? I didn't say anything to goad people into flaming me... I'm just stating my opinion combined with my experience of what people are up to of the friends I knew who used to play MUDs.

    • Re:Lets try this again (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The text MUD (Everquest is a graphical MUD) scene is actually more alive than it ever has been and there's a LOT more innovation in design going on in it than in the graphical MUD market. Now, it's nowhere near the size of the graphical MUD market, and the fact that the graphical products get all the attention these days is why it may seem to you like it's died off. It's also misleading to say there are 1000 text muds. Yes, technically there are, but is it worth counting those that are downloaded and run mo

      • Re:Lets try this again (Score:3, Interesting)

        by 0x0d0a ( 568518 )
        Okay, clearly you're running a commercial venture, and there are clearly players that like your style. I'm not trying to bash your approach.

        However, I kind of liked having five to maybe twenty players active at any given time on MUDs I've played. It meant that you could know just about everyone that played.

        That being said, I'm sure there's something to be said for having a virtual city...

  • Hilarious (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nutcase ( 86887 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @12:32AM (#8506603) Homepage Journal
    This is the funniest thing I have read all day. The mental image is classic. That said, thats the only place you get an image, as it's text based... so I would probably just be confused. (Uh Oh.. geek street cred dropping rapidly...)

    I would've tried it, but they closed to new accounts until the hdd is restored.

    That said, the most interesting thing is that the MUD is commercial. Which I would presume means that all those requests for death by god are being paid for. The game sells currency which players use in game for things.

    Even if Anarchaea is free, Achaea is not... which means they just got some really great free advertising. If I was them I would have a yearly "hdd crashed" special event.

  • Backup (Score:5, Funny)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @12:55AM (#8506768) Journal
    I remember one time, someone had a their home directory as /home and I did a normal deluser. Boy I'm glad I back my servers.

    Only happens once, and you backup the rest of your life.
    • You can be sure after this, they will be backing up more than once a week. This really reminds me of what happened to the MMORPG Shadowbane. "..teleporting people all over the world, teleporting hostile guards into the safe-holds, bringing in hordes of special event monsters, and teleporting everyone to a city at the bottom of the sea." Hilarious! This is just the game I want to play, too bad it Hell will only last one week.

  • Sigh (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @01:32AM (#8507005)
    I'm the CEO if Iron Realms, which owns and operates Achaea and a couple other text muds. First, I realize this is a low-value news article to most of you, but we didn't submit it (one of our players did). Second, I am fairly embarassed about this whole thing. The backup problems were a result of a minor but very crucial screwup on our ISP's fault that left us without backups since February 12th.

    Anyway, believe me when I say this is hardly the kind of publicity we need or want. (We've only got about 5000 users but that's plenty when you're a text mud.)

    --matt
    • Hardly any excuse for you NOT to use RAID. Rely on your ISP to backup -- what about updates for that day between the backup and failure time? Sorry to bitch, but you really *should* be embarassed :>
      • And I'm sure their ISP will have problem doubling disk usage at least just for raid 0, (let alone 0+1) at no extra charge.... They're taking the time and money to get the data recovered from a firm. Anyway, it's the Service Provider's job to provide said service and was understandably relied upon to keep up with backups. Unfortunately, there was mistake and they're making up for it.

        Anyway, I commend you Sir, your pompousness eclipses your finite wisdom.
        • And I'm sure their ISP will have problem doubling disk usage at least just for raid 0, (let alone 0+1) at no extra charge..

          RAID 0 is a pointless level of just concatenating two disks together. You want RAID 1 mirroring at least. Very simple and very cheap to do.

          • Woops you're right... can I use the late night of drinking and pot smoking as an excuse? I meant 1. I think striping alone is crazy, unless maybe it's a swap file of some kind.
    • On the contrary, shit like this can happen to anyone and, though one should never, ever trust a harddrive for any reason, any publicity is good publicity. I've never heard of this game before and I might now check it out. I've never really gotten into MUDs, but perhaps now's the time!
      • Makes me think of a quote which goes something like, "The sum of human knowledge is stored on mechanical devices sold with one year limited warranties."
    • Hey these things happen. I know you are probably kicking yourself for not covering all the eventualities, but you made the best of a bad situation in an imagitive manner. You quite literally were handed a bucket of lemons and decided to make lemonaid. Way to go. Not many people would have the class or the ability to handle a disaster in this manner. I for one salute you for a job well done.

  • Updates to my Post (Score:5, Interesting)

    by daki ( 731824 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @01:42AM (#8507073) Homepage Journal
    Please forgive me Matt, I didn't mean to reflect poorly on the Company, but in the two years I have been a customer of Iron Realms, I have never once been disapointed. When the character creation is back up, I urge you all to give it a try, as it is by far the best MUD out there.

    • Re:Updates to my Post (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Hey, it's ok. I know you did it with the best of intentions. It IS our fault that we weren't using a RAID array and that we trusted our ISP to handle the backups for us and while we wouldn't shy away from admitting that I would just rather not have broadcast it to the wider world. ;)

      Seriously though, don't worry about it.

      --matt
      • Y'know, this is just a personal view here-- I haven't played a MUD in at least a year-- but the stance you guys are taking (ie turning a bad situation into something entertaining and attractive) is one I'd dearly love to see in more companies. I'd love for, say, Square-Enix to give players gil in their other games when the main FFXI server goes down for maintenance. But you guys did something really unique and interesting with what would otherwise be a major disaster. Good job.

  • Sounds like... (Score:4, Funny)

    by dynoman7 ( 188589 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @01:50AM (#8507115) Homepage
    where rules have no meaning, the gods fry the players at request, and players are killed by homicidal butterflies and socks ...my kind of game! Where do I sign up?!?!

  • but...what's a MUD? Multi User Dimension, ya ya whatever, but what exactly is it? Some kind of text-based MMORPG?

  • screens? (Score:3, Funny)

    by paradesign ( 561561 ) on Tuesday March 09, 2004 @04:44AM (#8507889) Homepage
    Anyone document this with some wicked screenshots?
  • Interestingly enough, I played another mud reguraly and at a certain point there was a move with ISP's, which took a while. In the mean time an old backup was set back, with no playerfiles. It was quite popular, cause there were no rules either, it was a killing spree so to say.

    To my understanding this happened before on that mud when there was a big version change.

    Anyway, it makes one wonder what it is that makes this so interesting to players. Perhaps the view that it will only be temporary and theref
    • I think it turns it back into a game for a lot of people. After a while a lot of the power players don't take any more risks because their character might be killed. If you know that in X days everythings going to be purged anyway you go back to taking risks with your character and actually having fun rather than repeating the same tried-and-true killing loop to maximize your experience rate.

  • Apocalyptic visions? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by thesp ( 307649 )
    This seems interesting from a psychological viewpoint. The players have effective foreknowledge of the end of their world, with the knowledge that all actions undertaken in the short while left will, ultimately, have no consequence. Result - disruption of enforced and evolved social fabric.

    I wonder if this has anything to say about how society would react if we knew that we would all die in a week; or if we knew the time was about to be rolled back by a week, and would have 'never happened'.

    The true judge
    • Interesting, I have observed some of these same tendancies in people. I thnk it is more about the escape from normalicy when there is a lack of control. When we have strange things going on, there are others who join in just because it is different. Its a mini vacation in a way, i doubt if the deadline was longer than a week, that they would continue to act in the same manner. I've only tested it for a few hours though.

      I am a "god" on another mud shameless Barren Realms plug [barrenrealmsmud.com] and while reading this, it s
  • The only reason they were in the lead was because of the big news about the crash...Aardwolf which isn't run by or paid for by a company has been #1 on the list for as the couple of months I've played it. I just think it's funny that a company run MUD would not be running a raid for the player files or atleast better than a weekly backup system.
  • I don't know about you guys, but I for one can barely contain my excitement about this bit of news :-p. The MUD I've played on off and on for the past six years (http://mud.arctic.org/) has something called a "Chaos Day" every few months. Basically, it's 24 hours of noholds bars, super characters going out and having fun. Immortals will take control of dragons and fly them in to town to have a little feast. Lord Soth (Dragonlance themed MUD) will saunter in to Palanthas to spread his special brand of lo

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