#multi user dungeons

[tachyonblu]

Champions of Elanthia: Survey Deadline Reminder

Just a quick reminder for Champions of Elanthia backers:

🛡️ Most of your surveys are in (thank you so much!) but we’re still waiting on 7 of you.

🗓️ The deadline is Tuesday, June 24th—check your Kickstarter messages to make sure your rewards can be delivered!

You’re all amazing. 💫

[paulgadzikowski]

Usenet? MUDs and MOOs?

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

The other night I dreamed that I was in an RP on a MUD, doing vaguely D&D things (depicted in the dream as live action with fantasy characters going around this forested modern neighborhood), but then there were these monsters attacking, and we fought them using attack-commands in the game. The other players got annoyed that in the "real world", dreaming-me was driving somewhere, and so I wasn't instantly making my own character attack the monsters when it was my turn.

[technitaur]

A Story of Entirely Preventable Data Loss

There's this MUD that I got into a couple years ago. I'm not going to give the real name of the place - at least, not yet. Not while I'm still upset. I had a lot of respect for the owner of the game and I don't yet know if I want to openly call them out anywhere, but damn it, this could have easily been prevented.

For now, let's call this MUD 'Fantasy Land', or FL for short.

In the greater ecosystem of MUDs, I would call FL an immaculate work of code. The owner wrote it from scratch, by themselves. This is a hell of an accomplishment. The vast majority of MUD owners just work off of a pre-existing codebase, but this owner has been working on their own custom codebase as a labor of love for at least a decade.

The mechanics and systems are amazing. While there have been some pretty major bugs over the years, the owner usually gets them sorted out pretty quickly, and once they're sorted, everything fits together like beautiful puzzle pieces. The owner is extremely good at programming, and at game design in general.

So I want to know why... oh why... they couldn't be bothered to take half an hour to write a script to automate some offsite backups.

Recently, the server hard drive failed. The server provider doesn't maintain off-site backups.

And for reasons unknown, neither does the owner.

And just like that, 4+ years of player progression was gone. Forever.

It's a MUD. A text-based game. Unless the data is being stored in some ungodly bloated manner for some strange reason, there's not going to be a whole hell of a lot of data to back up. Even if FL is exceptionally large for a MUD, cloud space shouldn't be the issue here.

But no. The owner apparently couldn't even spare a portion of a Google Drive. And now every player has to start from scratch in a completely new world.

The community came together to build a whole shopping center at one point. It was a collective investment of hundreds of thousands of gold and materials. If I recall correctly, there were AT LEAST 500 shops in that place, and there might have been as many as 2500, but I don't remember what size the zone was. And of course, it's not like I can go check now.

It was an effort to make it so that people would always have a place to go to buy raw materials, farming supplies, skill books, etc. and it's all gone.

Player characters who have hundreds, in some case thousands of hours of grinding their skills and rolling the perfect gear - all gone.

Here's the worst part: The owner doesn't even appear to care. At all.

When they got the news that the drive was not recoverable, their reaction was to put a laughing emoji and say that this server provider was probably getting fired.

The owner never even gave the slightest apology. In fact, they were happy about the data loss, saying that they'd been thinking about doing regular resets, and that this is a 'good excuse to start doing it.'

As the game has been in active development for a while, there has always been an expectation of some occasional data loss. And there have been incidents of data loss in the past. Usually it amounted to anywhere from a day to a couple weeks worth of lost progress.

Each time that I can remember, the owner tried to compensate for the loss as much as was reasonable. This indicated to me that there were no plans to do any kind of complete player wipe. At one point, the owner stated that they didn't even plan to wipe the test server.

So there was no precedent for a complete wipe like this at all. We were not told to expect a reset anytime soon, and as far as I can tell, there was never any public talk about these notions of periodic resets.

In fact, the owner has often gone out of their way to make sure we lost as little as possible even in major updates where huge rebalances were applied.

Why go to those lengths while not even taking offsite backups? For 4+ YEARS?

And this time, we're not getting any compensation. Everybody is starting at level 1 again and that's it. Tough luck, I guess.

If I ran a MUD and I completely lost 4+ years worth of player and world data, my friends and family would need to be legitimately concerned that I might harm myself. I would be beside myself with grief and shame over the loss of so much of my players' time. And such an incredibly preventable loss.

I'm not saying that I want the owner to be completely emotionally destroyed, but even the slightest indication of remorse would have been nice. Instead, we got a laughing emoji and a 'welp, it was something I was thinking about doing anyway.'

This tells me that the owner doesn't give a damn about the time that the players have spent on their game. From this point forward, at least people will be aware that there can (and probably will) be complete wipes in the future. But the players who have played and tested and provided feedback and publicly sung the praises of this game so far?

Well, I guess that doesn't mean anything.

I appear to be in the minority with my negative opinion, as it seems most of the other players are strangely okay with suddenly losing all their progress and having it be treated as a little whoopsie-daisy. It's toxic positivity at its finest.

Yes, at the end of the day, it's just a game, and a completely free one at that. But any kind of server owner who respects their users should be making a bare minimum effort to ensure that important user data is preserved, and this owner didn't.

This is the most catastrophic loss I've ever seen in 27 years of MUDding, and it could have been entirely prevented with an hour or two of scripting and testing and a free-tier cloud storage account.

Great codebase. Atrocious management. I'm going to miss the mechanics, but I'm not going to go back to a game where I know the owner would cheerfully watch their players lose several thousands of man-hours of grinding and building again.

[balketh]

Pining For The Chjosts

It has been 44 days since Cohost closed, and the world is still worse for it.

I still think about it. I still think about chosting. I still think about the networks that formed and were forming there, and how those tethers, effectively, were severed.

I still think about how Discords aren't it. About how Reddit-likes aren't it. Forums weren't it. How it has changed over the years, as innovations continue in digital social circles. How Cohost wasn't perfect, but it was great.

Many folks tried their best to band together after the closure announcement, and small communities emerged from the fallout, but there's a reason that all the Cohost Leaver Discords got filled up, and then, for me, completely muted: Discord sucks. Chat rooms suck, once you get past a certain age - they're just too fast; channels are too big/prominent to be single threads of discussion, the threads feature sucks visibility-wise, and all the other forum-like features require allowing Discord even further privacy invasion.

And, IMO, forums are not the savior many folks think they are. They died out for reasons too. They also suck, in similar ways to Discord. People think forums would be great because 'you can read them when you want', and 'it slows things down' and 'they'll always be there unlike Discord'. But only the middle one is true: forums are just Discord servers in slow motion.

Whole subforums become too fast in posting, topics/threads get muted/ignored, and each individual topic is still singular in its focus, moreso than Discord due to the sometimes-days-long post-and-response cycle, just spread out in more layers of obtuse forum pages. Subforums are spun off, cliques form, social hierarchies come, fallout happens, rinse and repeat.

They were good! Don't get me wrong. They were good. It was great to be able to find and read threads, convos, from years ago, easily accessible with no fucking app in your way. But that element eventually split off to become the Diggs and Reddits and Slashdots of the world.

What remained is the desire for the social circle. And forums are just another small social circle, even if they have several hundred active users and a couple thousand lurkers. They were good, but they died out because we realised they weren't it.

And, trust me, they still get deleted. The drives they're stored on still die, and in a much less reliable timeframe than you'd hope for. Forums only persevere on the backs of peoples' effort and care, and that wanes with time, or drama. Plothook, an incredibly old RP forum with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of posts, games that had been running for 5-20 years, some peoples' whole creative lives, suddenly vanished, along with all its data, around July 2015. An entire, massive, old community, just... Vanished. Severed.

Even back then, in the height of 'things on the internet are forever!', things never were. Forums aren't any more the solution to community than Discord servers are. They're just an attempt at a structure to make it work, and so far, our attempts as a collective internet have been found wanting.

Cohost was better. It wasn't perfect. It wasn't a forum. It certainly sucked ass in discoverability. But it was better. Even after its first unexpected boom, when the quality of a social media platform usually begins a hard dive, Cohost stayed... Good. It was all the elements I wanted out of Social Media save for the forum-roleplay/games content (but, frankly, that's better served by the semi-automation and chat-like format of MUXs than forums.)

There was a feed, it was filled with tags you liked and people you followed. You could search for tags, but not post contents. (Because of that second part, there were discoverability issues from day 1.) (Someone made a global feed tag as a joke, and many despised it, including the staff, but I'll die on the hill that we wanted it and we made it real and not a joke, and it drove most of the discoverability on the site, which made it work for many people. You cannot convince me it wasn't worth its troubles - troubles that would still exist entirely unhindered without it.)

You could post, reblog, comment, and like. Likes were private. No numbers except total number of unread notifications. There was some really brain-warping logic around reblogging and how it affected tags/etc - I didn't understand the implementation, but it seemed to work reasonably well. Less issues than Tumblr. There were asks. There was an artist's alley for artist-paid self-made adverts. There were CSS Crimes (taking advantage of the shockingly lenient CSS allowances Cohost had to create the most incredible post customization, interactivity, and meme content I have seen online in a social media community at large, to date, bar none). It put even animated forum signatures to absolute shame.

It wasn't perfect.

But damn if it wasn't great.

... Now I'm thinking about MUX again. Fuck.

If you read this far, consider sending big ol' titties. Always brightens the day. They don't have to be yours.

[abocode]

social media is a MUD with no plot

[diabolocracy]

Might I interest the roleplay enthusiasts among you in some MUDs?

Achaea is my usual go-to because I'm most familiar with it. While once upon a time it was very P2W, they've since enacted a Renown system - you can earn up to 2000 renown a day through quests, which equals to around 20 credits per day unless you want to save up for something else. The big problem is... Finding quests once you're out of the newbie areas. I'd suggest farming Renown while you can do so easily until you've got what you want in terms of artefacts, licenses, and lessons. It's against game policy to share quest information (for whatever asinine reason) and third-party sites that have quest information are woefully outdated and mention cities that no longer exist. Rest in piss, Shallam.

If you're more of a furry, there's Lusternia. I only played this one briefly so I don't know much about it.

There's also Starmourn (by the same people) and Imperian (also by the same people). Starmourn is sci-fi but has kind of been abandoned by the former dev team; I have no idea about Imperian.

Also I forgot to mention Aetolia--the edgy vampire vs. werewolf cousin to Achaea. I have no idea about this one either. When I poked my head in a couple years ago there were barely any players. (Hence why I'm trying to get people to check these out they're so empty.)

Aside from IRE, I've recently checked out Silent Heaven. It's purports to be a horror MUD. The tutorial intro is straight forward and quick unless you stop to read every little thing (though the website itself also has the help files linked so you can easily do that beforehand). It's extremely LGBT+ friendly and you can set your pronouns as well as your consent to most things in-game. I'd advise you to set your consent within the tutorial part because everything is automatically marked No. I dunno much about this one. It made me make up a backstory featuring my character's deepest darkest secret. You're encouraged to be a bad person--in fact, you have to be, otherwise why would you be in Silent Heaven? (It's like Silent Hill if that weren't obvious enough.) While your character cannot normally die, they will eventually, iirc after obtaining ~400 experience there will be some kind of an event? - so don't get too attached.

[deadc0py]

I love video games

[tachyonblu]

I'm excited to announce that the Kickstarter campaign for Champions of Elanthia is now live! This book explores the world of multi-user dungeons through the eyes of a dozen DragonRealms and GemStone IV players. Please consider backing today! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tachyonblue/champions-of-elanthia

[mars-of-all-trades]

Art of Jody Marshir. My Star Wars OC that I had RP'd as for..9 months.

She was..game mechanically useless but she made a difference in a big way, by being present. :p She ran a couple of caff shops, married the Grand Admiral, jailed, bailed out, married again..I don't regret a single moment. (nod) (nod)

I had a lot of fun with her and happy with the connections and friends I made along the way.

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

The other night I dreamed that I was roleplaying on a MUD or something. Now, in the waking world, in a MUD, every "room" (that is, a discrete location in the game's world) needs to be an actual object in a database; you can do some minor shenanigans, but they won't be "in different places", they're still functionally one location for all practical purposes. However, in the dream, I discovered an area where you could, like, enter a sort of procedural gardnen where each room corresponded to an "RGB color", meaning there were 16777216 rooms. In one room, two people were RPing Tenshi Hinanawi and Shion Yorigami as girlfriends; one of them may have been a former friend I had a falling out with years ago.

I may have briefly woken up and then fallen asleep again, but as I was waking up completely the second time, my brain produced the statement, "The word 'virus'" (referring to the biological kind) "has exactly two syllables; however, using our new antivirus software, we can fix that!" What does that mean. My subconscious will clearly not be taking any questions at this time.

[glavilio]

*in the 2020s* he would do numbers on twitter *in the 2010s* he would get shares on his blog *in the 1990s* he would be a wiz on the multi-user dungeon *in the 1950s* he would get ratings on the television *in the 1930s* he would command the masses on the radio *in the 1880s* he would do dots and dashes on the telegram *in the 1790s* he would do arm signals on the semaphore *in the 1600s* his prints would be distributed widely *in the 1400s* he would sound the trumpet in battle *in the 700s* his words would be passed down by oral tradition *in the 300s* he would do smoke signals in the sky *in the neolithic* his artifacts would enter the archeological record *in the pliocene* his bones would be preserved in the sediment *in the mezozoic* he would do permineralization in mineral rich groundwater *in the paleoarchean* he would facilitate recombination of his genome *in the hadean* his molecules would self replicate in the early ocean *in the matter dominated era* his stellar nursery would collapse into a star and an orbiting cloud of dust *in the cosmological dark ages* quantum fluctuations in his density would form the first cosmological structures *10^-32 seconds after the big bang* his elementary particles would dominate in baryogenesis *in the plank epoch* he would do cosmic inflation in the energy dense early universe *10^-43 seconds after the big bang* he would be

[orteil42]

back in the days of Multi-User Dungeons if you reached max level you were granted the role of Wizard, which basically gave you full admin and game dev privileges. we were trusting like that

[techturd]

It might surprise you to know I spent several years of my life playing this text-based online game!

USA 1997

[vintagerpg]

This week I’ve got posts on something I don’t really know a ton about, but I have always been incredibly curious about: play by mail games.

I’ve never played. They strike me an improbable relic of a bygone age — I can’t imagine ever having the patience to wait for turns delivered by a mailman. And yet, it seems so cool. PBM predates RPGs, of course — chess and go and Diplomacy and many strategy games were PBM. Flying Buffalo, which would later publish the Tunnels & Trolls RPG, basically created the pro PBM industry when Rick Loomis published Nuclear Destruction in 1970. As it happens, Heroic Fantasy here (1982 originally, this edition 1990, Chris Carlson on the cover with an excellent painting that reminds me of Down in the Dungeon) and most of my other PBMs were published by Loomis.

As I understand it, a game like this would typically have four phases. You get the results of the previous turn. Then you consult with other players you are in contact with, a kind of diplomacy session. Then you fill out a turn sheet with your orders and send it in to the company, along with the turn processing fee. Finally, the company reconciles all the actions and the cycle repeats.

Processing was, originally, done by people. By 1990, Heroic Fantasy here was being processed by computer — the orders resemble commands for Zork or similar text adventures — in two week increments. I honestly can’t help parsing this experience as a kind of analog multi-user dungeon (MUD) of the sort that would soon emerge on message boards of the fledgling internet.

So, tell me, did you PBM? I want to hear some crazy ass stories, folks!

[ranchstoryblog]

February Community Poll: Headcanons of the World Wide Web

The year is 1999, and a sleepy little farming village just got their first (and so far, only canonical) computer with internet access set up at their local library.

So, in all of the fandom's infinite wisdom, I ask you: