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The MUD Connector

mudconnect.com

40 pointsmindcrime29 comments

Oh man. A couple of times each year, I think about starting up a mud again. Back in the Day, I ran a Wheel of Time MUD called the Weave, and sometimes I think about porting it to Java or something. My C code base has some creative memory leaks in it, but running a MUD taught me a lot about coding and development and even some interpersonal stuff. (and almost kicked out of school...) I'm not sure what the equivalent entry point into networking/games/writing would be today. Engines like Unity certainly take a lot of the work out of it, but when you downloaded ROM or DikuMUD, you got a full game that you could just tweak as needed to learn things.

I used to play WoTmud, which is still going but at like 5% of the old userbase.

Were you aware of that one at the time?

Probably :) I played on quite a few muds back then. Lost Realms and Moment in Tyme were the biggest and then I played on some WoD MUSHes. I recall WoTmud. I sometimes go back to my old haunts and see what's up.

I was on WotMud for years! Small world.

Same here, was a coder on a WoT MUD called Dawn of Time. Most of the old frameworks have custom memory management systems, and I learned a ton about debugging C code doing this. I've been mudding since I was a little kid, and think about starting one up from time to time as well, even going so far as to build a few basic ones in python. This python telnet library is a legit starting point - https://code.google.com/p/miniboa/

Does anyone think there might be a resurgent market for high quality, old school text based MUDs in the future?

I've played MUD's on and off for a long time and even tinkered with coding my own (first time was ~10 years ago: database + networking was done in C++, everything else in Lua. Most recent one was a 3 months ago[0]). I'd love there to a renewed interest! But I currently don't see it. There don't seem to be many new players and the existing ones are already heavily invested in the games they play (so its very hard for new MUD's to gain traction). I hope I'm wrong though!

[0] https://github.com/danielytics/dynamo-server I started this to try out some ideas I had. Didn't quite get to where I wanted, but did try some things I've been wanting to try. Didn't make it playable since its unlikely anyone but me would ever play it anyway. It was a good learning experience though and I would definitely structure it different if I do it again. Maybe some weekend I'll be bored and take another stab, but motivation isn't high without players.

market in the sense of "would people play it", sure. But probably you won't get enough people to pay for it.

Yes. Capture the nostalgia for old players while revitalising the concept for new players. Sierra just released a new King's Quest game. Anything is possible.

> Sierra just released a new King's Quest game.

Yes, but in a completely different format than the original. The value in the new King's Quest game is the story, as told by some excellent voice acting, not in the ties to the King's Quest franchise or the old style of gameplay.

What were the problems with traditional MUDs? Would they need protections against modern griefing and trolling and spam?

The future is here but unevenly distributed. So the future was already there, 20+ years ago. Plenty of biz model / programmatic solutions.

I mostly hung out on "The Glass Dragon" (a couple hundred player Diku with lots of added areas) in the very early 90s thru 00s but I also played other muds at that time so my memory might be foggy... Anyway:

A lot of "problems" can be eliminated by simply removing things that are now taken for granted. For example without a real name policy or link to the real world, its very difficult to harass random demographic members. I only grew to personally know a couple players, and even that not very close. Of course I was playing MUDs before the Cantor and Seigel (?) first usenet spam in '92 or whatever it was, so spam wasn't an issue in the early years, but people generally did not share email addresses or other contact info except among their closest friends. In this modern facebook era this is conceptually unthinkable and with socialization comes inevitable harassment followed by inevitable pouting about this unavoidable aspect of the human condition. If you "stole" socialization and real names and the like from a 10's player they'd drown in rivers of their own tears, but there wouldn't be as much trolling either.

Note that an anonymous message board with no reputation has no loss when you troll and get banned, whereas if you invest three hours just to get thru the tutorial zone before you can socialize with anyone, you have three hours invested in not getting banned. So comparing a modern troll rampage to a mud is specious. I don't think twitter would have many users if they forced all new users to go thru a week long 100 tweet training course; of course they would have no trolls.

There are trivial programmatic ways to eliminate theft, if you're willing to torpedo the business model of selling virtual gold on ebay or selling virtual loot or virtual grind as a business model, which again today is unthinkable. The only way to get my loot and gold is to ask me to give it to you. Wiz and immortals did a brisk escrow business as a stated duty of their title/position as ordered by the admins. The often exponential scale of growth of player levels also plays a part, if you go to home point and make a higher level player feel sad, their trash items and trash coinage makes you the richest most powerful lvl 10 you can imagine...

I don't think the extremely class based (as in socioeconomic class) model of most MUDs would be socially tolerated today, but back then there were plenty of higher class immorts and wiz and the like who would, um, not exactly spare the rod to spoil the child. They were not jerks, if they were then the mud would be empty, but they had no financial qualms against doing everything up to and including banning your IP range. This is utterly unthinkable in the modern era where trollers feel they purchased the right to be jerks by paying their monthly subscription and bought their virtual gold, and every disciplinary action therefore carries a financial penalty that has be to (stereotypically poorly) balanced against the offense and subsequent financial losses the troller causes to the rest of the community.

Now for a nice controversial opinion, I believe most (all?) modern designers intentionally design MMORPG type games to encourage a low dull roar of drama we claim to hate, because there exists a tiny, profitable, subset of players who expect it and find it vaguely enjoyable as long as it doesn't happen to them etc. Social engineering does not inevitably lead to a utopia or hell, much like in the "real world" the most profitable/popular for the important people involves most people muddling thru some filth.

I think there was a general perception that text based MUDs would die when graphical MMROPGs became mainstream because graphics were just ''better'' in every way. Personally I prefer text in many ways to graphics. It's like reading a book versus watching a movie. Although the most popular text based MUD only ever had a few thousand concurrent players, whereas (from what I remember) World of Warcraft peaked with close to a million.

14 million I believe.

Yes.

Not only that, but it seems to be happening already. The MUD I've been playing, Ansalon, has around 20 people on most days.

Are they new (to MUD's) players? New (to the game, but not to MUD's) or old (maybe returning to relive the good old times)?

I ask because some of the most popular MUD's still have hundreds of active players at peak times, but as far as I can tell, most of them have been there for (made up number) 15 years. Basically, I'm saying that unless there is growth through new players, then ultimately MUD's will slowly fizzle out, but if there is growth, then that is very interesting!

I'm new - and there are about a half dozen people I know there that have been playing for less than six months.

In the 90's this site got me into God Wars. Those were good times. Staying up til 2am chatting, battling, exploring.

Neither the website nor the title nor the nonexisting comment explains what this is about. I know what a MUD is but what do I need a MUD connector for? Why do you think this website is special to tech and start-up people?

I'm not sure exactly why it's been posted here (perhaps to kickstart a discussion about MUDs in general?), but The MUD Connector is a directory of MUDs/MOOs/MUSHes/etc. in operation, with descriptions, player reviews, activity stats, and so forth.

Thanks.

I don't play much anymore but I used to spend a lot of time on MUDs. As a totally blond individual they were a good way to play online games with other people.

Gee I spent far too much time on Astaria in the late 90s. I'm sure there's a few people around here that are in the same boat.

I miss this, post-90s kid but really enjoyed the MUDs I played, its great to have a game you don't need amazing graphics for

Endless hours spent on Genesis, miss it sometimes ;)

spent way too much time on medievia

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