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Comment by aurelius12 | Hacker News Reader

MUDs may be history to most people, but at Iron Realms we still have five commercial MUDs running live with dedicated paid staff on each constantly working to improve the gameplay and enlarge the already massive worlds. Honestly, it's pretty surprising to me, as when I launched our first one - Achaea - in 1997 right around when Ultima Online launched, I gave us five years.

https://ironrealms.com

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Since you run the place, I'll state here that it would be nice if I could look at your web site and decide if I'm interested before being hit with a pop-up window asking me to sign up for a newsletter.

How do I know if I want your newsletter, if I haven't figured out what your product is? Window closed. Sale lost.

This site is by no means unique in this practice.

And? Just because the practice is prevalent doesn't mean it's absolved of criticism.

What sale? If a newsletter popup prevents you from actually looking at the site, you really need that time machine back to 1995.

Newsletter popups are obnoxious and unnecessary. Why can’t they just be a link on the page instead of a popup?

Yeh I have had made this point and had it changed on some of the sites I work on - immediately popping up a call to action is counter productive.

It might also hurt your SEO as well

Fair point, and you're right.

Wait, so people not only still play, but also actually pay for MUDs?

OTOH, I managed to find the price list and seems to be quite heavily pay to win...

(context: I played Achaea without access to a source of cash)

Back when I played, you could buy "artefacts" with real money, but they were less "pay to win" and more "pay for convenience". They were definitely far more than mere cosmetic items, but it was more than possible to play without ever buying one.

Though I was always, always jealous when I saw somebody using wings. Those things took you to a kind of cloud teleportation hub where you could immediately jump to a number of places.

What was the code word... "Duanathar"?

Depends on the item. Some of them were quite powerful, but even then, generally you'd get a 10% edge or an ability from another class. And people would often have macros to unequip all their artifacts for a fair duel.

The Lasallian Lyre is named after my character, but strangely enough, I never mastered the timing to make the best use of it. (A playable class was later based on some fiction I wrote for the official history, which arguably the most impact I've ever had on a product vision...)

Never thought I'd see Achaea discussed on HN. It was a deep influence on me, though my active time was a lifetime ago. Hi, Sarapis! Figured you'd like to know that Achaea, and of course Avalon before it (you were... Orthwein?) really did have a long-lasting impact. These games have always been deeply participatory: player-run guilds, player-run cities. At least at the time I played, you literally couldn't even get class abilities without joining a group and inheriting its political positions, friends, enemies. And although there were PvE quests, the majority of the game was about conflict between players, at the level of people, guilds, cities. That's a far cry from the theme-park nature of modern multiplayer RPGs like WoW.

Thanks! No, I was Shaitan as a player in Avalon, then Lazarus as a god.

Glad you have such fond memories!

Yup, Duanathar. It was especially fun when the Clouds were strategically used during raids and skirmishes, people found a lot of creative uses for it.

I tried Achaea after I got too frustrated with MUME. What turned me off wasn't the way people could pay to avoid grind, but rather how you absolutely needed a client script for combat. If you didn't have some kind of script that provided automated reactions, PVE was really hard and you couldn't even consider PVP. And, of course, people who made the best scripts were charging for them.

That's true! I did very little combat overall -- I spent most of my time on the social side of the game -- but I did build a few of my own convenience scripts anyway, so the criticism is well-founded.

You can get by in PvE without anything overly complex, and it's honestly more fun to figure out how to deal with the damage and affliction patterns from individual monsters yourself than relying on an autocure system. (Achaea has strict rules on what goes beyond the line of "botting", too.) But yeah, PvP essentially required some automation to let you focus on tactics instead.

Yeah, I remember the rules about "botting", too. I don't know if they changed a lot since I played, but back then they basically amounted to "don't automate your character to farm while idle". In light of the pay-to-avoid-grind system, it didn't take me too long to conclude that the rules were pretty much "don't affect our bottom line, anything else goes".

Because botting is basically impossible for us to detect algorithmically (we're a tiny company and don't have the resources to engage in that kind of battle with botters), our line boils down to, "If we come and talk to you and you don't reply, you're not playing the game and that's not allowed."

It's the only standard for botting that works for us.

True, but not strictly true. I played with 100% manual attacks and cures, but made heavy use of color coding to recognize threats in the rapid scroll of incoming text. It wasn't any harder than playing a competitive puzzle game: recognize colors, make matches, try to throw sand in your opponent's gears and make combos faster than they can.

The line "X snaps his fingers in front of you" still makes my adrenaline pump for an instant o_o

Iron Realms games are pay to win enough to make every publisher jealous. Though they are some of the most involved/integrated communities of players/developers/tool-makers in likely any game at the moment.

Are any particularly tuned to playing together in small groups or pairs?

My love of MUD/MUSE/MOOws largely around such experiences.

This is fun, thanks! Minor bug report, this asset is missing (404 - found it broken while creating a character): https://www.achaea.com/local/client_data/classes/psion.jpg?v...

As someone who was a volunteer Admin/coder for a while on a MUD during college (Fires of Heaven, yes based on the Wheel of Time) keeping a MUD going with paid staff in this age is incredible. Well done!

Woah, Sarapis! I've seen MUDs discussed here on HN before but never Achaea. I wouldn't be who I am today without having played that game. Thank you for so many years of fun.

You're welcome, and that's really cool to hear.

Former player of Achaea here (if anyone recognizes the name Soludra) -- can attest, the Iron Realms MUDs are top-tier. I tried to get into volunteering, but my work ethic wasn't really up to snuff at the time. Sorry ^_^;

Nothing to worry about, it happens! Glad you enjoyed Achaea. :)

The combat system in Achaea was always so fascinating to me in terms of balance, but back when I was still playing it I was on bad dialup or satellite internet, which gave me a pretty big disadvantage against other people.

Oof, yeah, relatively low ping is important. Not like FPS important, but still important.

Same. It really amazes me how cool combat was in a game that was purely text. Even if it was almost a decade since I played a lot of it. I remember it fondly and still recommend it if for nothing else but novelty.

The hundred or so debuffs and the concept of truelock still fascinates me. If a new, (more graphical perhaps) game dared to come even close to that I'd be so happy to give it a spin.

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