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Comment by monster_truck | Hacker News Reader

I just don't care man. Did these people just log on yesterday or something? The MUDs and MMOs I grew up with disappeared. The IRC networks, and especially forums I learned so much from are gone (these were largely killed for something even worse than AI: commercial blogs!). Effectively every social network I've ever cared about has been ruined, failed, or sold. Even games have become bottom line chasing, live service slop that you never truly own.

If you want it so bad stop crying and make it, that's what I've been doing. It works a lot better than whatever this post and many of these comments are. There are dozens of us !

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I remember from the MUD era there was a paper (possibly by Richard Bartle) on the "MUD lifecycle", and how they tended to last on average two years before the operators got bored / burned out / the community left / there was an Incident.

Someone showed me something about Old-School Runescape recently and it struck me how quickly the game evolved. I played it in high school for two years at most. If you rewind or fast-forward in two year increments at a time, a lot about the game is barely recognizable each time. I think if you rewound two years from my play time, there was unlimited free trade, no grand exchange, and two or three fewer skills, and if you fast-forwarded two years, you got unlimited free trade again and the Evolution of Combat. It really puts in perspective how the people who make games are not planning the perfect game and then spending 10 years building it (except for Jon Blow) - they're flying by the seat of their pants. Apparently in 2001, the game's creators expected that nobody would ever reach the maximum level in any skill.

Oh yes, same for Warcraft, Ultima etc. Multiplayer games necessarily exist in a "dialogue" with their players. There's a tendency for players to optimize the fun out of games, as well. Someone discovers a dominant strategy, and then everyone feels they have to use it.

It is a bit risky, and I think the broader internet can make it worse. There's always the risk of a massive falling-out between players and developers which can sink the game. Latest example is probably the Love and Deepspace fiasco, but we've seen quite a few failed launches recently.

I also once played SS13 and they kept changing the secret adventure zones every few months, so that you couldn't learn them unless you were connected to the dev team.

They were really hard to get to in the first place, unlikely to happen before the round ended and if it didn't end yet then it was about to, and with the role-playing rules you had to have a good reason to be there or you'd be banned for meta-gaming. Mostly that meant you got lost in space, or someone threw you into space and you managed to survive, or you were a teleporter scientist, or you were a bad guy who found them in a previous round (allowed meta-knowledge) and trying to raid the area for supplies. Those were about the only ways to end up in secret areas.

The old net is still there to a degree, but we live in pre-Alta Vista times again. It is hard to find. (I know as I run an old-school Forum and RPG-Game for more than 20 years now.)

Libera (formerly Freenode) and Rizon are still around, moderately lower in absolute numbers, drastically lower in percentage of total internet usage.

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