@camlorn: Personal attacks are not my intent. Lost Souls is on the chopping block because it seems to be a mud that we are both familiar with, has come up multiple times on this forum, and has some of the systems that we are objecting to. I could criticize 3k, discworld, battmud, Cyber Assault, Slothmud, retromud, and I'm sure others if I spend time thinking about it, with differing levels of strength on these points. However, I haven't played many of those in years so would need to spend time refreshing myself on how exactly they work, and I'm not sure how many of them you and bladestorm have played at all. I'm sorry if my need for a common mud to discuss made you feel picked on. My criticism of your attempt to brush off the problems with Lost Souls was, admittedly, slightly personal. But I couldn't resist, as it served as a perfect example of what I was talking about. I'm not trying to find fault with you; the fault is in Lost Souls itself, and other mud and real world communities that are set-up to encourage exclusivity and secret knowledge. If you detected frustration and anger in my last post, it's because I've heard all of the things you're saying before, in other muds, and even in real life. They do, in fact, make me frustrated and angry. I'll be the first to admit that I can have problems communicating that level of frustration without causing offence. I'm sure if you go searching, you can find a discussion of why I dislike VIPMud on this forum where Dark had to step in and tell me to tone it down. I apologize for any offence, and I'll try to back off a little in future.
However, that said, I refuse to believe that my problems with Lost Souls are because I don't get it, haven't played long enough, haven't tried hard enough, haven't read enough, or am not smart enough. I am a highly experienced, university educated, player. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the worlds smartest person, and you're probably smarter than me. But if a player like me, and I hope I can at least be permitted the conceit that I might be ever so slightly above average, has never once managed to advance a single level by myself, I think it shows serious flaws in the mud.
I can say from personal experience that if a community doesn't go out of it's way, in every area, to embrace new people, it quickly becomes a toxic place, where all new people are rejected for various reasons that seem perfectly rational at the time. I'm afraid I have been the rejector just as often, and maybe more often, than I have been the rejectee. Systems that penalize players who want to quit seem, from the experiences I've had playing muds for the last 14 years, to especially promote this kind of problem. The other place it seems to show up a lot is in real world churches. But I haven't managed to figure out how these two things are similar, yet.
I think you may be slightly confused about what we're discussing. The complaint that I originally made was not about rent, but about muds that penalize quitting. One way muds do this is rent, and so it has obviously been up for discussion. But that was never the topic of discussion in particular. The topic was preventing quitting, or penalizing it. Lost Souls does this. It is quite possible for players to have equipment that will be dropped when they quit, because they don't have enough keep points to retain it. Even worse, Lost Souls will not even warn the player about this; it'll just go ahead and quit, dropping the stuff on the ground. When you've got to quit in a hurry, this is almost worse than being told you can't quit here, because you might not see the messages about your eq dropping as you probably typed quit and closed the client. When you log back on, you're sure going to be penalized for quitting! Admittedly that is far from my only criticism of lost souls, but that has nothing to do with you. I just feel like lost souls is a really good idea for a mud, that in execution manages to do absolutely everything that has ever been done wrong in mud development, all at once. This makes it a really good target for me when I want to criticize some particular system. Also, I find that Analyzing failure is more instructive than analyzing success, making lost souls an especially interesting target for me.
I have been playing muds for 14 years. The idea that I don't like them, or have some kind of nonstandard requirements, or even don't know what a mud is, is baffling and strange to me. I can think of many muds that come close to fitting my requirements, and a few that get it perfect. So I can't be all that unusual. In order to widen the discussion, here are some experiences with muds I've played that is related to this discussion.
Dark Legacy: You can quit whenever you want. You don't age unless you're online. No rent. You can avoid eq loss on death, or if you haven't created your character with the right perks, use an in-game currency called favour to have your corpse and equipment returned to you. Unfortunately, the developer isn't working on it anymore.
Miriani: You're nearly always only 60 seconds or less from being able to quit. You do age when offline, but this is entirely meaningless for game mechanics. No eq loss on death. No death, actually. Unfortunately, the community went extremely sour anyway, largely because of other mechanics related problems, and some administrators who...didn't always do the wisest things. This game taught me half of everything I know about online communities and what not to do.
Hellmoo: PK. Eq loss on death. Eq loss because someone hates you. Quit at the wrong time and people will kill you, take all your stuff, and dump you who knows where. Rent once you're no longer a newbie. I played this game when I was having some rather extreme struggles with sickness. I couldn't have a life anyway, so not having the ability to quit at the blink of an eye didn't bother me. Also, I had several friends that were starting the game at the same time I was. We all helped each other out. It felt fun! And easy! And it sure felt good to laugh at those newbies complaining about balance issues. I mean, of course there were no balance issues! How could there be, when I had a trillion billion points in everything, all the credits I could ever use, and could rape every newbie I ever met? The only problem was all the whining, obviously. This game taught me the other half of what I know about online communities. Sure, the mechanics encouraged it, but unfortunately, the real problem in this case was me. This game turned me into the biggest jerk I have ever been, and hope I will ever be. Unfortunately, this also carried over into real life somewhat, and I also learned valuable lessons about how constant exposure to virtual murder and rape could affect my real personality. That's why I've been known to go on a bit of a rant about this game as well. If I keep bringing up things I've learned from mudding, this entire post is going to morph into a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfic, in the form of a collection of letters to Princess Celestia. As the name Twilight Sparkle doesn't fit me at all, I'll stop bringing them up. Promise.
The 7th Plane: Quit whenever. No rent. Unfortunately, I never hung around long enough to figure out if aging was a factor. The developer of this mud seems to have something against room descriptions, of all things. I just couldn't get into a text game without text descriptions. I think this game secretly wants to be a browser based game,. Quite unfortunate really, as other than that bazaar quirk, the developer (who's name I can't remember) is friendly and fun and involved and awesome. Everypony...everyone...sorry, sorry...else I met there was also nice.
4dimentions: quit whenever. no rent. Aging doesn't seem to be a factor. Unfortunately, unless you're into puzzles, this will not be your home. I love puzzles, but not multiplayer puzzles. I'll start a game of interactive fiction and leave it open for days, and take a 5 minute work break to try something when a good idea strikes me. So a single interactive fiction puzzle can last me as long as a month! This method of puzzle solving just doesn't work on a mud. Add Molly to the list of really amazing administrators whose game just doesn't quite do it for me and I feel bad for leaving the results of all their hard work because they're good people.
6dragons: quit whenever. No rent. Eq loss on death, but you can pay to get your corpse back, so no relying on older players. This mud doesn't exist anymore, and it makes me sad. The crafting system in this mud was my favourite out of all the ones I tried, and I'm not even sure why. It just...struck the right tone, for me.
CoffeeMud: quit whenever. Unfortunately, while you're away, your character will age. As each race has maximum ages, every hour you're not playing is another hour closer your character gets to death. Also, eq loss on death. And don't even get me started on the xp loss on death. CoffeeMud is my favourite codebase, but unfortunately, the game at coffeemud.net is almost unplayable unless you want to be a monk. Even if you didn't mind relying on older players for everything, there are hardly any older players to help you. If I could get a group of 9 or 10 people together to seriously play this game around the same time every day, I think we could solve most of these problems by keeping the stores stocked with decent eq, casting resurrect on dead newbies, etc. But then we'd just be the clique of old players that the next generation of new players would hate, justifiably so. Yeah, let's not do that.
Alter Aeon: quit after you recall. Recall from almost anywhere. The few places you can't recall from, you get lots of warning that things will be different. Unfortunately, you do age while you're offline. Apparently this can be reversed, but I don't know how. No eq loss on death.
Discworld: Quit whenever, I think? No rent, I think? Basically my entire playtime once I got out of pumpkin town was spent totally, completely, unrecoverably lost. So I'm a little fuzzy on the details, other than...Oh my God huge huge huge mapping project from hell nooooooooo! Whenever you ask for help, everyone will point you to gif maps, or blind players who aren't online. The only reason discworld isn't full of jerky cliques is because the high level players are willing to share the maps with sighted friends, so everyone who can read them can be in the clique. The rest of us are out of luck, though. This is why I dislike muds who's response to a request is "Go to the wiki hosted by RandomPlayer9!" or "StephTheDoomMage has a good website about that at 593u5.tripod.com/mud/long-address. She hasn't logged on in 503 billion years, but most of the information should be up to date. Good luck figuring out what isn't!" Everything players need to know should, maybe even must, be a part of the official game.
ProjectBob: Quit whenever you want. No rent. Noe eq loss on death. I think you did age while offline, but your age was just one of fifty thousand numbers that effected your character, so I have no idea if it mattered. Everything was documented in the game...it even had formulas! The fact that Project Bob made me feel like a total moron was, I'm pretty sure, my fault. I just couldn't get into doing differential calculus, or whatever it was that you had to do to figure out how to solve those equations and determine how best to improve your character. But it's apparently gone now, so I can go back to feeling smart again. The other nice thing about project bob is that you could totally play just by the mud version of button mashing, and still have a good time. Yay! I have more aura, now! Let's use this random weapon and go kill stuff! You &((&%$$^&#$@$&%%struck!^^%(#(@^%$$&& for 5038560388777 in melee damage! Woohoo!
Anyway, this turned into a huge post. I'm glad I apologized, and put all the important stuff at the top. If you're still reading, my point was...uh...that I'm not even 30 and already I've turned into an old man, sucking my teeth, and remembering the muds I played in days gone buy. No, that wasn't my point. My point was that I apparently read too much my little pony fanfic and...no, pretty sure that wasn't it, either. Oh! My point was that muds with systems that penalize quitting, and are thus extremely unfriendly to newbies, are a rarity, not the rule. Also, I have lots of experience with muds, and like many of them. And lastly, I have experienced exactly the kinds of communities that I'm slagging, and even previously been exactly the kind of player that I now dislike so strongly. Oh yeah, and also, if you're looking for games/muds to play (title drop!) I would recommend all of those accept Miriani and Hellmoo. Just go carefully if you want to try Discworld, unless you have enough vision to read some maps.
