I'm afraid I'm miles and miles from being either experienced or wealthy enough in the game to own or have anything to do with ships, so I can't say how accessible things are. I did meet one lady on the audeasy list who has apparently been playing for a long whileand she might have tried it, but as that was back during my phase of failure with seeing stats I wasn't able to really communicate with her much about the game.

Right now the problem I'm having with mm is finding interesting things to do. I can wander around and slaughter things, but I'm finding npcs are very unresponsive, and it's a litle strange to meet an obviously important npc character and be a litle stuck for interaction, or how to trigger whatever they're supposed to do in the game, ----- imho a general "talk" command as in a brouser rpg would make things a lot easier.

The formal quests are interesting, but there's a really irritating time element. While the time is of course ample, ---- a good two hours or so per quest from what I've seen, I'm personally less keen on time limits myself, ---- though maybe that's mostly due to my unfamiliarity with in game areas combined with my inability to use the graphical maps on the various materia magica websites.

Mostly i've found myself running around like a headless chicken trying to find quest locations, ---- which isn't fun.

Then again, i've been particularly ill over the past couple of weeks and so probably not in the most patient of moods.

I should probably try things again now I'm vaguely recovering.

If you want to start a character Cx2, I can give you some advice on getting the most out of the quests in the newby area (which you'll be booted out of at level ten whether you've completed the quests or not), then maybe we can meet up in game to see what a bit of cooperation will do.

I'm a Dwarf paladin, ---- sinse paladin is generally my favourite class in any rpg as it combines good fighting skill with a bit of magic to keep things interesting, ----- the hole knightly thing is fun too.

I've only tried a litle of that, but I was distinctly lacking in stat view at the time so it didn't work too well.

The problem with mm as I've said is this time limit business with quests. I just logued in, went to the quest master, and was told to head to a place I've never even heard of! this would be fine if I had unlimited time to find it, but I've only got four hours, so my choices are severely bugging the people on the novice chat channel, or quitting the quest.

Quitting the quest would be fine, ---- but I'm uncertain as to whether if you quit a quest you get offered it later or not, or whether it's gone forever.

While the rewards are just gold xp and quest points which are always obtainable elsewhere, I personally don't like the idea of failing at something I could do later more easily (when i've found the appropriate location).

Anyhow, the newby area.

There are to my knolidge three npcs on the road betwene lasler and the adventurer's school who give you quests. Two of them, ---- the grieving woman looking for her daughter's portrate, and the litle thief chap, involve the crab monster (which is a huge thing you need a formation with other players in order to fight), and give you items which are for that quest, both involve pretty obvious directions once you've met the appropriate npcs.

the monster itself is found in a pond in the north east of the area, ---- but it takes some finding, and can't actually be defeated by one player alone (I never killed the thing myself partly due to the stat reading difficulties I had, though I got the components for it).

The third npc on the road, ---- the priest, gives you an orienteering quest which earns you one of the in game marks. This requires heavy use of the survey command (but as an exploration fan I rather enjoyed it).

In the village itself, go and see the village elder in the western most house, he gives a couple of short seak and destroy missions to earn some equipment.

In the village cemetory you can meet the ghost of the care taker who gives you a short item collection quest.

The big quest as you might call it, involves the druid in the forest (which you need to complete the cemetory quest to get to), just go south from the forest entrance to find him. This is the pretty major quest of the area, and requires quite some doing but will reward you with another mark.

Once that is complete you'll pretty much get taken to earn your next mark if you hang around in the recall area for long enough. there is also one more thing I found as well.

In a guarden in the forest is a statue. Examining the statue should tell you what items you need to find, ---- which you can get from killing two monsters (as some free advice, you need to kill two different monsters, doing the same one twice won't do). all this nets you a pretty cool class specific weapon.

That's all the stuff I discovered in the village. I've tried to let you know what's there without too much spoilage, ---- but if you want some advice just ask.

there may actually be more (I could never kill the lake monster and I'm stil not sure about some of those npcs), but that's all I found during the course of two playthroughs.

As I said, I'm having real trouble with npc interaction, that blasted bar tender never said anything to me, and everyone in the tavern just sat there like dumbies as I ran in and out or tried to speak to them.

I really don't know why there isn't a better way of triggering whatever npcs are supposed to do in the game.

The survey command and exploring areas of the game is actually something I really enjoy, ---- me being an exploration freak. I only wish you had unlimited time in quests so as to make them more doable without maps etc.

a Textual description of the world or an expansion of the survey command would be great, ---- in fact if you read the windhammer gamebook from www.arborell.com this has one of the best text descriptions of a map I've ever seen (and the gm just did it streight off the bat too with no suggestions or prompting at all).

Getting back to Mm though, One reason I'd like to contact the lady I mentioned on audeasy is I remember her saying she'd either found ways around the map issues or had made arrangements to fix them. Sadly at the time I was too much involved with learning mudding, learning vip mud, and cursing the stats view issue to take enough mind, and my efforts to contact her on the list more recently haven't been successful as yet, and I'm hesitant to start bugging the game admins for in game changes, ---- ie, more time on quests, expantion of survey and mapping commands etc, until I've found out what other vi players, ----- particularly someone who's been as successful as she seems to be (she's apparently been playing for about two solid years), have done.

Hmmm, what you say about health status is a good idea, ----- though I'm not sure if Vip mud couldn't do it (I thought that was what scripts were for). I usually press ctrl end and just keep hammering my down arrow to read the last output line of text, and usually that way I can keep up with what's happening in the fight, but I agree now you mention it, displaying of enemy health is a bit excessive, ----- though I assumed that was usual for a mud.

Never got a bow myself, being a paladin of course, ---- though I am finding the light spell hugely useful (no need to buy torches or lamps ever!).

As far as the caretaker goes, one of the ghosts of his children randomly tell you how to fill the cemetory with fog, after that it's just a matter of looking for the right item in the village.

To give a small hint, don't discount the possibility of shopping! (I had to ask on the novice channel about that one the first time round too).

Found something interesting on the MM site's links at the top. On the home page there is a link to "visit the knowledge dojo", that's an external site and they seem to have sets of sextant coordinates for different places. The locator gadget is useful too, telling you what's around you.

Of course I know from Dark Legacy this isn't perfect, it doesn't help you get around obstacles. DL let you fly over them if you could fly, but seems this isn't possible in MM. It also won't help with PK areas, which apparently I think Pirate's Cove was according to the class choice newbie guide. It's better than nothing though.

I've also found mounts handy, though they seem to go down the wrong path easily when they hit a fork in the road.

eThat's unfortunate, I haven't got to the stage of trying to find a sextant but I had worked on the assumption they would be readily available. Perhaps it would be possible to find out from players where they can be obtained.

I know in DL it was possible to fly over obstacles, but even then there was a high chance of running into really vicious nasties at random. It was possible at least though, but it seems MM doesn't have a flying layer to the wilderness areas sadly. Perhaps the blink spell is another alternative, it might let us bypass the obstacles. Depends how MM works it, the help file says it moves you up to 48 rooms in a given direction but not if this stops when you hit somewhere impassable.

Edit:
Here's another theory. Use survey to find an identifiable location, perhaps one of the major cities say. Then look up the city's position on the list of coordinates and feed that into the locator gizmo. It then tells you the distance and direction to the major locations, which at least gives us a hint if nothing else.

Hmm, curious. I could imagine possibilities if a person was using braille, but otherwise it might be awkward. Shame noone has made a "map to HTML table" program that will take a text file with an ascii map and convert it to an HTML table, though this would probably be very hard to make work indeed.

If I can learn my wa around some of the cities I could try describing it in general terms, I've considered this before. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be something. This would take time for me to become familiar with them though obviously.

Oh and just so you know, that would be A S C I I. Not picking fault, it's just handy to know sometimes. It's short for "american standard code for information interchange", good grief. It's basically the number code that lets computers store text, since they don't actually store anything other than ones and noughts. Each letter has its own number, with different numbers again for capitals and accented versions. There are other systems, but ascii is the point where most of the english based ones start.