Hi all,

So, I've just had a rather bad experience with a game I'd been messing around with off and on for a few years now. The game is called AarchonMud. I'll highlight a few of its gameplay quirks and tendencies first, then tell you why you should beware.

Yes, this has personal bias. I'll freely admit it. But there's fact here too. I'm putting this out here because in the wake of the incident, the blowback has been, in a word, appalling. I don't believe any MUD should be treating its player this way.

So, the game.

It's a system where you pick a race and class - it's fairly bog-standard this way at first, but you do get a lot of choices - then hack and slash your way to the top. In this case, it's level 90. You can do auto-quests, and a few areas have their own built-in quests. Once you hit level 90 and have enough gold and quest points, you can remort.
Remort is a trial where you pay a reasonably high amount of gold and quest points to enter a small area where you have to complete various challenges. They generally get harder the higher you go. because that's the beauty of it. If you complete remort, you get to pick a new race (new ones are available), then go back around. You have a slightly higher amount of experience needed to level up, but you also are a bit stronger.
Each remort gives 1 extra level, until remort 10. After you do remort 10, you get to level 100 and do an ascension quest. It's grindy, but when you finish it, you go back to remort 0, level 1, keeping all your skills and spells, with a subclass, which grants new abilities. You can later merge subclasses and stuff.
The game is quite cyclical, but it's also very fast. It's possible to get through an entire remort in a few hours if you know the game.
Writing-wise, the game has a lot, and I do mean a lot, of typos. There are some neat areas, and some downright creepy stuff too. A whole mishmash of themes as well, if you like that sort of thing. But yeah, typos.
Most classes are fairly well balanced, though some are a bit hard to solo with (bards, for instance). The game is ROM-derived, but it's not bad. It has its issues, but it's not bad.

Now here comes the dramatic bit, the stuff I think you ought to be aware of if you try.

So, this morning I made the painful choice to stop playing Aarchon after I died in remort 8 literally one step from safety. I was holding a crystal which drains HP, and died one step from a safe place to rest. The RNG screwed me, and I lost about 80000 gold and 275 quest points. Grinding this much gold and quest points can take anywhere from two to six hours, and questing at level 97 (which is what I am) is very, very risky.
When you die in remort, you're kicked out, and you are reimbursed half of what you paid. In the game itself, when you die, your corpse goes to the morgue with some money in it, and you might lose trains dumped into HP/move/mana, but only one at a time. So dying in the game is pretty light, dying in remort is harsh.
Well, I was utterly crushed when I died, so I asked if there was any way at all I could be more fully reimbursed. I thought the RNG screw might have been a bug - it wasn't - and even if it hadn't been, I was right at the end of the remort.
There's a whole ethical point of "do you help someone in a case like that when they were so obviously close, or can you not set bad precedents?", and I get it. They decided not to, so I decided to quit. This is by no means the first time I've gotten angry or upset about dying in remort. When it happened today, it was a sign, of sorts. I'd had enough, and I knew that I was just going to get worse as time went by.
There was a discussion, a bit of an argument, and all of a sudden, without warning, my channel privileges were removed. I should mention now that I'd made it clear I wanted to sell all my gear off and then dump the gold in the town square where people other than myself could enjoy it. This morning I was in a rage; by this afternoon I was perfectly calm. I didn't swear, I didn't insult anyone. I was sharp a couple of times, but not, like, personal-insult sharp. I think the sharpest thing I said was something along the lines that I was hoping that a mud would care more about keeping a player than maintaining the status quo, but I tempered it with the whole bad-precedent thing. If you do it for one, maybe you have to do it for others. It was an RNG screw, and no matter how upset it made me, it's not really the game's fault. Okay, fine. I don't like it, but I'll live with it. So anyway, I'm in the middle of offloading gear, and I got booted. Logged back on, got booted again, then sitebanned. No warning. No rationale. I'd made it clear that all I was doing was offloading gear to make sure others could use the spoils.
So I used a different IP - my phone's hotspot - and continued doing what I was doing. I have a couple of chars, it took a bit. While I was doing so, I got treated to comments like, "I've never been glad to lose a player until today", and the like.
When I used one of said alts to ask publicly, and politely, why I was being sitebanned, the response I got was something like, "Why do you care? You're quitting", whereupon I highlighted the fact that I'd said more than once that I was going to offload my stuff and then delete my chars. Nothing about that behaviour breaks any rules. I was never given a reason for being sitebanned, and before long my iPhone's hotspot had also been sitebanned. During this time, I had one imm saying he was going to un-delete my character for the sheer hell of it, which strikes me as childish. You may ask why I care? It's an ethics thing. It smacks of a power grab, where I can't just be allowed to leave in my own way, providing I wasn't breaking rules. The only rule I ended up breaking was getting around a siteban, which was, as I say, applied with no reason, warning or explanation.
What this tells me is that the game is not content with me quitting on my own terms, and that the administration are not above making derisive comments in public about players who, for whatever reason, have decided to quit.

So okay. Did I kick a hornet's nest and get loud about the whole issue? Yes, I did. I was salty about it. And that precise fact is what made me decide to quit. Remort was stressing me out to the point where I was anxious about it, would sometimes even put it off, particularly the harder ones. If I died and it was my own stupidity, I'd still get upset, but I'd live with it. If I died out of nowhere, did something I expected to be safe and it wasn't? Got screwed by the RNG or whatever? That sort of thing bugged me more. I really, really don't like the threat of dying in remort. So this morning I said to myself, "If they aren't willing to work with me even a little on this, then I don't want to stay. It's not fair to them, and it's not good for me." I could've handled it better, but nothing in their rules suggests a siteban is the prescribed way of dealing with a person like me.
To me, this fosters an extremely close-knit and insular community which can't stand for someone to say "your game is no longer for me" and then quit on their own terms. It's a power-trip in my eyes, pure and simple.

So I'm telling you about this because some of you may play there, or may have seen it and considered it. While I can't/won't stop you, I want you to be aware of what might happen if for whatever reason the administration don't like you. There's a considerable amount of immaturity there, and a lot of QC issues which still persist after a couple of decades. My anecdote may strike some as overblown, dramatic, even self-serving, but it may serve as a nail in the coffin for others. I hope it's enlightening either way.

And hey, if you have dissenting opinions, go ahead. I can't promise I'll agree with you, but I can promise to be civil with you, at least. You won't catch me badgering you, slandering anyone directly or otherwise kicking up further ruckus. I just wanted to bring a potentially toxic MUD community to your attention, for whatever it might be worth.

If you're still here, thanks for reading. This was definitely kind of a long, rambling rant in places, and I do apologize for that.