[MUD-Dev] Re: Ugh, IS Diablo a mud?

[Ryan Prince]

Koster, Raph wrote:
> 
> Many of the early muds in fact reset the entire world, because they were
> based around the concept of a scavenger hunt. You tried to gather as
> many of the hunt items as you could, and drop them in a central location
> to score points. You can still see remnants of this design in AberMUDs
> and their descendants, including the ubiquitous town squares in
> Diku-derivatives... so in fact many of the early muds were not really
> very persistent.

Well, there is a difference between reset and reboot, I think. Reset, unless
your playing something on a console, generally means it stays the way it is, but
goes through the start up routines ( load this,
check for that ) while reboot means clear the world and start again. Do items
droped by players stay there, even though the players left? My apologies for
anything that I say that seems cryptic. I do that too much nowadays.

BTW, If a game is based on a scavenger hunt, it is also lacking another thing
that makes something a MUD, it isn't PLAYER-DRIVEN. All these one-track games
are not MUDs. They are just a doom clone with a chat room at most. Sometimes a
text-based doom clone, but still a doom clone. 

> 
> Hmm, I quite successfully played Diablo without even trying to kill the
> boss monsters (what passed for a plot in the game). What about PKMud or
> HoloMUD or other such single-track muds? I am quite willing to exclude
> them on this basis, but I'd note that they do exist, and many count them
> as being muds.
> 

Hmmm ... didn't think of sitting around killing stuff ... well, you changed the
point of the game, but you still made it quite one-track. The "I MUST LEVEL"
attitude in players is an indicator for me that you are slipping away from what
I view as the purpose of MUDs, which is player interaction and puzzle solving.
I've kicked people off my MUD for turning off all the channels and sitting there
leveling. I hate that. On one occasion, I baned a guy, but that's just opinion
and my deep imbred hate of one-track no-rp players showing through, so don't
take it as an insult to anyone else. PLEASE.

In my book these games are not MUDs. Some people think that one of the proofs of
being a MUD is being able to log on through telnet, but I am sure OU, M59 and
Furcadia disagree.

--
- Jynx Ryn
- The Complex Man with the Simple Signature
- Home Page: http://jynxryn.home.ml.org/