[MUD-Dev] Mud hosting services

[AR Schleicher]

From: Dundee <SkeptAck at antisocial.com>
>Does anyone know if any mud hosting services are familiar (at all) with the
>various UO server-emulators available?  Seems like every private shard out
>there is running on someone's home PC, but lots more people (I imagine)
would
>like to run them, if there were a hosting service that could accommodate
>them.

Origin revised their terms of service quite awhile back to make UO server
emulators a violation.  While they haven't ever taken action against them to
my knowledge (unless you count the attempts at changing the encryption to
stop the cheating utilities), this has discouraged a number of people.

>And yeah, it takes about 600 MB for the mapfiles and such, but a person
could
>have multiple shards sharing the same mapfiles, since they are read-only.

This wouldn't always work, as there are some people who have worked out the
format of the world files, and have changed them to provide a different
world.  I built a really nice ski slope once. *grins*

>The emulators themselves are quite a bit smaller.  Our 'worldfile' is quite
a
>bit smaller than most mud's, I think.  And we're running with something
like
>64 RAM on a P200, 30+ users before there's any noticeable lag (ADSL
>connection).  I look at most mud hosting service's packages and think their
>upper-end packages could EASILY handle a UOemulator.  And if they shared
the
>main, read-only files between multiple shards, their lower-end packages
could
>do it, too.

The problem is you're asking them the service to host a program developed in
violation of OSI's ToS.  Then there's also the fact that if you're paying to
have it hosted, you might want to start asking for donations to help support
it.  Then you could be making money, which is what many have guessed might
be enough to cause Origin to take action against the emulators.

In my opinion, Origin's main goal is to make sure people who keep using
their client keep paying the $10 a month fee.  There's no good way to insure
that, in particular when you remember that both server operators and players
have no interest in paying Origin if they're playing solely on private
servers.  Some methods have been tried, but there really isn't a good
solution.  (For example, UOX had mode where if you weren't logging in
locally, the account you used would be verified against the real UO login
servers.  Good, except the server operator had to turn it on, and then you
could only use your UO login and password.  In addition, you had to trust
the server operator with your login and password to do this, which proved to
be a problem in some cases.)

AR Schleicher (Jerrith)
ars at iag.net





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