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Comment by sedatk

2 days ago

I used to play Aardwolf almost 27 years ago when its address was wolf.mudservices.com 4000.

It was marvelous, and I have my many magical multiplayer moments with MUD which I wasn’t able to experience with MMORPGs or other modern multiplayer games. They are a lot of fun too, but MUD was something else.

I got banned from Aardwolf in early 2000’s because my friend and I couldn’t prove that we were separate individuals connecting from the same modem. They had asked us to count simultaneously in different orders and we had failed the test. We went back to Counter-Strike.

My first MUD I ran was there on mudservices! I learned C and become a programmer because of MUDs. MUDs and my obsession with building them in high school took me on a very long and statistically improbable journey of success in my career and life.

I fondly remember getting banned from some MUD around that time, for talking back to an admin. It was a formative experience.

This reminds me that back in high school, I would multibox on the MUD I played regularly by logging in, pulling the plug on my dial-up modem, dialing back in and then logging back in to my initial character and a new one. Dialing in would give me a fresh IP address, but the initially logged-in character would retain the one it logged in with (also, you had to do this fast enough that the character didn't get disconnected).

I also had some scumbag moments. Namely, I helped someone else on the MUD code on his other MUD, and I saw that he never installed libcrypt or whatever, so I could view players' passwords in plaintext. Since I new him from the main MUD we played, there were a bunch of people I knew playing in both, at least to check out this guy's project. So I'd use the same IP trick to log in as them and kill their friends, as them. Fun stuff.

  • I once ran multiple bots on Ancient Anguish that would do simple quests for cash and follow other player to steal their gear if they dropped anything. The bots would then find my main and hand everything over.

    The mods teleported my chars into a dungeon and virtually tortured them while trying to get me to admit one person was behind the lot.