Comment by viccis
2 days ago
Ah I remember playing this one. My first MUD/MUSH was Elendor. Looks like it went down in the last year or so. RIP
Aardwolf was fun, though I remember my big gripe was that it had a bunch of weird little themed zones like the Star Trek and Wizard of Oz ones that felt a little hokey to have in there. These days it wins solely by virtue of being one of the few that's still populated and free.
When I tried to go back to the Simultronics ones (Gemstone IV and Dragon Realms), not only was it a ghost town, which made random interactions almost stressful because you feel like two people walking past each other in a ghost town, but they have double, triple, and quadrupled down on squeezing their whales for every cent. A lot of people playing that game are paying $50-100 a month or more, and even normal players have to cough up more than the base $15 a month subscription if they want more than 1 character (!!!). Looks like their website has been stripped of all its cool character too. Shame.
These games in their heyday were truly a one of a kind experience. All of the weird online socializing you see people getting on platforms like Discord, but all wrapped up around a fun RPG game that felt so much more flexible and imaginative than other online games at the time.
Elendor is up? telnet mush.elendor.net 1893
https://discord.gg/H8Xr3UF - is a discord server people migrated to.
Thanks for pointing that out. I saw reports that the telnet endpoint was down and didn't think to check.
Wow, I'd visit play.net from time to time to get that nastalgic dopamine hit. Sad to see that's gone.
LLMs could really make this genre incredible. Too bad they probably don't have the funding to do something with it.
No, they could not actually.
The important thing is to relate to other humans and to be sure of what kind of human you're interacting with: the creators of the game or other players.
The staleness that actually "shipping once"[0] gives is precisely the space where human player creativity grows and thrives in.
---- [0] I understand you can get the similar results and better base games if you patch things occasionally, but constant patches[1] hides the jank and repetitiveness with novelty.
[1] And dynamically creating "content" with LLMs is like a constant stream of patches.
How would they? LLM can generate content, sure, but do MUDs need more content?
Yes.
A new MUD needs a way to build several thousand rooms, mobs, items, etc. LLMs can help with that process, though I wouldn’t trust them alone with things like balance.
Similarly, existing MUDs adding new areas need hundreds of rooms, mobs, items, etc. In my experience MUDs tend to stagnate when there’s no new content for long time players.
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Keep your AI slop out of my human-crafted adventures, please.
If you want an LLM-created text adventure, by all means, go and enjoy that yourself. I want no part of it.