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Check out this review....



http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/27/1748252&mode=thread&tid=127



sounds like majormud =\

Everquest Ownz =P I quit playing mud as soon as EQ came outa beta.

I play EQ I quited tho Level 60 Paladin level 60 Warrior and Level 48 or 49 Cleric. It was getting boreing and old. People scamming etc is getting old and ninja looting. I use to play on The Tribunal Server

EQ looked like something I'd probably wanna shit on.

The Video Card of my friends computer was shit...so maybe thats why i didnt think EQ was any good..



I cant say EQ sucked, cause i havent fully checked it out.

EQ was fun for a bit. I took a break from mud to play it for 2 years. Was one of the top necromancers of the server. Then, the leveling treadmill killed me. I never even hit 59. Now I can't stand leveling at all.. in any mmog game.

I took the above mentioned article a modified it VERY SLIGHTLY and look:



note -- this is not the original article and it is not intended to be plagurism. these wordings are also not mine and don't necessarily reflect my own beliefs. comic relief is simply my intention.





---[snip]



MajorMUD: What You Really Get From an Online Game



dsanfte writes "If you’re reading this, you may be considering playing MajorMUD. Most likely you’ve heard from friends how great this “addictive” game is, how in-depth it can become, and how much fun you’ll have playing it. As usual, however, you aren’t getting the straight deal. So before you start into MajorMUD, let me tell you the other side of that euphoric story." The rest of the article is below.



MajorMUD is a game centered on rewarding you for how much time you put into it. This is the core design philosophy behind the game, since they charge you by the month and make more money the longer you stick around. What they don’t tell you is that taking your money is about all they’re interested in. They care little for player complaints, and less about player suggestions and requests. They’re in this to milk you for all you’re worth, and that’s the first thing you have to know.



The second thing you have to know is that the game stops being fun. By that time though, you’re so “addicted” to the game, you don’t realize it. The game becomes a source of frustration and anger instead of a source of entertainment and fun. It becomes a chore. It becomes a job. You plod away at the keyboard, obsessed and consumed with getting that new item, or finishing that last quest, and while so consumed you begin to hate the game. Vehemently. It’s a game that goes on forever, and one that you can never win.



After playing the game for a while, you’ll start conversing with other players, and you’ll see the one thing all players have in common is that they all hate Metro – the designers of MajorMUD. Look a little deeper though, and you’ll see that most people who dislike Metro are the ones who no longer have fun playing MajorMUD. They aren’t getting what they want out of the game anymore, and they look to Metro, being the source of all changes and improvements/breakdowns in the game, as the cause. Right or wrong, this is the state of affairs; the consumers hate the company providing them with a service that they think they enjoy.



On Metro’s website “MudCentral”, there is little useful information. Where there would be several updates per day, now there are perhaps one or two per week. Answers to player questions are few, and replies to player emails are fewer. Since most answers to customer questions are now handled on specific, “class” (ranger, paladin, monk, etc) message boards by the developers themselves (once in a blue moon of course), one is left wondering what they are paid to do. Twiddle his thumbs perhaps? The world may never know.



This leads up to a lack of will at Metro to address their customers with any sort of respect. Often, sudden “game-changing” features will be added or removed in a patch, with little or no explanation given to the players, and no recourse for the players themselves other than to submit comments to the black hole at the Dev Corner. Other changes can render a class’ or items’ abilities weaker, slower, or even drastically altered or removed from the game. Again, the players have no say in the matter officially, and rarely get these changes reversed through massive online signature petitions. It is quite common now for these sorts of changes to come completely unannounced and unexplained, leaving the players themselves to bug test, figure out what happened, what is wrong, and leaving them again to wander off to the Dev Board asking what the purpose of the change was. Far too often in this process, the sheer discoordination and incompetence at Metro is revealed, as the changes happened accidentally or were not intended to occur in the manner they did. The bottom line being, you can go to bed one night with a great character and items, and wake up in the morning to find all that has changed; leaving you holding your member and your opinions mattering less than a pig’s squeals in a slaughterhouse.



Metro of course doesn’t mind these situations in the slightest; because you see, this is their high-end game. Where in the lower levels you’ll spend your time getting great items by fighting mobs that take seconds to prepare for and a minute to kill, at the high end you are required to spend multiple hours (sometimes up to twelve hours) with a “raid force” of 20 or more people just killing useless, annoying mobs (which drop little or no loot) put there as obstacles.



These situations are ‘lovingly’ referred to by the players as timesinks; gameplay traps intended to waste your time and keep you playing longer. There are hundreds of them; others incredibly longer than simply getting to a mob. Several quests required to advance in the game require you to spend 100+ hours sitting in single locations, killing hundreds of mobs in 12-hour stretches for a “rare drop”, such as nexus chakrams in the black wastelands and gathering black diamonds for that stealth quest. Unlike the other parts of the game, these timesinks are required for advancement, and there is no getting around them unless you wish to stop playing. This is of course not fun at all, but as said above, by this time you’ll have long stopped having fun with MMUD. You’ll do it anyway though, as thousands of others have, because you, like them, are addicted. The quest to kill the the dark phoenix is one of the most vicious timesinks in the entire game, but it is merely one example among dozens. To even reach this area of the game requires months of non-stop raiding with your guild; sometimes up to a year of raiding. Only then will you be powerful enough to enter.



Expansions to the game are put out about once per year. These are required to visit new zones, gain new levels, and so forth. No expansion yet released by Metro has been complete when it hit the shelves. Often the final zone in the expansion would be left unfinished, or in such a state of bugginess that it was unplayable. Other zones will be incomplete or have bad pathing for the mobs. Items and monsters will not be “balanced” for difficulty, and players will sometimes stumble onto great equipment for their characters, only to have Metro later decide it is too powerful, and “nerf” it. When an item is nerfed, it’s reduced in effectiveness or power, often to the point of absurdity, or it simply stops entering the game world. This rewards players who gun through the new expansion as fast as possible to get the upper hand over their competition on the server, and punishes anyone who cannot put 12+ hours of MMUDing in per day. The problems with expansions highlight another aspect of Metro which is decidedly underwhelming: their playtesting (or lack thereof). Many bugs in the new expansions are left for players to discover themselves and work around; fixes are often delayed by as much as a week while Metro tries to find a solution. In MajorMUD, you pay to be a bug tester, and receive no feedback or acknowledgement that any bugs you report are fixed, or even looked at, unless its fix shows up in a terse (bi-) weekly patch message. Most bugs are left unfixed due to their overwhelming numbers.



Class balancing is an on-going project of Metro to try to make sure each class (warrior, cleric, wizard, ranger, etc) has its own niche, and feels useful and meaningful in the game world. They seem oblivious to the fact that items are just as much a part of the game as classes though, and it seems they let their zone (game area) developers run wild with items, creating more work for the developers. If you’re keeping a tally, the cosmic staff was one of them, and the boomstick another. These weapons were both nerfed because they were too powerful, and made the classes who could use them much too strong versus the mobs of the time. There is no feedback to the players on what the “visions” for the classes are supposed to be (beyond the vague three-line descriptions in the manual), and no way to for the players to venture a guess of what might be “too powerful” and in line to be nerfed next. Playing MMUD is a lot like playing in a casino; you can see your winnings vanish in the blink of an eye out of sheer bad luck. It is not a game where you can ever feel secure.



All this pales in comparison to player harassment, of course. From sexual-orientation insults to other players spamming your chat bar, MMUD has it all. There are other forms of harassment too: Often when in competition with other guilds (as you will find yourself quite often if you play long enough), you will see them employ tactics such as stacking mobs in your area to hang you up. A “train” is typically a large number of powerful mobs (10-20), which the other guild will gather up from the zone and dump onto your raid in order to kill you. The Ops will do nothing about this, unless they are there to witness it. Being that there are typically only a few Ops on a server of 50+ players at any given time, and that trains are completely unpredictable and random, there is of course almost no way for them to witness these events. Your guild is then left holding their collective members once again. Do you see the pattern forming here?



MajorMUD is a game full of people who want to “win” and “be the best” at any cost. This includes griefing you and your guild, making your gameplay miserable. Why not simply quit then, you ask? If the game isn’t fun and sucks this badly, why would anyone play it? Well, because they are addicted. They are addicted to the mobs, to the loot, and to the social atmosphere with other people in their guilds. They have invested so much time in these characters (often hundreds of days of play time, sometimes more time than they spend at their jobs), that they can’t will themselves to give it up. They play on instead, hoping things will get better, and nursing a great and deep hatred for Metro and the game itself. If you play long enough, you will see this as the universal truth. People who quit are viewed as giving up on their guilds; they are ridiculed, denounced, and hated. There is massive peer pressure to keep playing. Often people you thought were your friends in the game were simply using you to advance, or improve their characters. Online relationships between people in MMUD are fickle, and are only good as long as everyone’s getting a good dose of the drug (loot, advancement in the game, and good social relations with their guild).



Perhaps now you’ve begun to see the other side of MMUD: The buggier side, the darker side; the side of despair and anger, fear and frustration. The game will absorb your life if you let it, while the days and weeks melt away into oblivion. I have barely touched on the repetitive gameplay you must endure to reach the top levels of the game: killing mob after mob, hundreds upon hundreds in an endless non-challenging stream to gain experience. I have not said anything about linkdeath (losing your connection) from network problems, or server crashes where you lose any experience or items recently attained (and for which you are not compensated by customer service). There are many other problems with this game that I did not go into here. Before you get into MMUD, realize what you’re jumping into. Look before you leap.

There's one big difference between MMud and EQ, as was mentioned in the article. Raids.



In MMud, you pretty much rip through anything in relatively no time.. or die trying. There's no middle ground. Espesially without the option to ressurect a fallen comrade back into the battle that EQ offers...



In EQ, raids take hours.. getting people together, slowly moving in and finally pulling big one. Since it's not text, and therefore room-based, everything happens differently. Pullers go in exploring, and luring certain mobs back to the main camp for ownage. As rooms get cleared, the main force moves deeper in. All this time, they have to be concious of regen -- if you move into a room previously occupied, you either have to be ready to fight the room repops, or move thru it fast enough not to get hit by it.



Different mobs have different aggro ranges, so pullers must be really careful not to bring too many to the main camp. Plus a lot of times, things, when low, run back, thereby "calling for help". If not stopped on time, it could result in a huge train (1 mob, "calling" more, those calling more.. until your camp is overrun with 20 things that own you in seconds.. things are even more fun when one of those 20 things is a big boss) that could wipe the whole raid out and waste the rest of the night in a huge corpse recovery mission.



Then, once you get close enough to your target and start setting up for the big hit, you try to time it as perfectly as possible to try and have the boss solo w/o any of their numerous guards who could REALLY complicate the situation.



I've been on several high level raids in EQ, and have lead many more myself. While there is a lot of downtime at times, it pays off when the raid gets going. As you're making your way down, it's constant action, espesially for the pullers and the tanks.. and on harder raids for enchanters and clerics. Pullers explore all the areas, and lead the main force down the safest path. Tanks taunt the mob so it concentrates on them and doesn't attack the weaker hp people. Enchanters do crowd control, stunning and mesmorizing extra mobs in camp so they don't cause havoc. Clerics and druids heal and buff.. Clerics also resurect fallen comrades back into the battle.. necromancers and wizards do damage, as well as several other melee classes, while shamans debuff mobs, as well as help with healing and buffing. EQ prides itself on trying to make classes inter-dependent on raids and imo, they've done a decent job of it with some notable exceptions. The deeper you are, generally the faster the action. So while these raids are timesinks, you don't realize that you've spent hours going deeper and deeper in these huge dungeons, and thus don't think of them as great timesinks.



Kinda like my personal philosophy -- if you had a fun time doing it, that time wasn't wasted.

damn you expect me to read all that?!



lol I caught this line though:



On Metro’s website “MudCentral”, there is little useful information.

Never tried it,im downloading it now with an account manager to give it a shot and see what its like.

on specific, “class” (ranger, paladin, monk, etc)



you missed a spot :P