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FULL DISCLOSURE: These are products I created and operated by my company. But very relevant.

The term MUD tends to harken back to an earlier time before 'puters had graphical horsepower of any note. But the reality is, online text-based games come in all varieties, and the one's we operate are in a league all their own. More significantly, they are still serious ongoing commercial efforts. If you want to see what a MUD can be when it's been in continuous development, expansion for decades, then check out:

http://gemstone.net/

http://dragonrealms.net/

GemStone IV, which began its life as a sequel to GemStone ][ (then called GemStone III just to confuse everyone) first came to existence on the online service GEnie. Eventually it moved to CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy and others. When online services went the way of the doodoo bird, we moved them to the internet machine. DragonRealms is somewhat younger than GemStone, but same sort of history. I began work on it shortly before forming my company Simutronics, something like 27 years ago.

Despite having worked on lots of other types of games, such as mobile titles, and working on other PC/Mac/Linux games of a much more graphical variety now... these text based games remain the corner stone of Simutronics.

I've played a MUD (GemStone III) for about 8 years.

About two years in a met a girl and hung around with her in game, and after 4 or so years, she decided that we should meet and hang out for the week, despite about a 1500-mile distance issue. She was a pretty hardcore player. Definitely consumed 15-20 hours a week of her time (I played about 10-15 in comparison).

Well, went to T.F. Green in Providence to pick her up. Just waiting around... holding up a sign with her last name on it. Then all of a sudden some attractive, blonde, Britney Spears lookalike comes up to me and hugs me shouting "Rob" quite happily.

Yeah, I'd say that the stereotype is pretty off-base! ;)

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Everquest is more "high profile", but several large-scale text games have had this "buying a character" phenomenon occur.

I play Gemstone III by Simutronics, and know of at LEAST one person whose full time job is just selling items and characters and "coins" for real life money.

Sure, he invested a lot of his time into the game initially, but he makes enough to support himself on it, so that's gotta say something...

An online game which myself and a few thousand people play had a similar occurence recently.

Simutronics -- maker of text games such as Gemstone III and Dragonrealms has fired an employee of theirs over just such an incident.

The company has recently hiked their monthly subscription fee to play their games from $9.95 for basic service up to $12.95 -- a hefty price, considering the games are solely text-based.

The change was rationalized, saying that they haven't raised prices in five years... which evidently translates into: "We're getting more money now. If you don't like it, tough."

A GameMaster (i.e. their word for coder) for the company felt this was wrong and said just that on one of the player discussion boards.

The interesting thing is that he used his player account, not his GameMaster one. This means that none of the players knew it was a dissenting opinion from one of the company members... It just looked like another voice of agreement.

Apparently dissention is not treated lightly there, as he was summarily fired from the company for saying so.

Talk about a violation of First Amendment rights... Just because I work for a company, does not mean I should have to agree with every decision made by them.

If this were true, many people would be fired for thinking their boss was an idiot. ;-)

The company has not made any official statement about this incident or its policy; the information was received from a reliable source, however.

Just thought I'd add another example of our rights slowly being robbed... :(

Yeah. There are other places that it occurs. Gemstone III and the other Simutronics (text) games are some of the biggest non-graphical MMORPGs and I personally know of tens of thousands of dollars that have changed hands over the years for various things. True, it is a much smaller environment, but the same sentiments are behind it. Simutronics TOS claims to be against it, but in practice they really could care less. Probably due to the fact numerous GM's have received kickbacks from players who regularly parlay in this type of trading.

I am copying this word for word, but am fooling with formatting a little so it's a little more presentable. It's pretty long, so brace yourself. Without further delay, here we have it:

Any general law about virtual worlds should be read as a challenge rather than as a guideline. You'll learn more from attacking it than from accepting it.

Persistence means it never goes away. Once you open your online world, expect to keep your team on it indefinitely. Some of these games will never close. And closing one prematurely may result in losing the faith of your customers, damaging the prospects for other games in the same genre.

Macroing, botting, and automation: No matter what you do, someone is going to automate the process of playing your world.

Game systems: No matter what you do, players will decode every formula, statistic, and algorithm in your world via experimentation.

It is always more rewarding to kill other players than to kill whatever the game sets up as a target. A given player of level x can slay multiple creatures of level y. Therefore, killing a player of level x yields ny reward in purely in-game reward terms. Players will therefore always be more rewarding in game terms than monsters of comparable difficulty. However, there is also the fact that players will be more challenging and exciting to fight than monsters no matter what you do.

Never trust the client: Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever forget this.

"Do it Everywhere" law: If you do it one place, you have to do it everywhere. Players like clever things and will search them out. Once they find a clever thing they will search for other similar or related clever things that seem to be implied by what they found and will get pissed off if they don't find them.

"Do it Everywhere" Corollary: The more detailed you make the world, the more players will want to break away from the classical molds.

Stamp Collecting Dilemma: Lots of people might like stamp collecting in your virtual world. But those who do will never play with those who like other features. Should you have stamp collecting in your world?"
We know that there are a wide range of features that people find enjoyable in online worlds. We also know that some of these features are in conflict with one another. Given the above, we don't yet know if it is possible to have a successful world that incorporates all the features, or whether the design must choose to exclude some of them in order to keep the players happy.

The quality of roleplaying is inversely proportional to the number of people playing. The higher the fee, the better the role-players. (And of course, the smaller the playerbase.)

Enforcing roleplaying: A role-play-mandated world is essentially going to have to be a fascist state. Whether or not this accords with your goals in making such a world is a decision you yourself will have to make.

Storytelling versus simulation: If you write a static story (or indeed include any static element) in your game, everyone in the world will know how it ends in a matter of days. Mathematically, it is not possible for a design team to create stories fast enough to supply everyone playing. This is the traditional approach to this sort of game nonetheless. You can try a sim-style game which doesn't supply stories but instead supplies freedom to make them. This is a lot harder and arguably has never been done successfully.

Players have higher expectations of the virtual world: The expectations are higher than of similar actions in the real world. For example: players will expect all labor to result in profit; they will expect life to be fair; they will expect to be protected from aggression before the fact, and not just to seek redress after the fact; they will expect problems to be resolved quickly; they will expect that their integrity will be assumed to be beyond reproach; in other words, they will expect too much, and you will not be able to supply it all. The trick is to manage the expectations.

Online game economies are hard: A faucet/drain economy is one where you spawn new stuff, let it pool in the "sink" that is the game, and then have a concomitant drain. Players will hate having this drain, but if you do not enforce ongoing expenditures, you will have Monty Haul syndrome, infinite accumulation of wealth, overall rise in the "standard of living" and capabilities of the average player, and thus unbalance in the game design and poor game longevity.

Ownership is key: You have to give players a sense of ownership in the game. This is what will make them stay--it is a "barrier to departure." Social bonds are not enough, because good social bonds extend outside the game. Instead, it is context. If they can build their own buildings, build a character, own possessions, hold down a job, feel a sense of responsibility to something that cannot be removed from the game--then you have ownership. If your game is narrow, it will fail. Your game design must be expansive. Even the coolest game mechanic becomes tiresome after a time. You have to supply alternate ways of playing, or alternate ways of experiencing the world. Otherwise, the players will go to another world where they can have new experiences. This means new additions, or better yet, completely different subgames embedded in the actual game.

As a virtual world's "realism" increases, the pool of possible character actions increase. The opportunities for exploitation and subversion are directly proportional to the pool size of possible character actions.
A bored player is a potential and willing subversive.

Players will eventually find the shortest path to the cheese.

Featuritis: No matter how many new features you have or add, the players will always want more. Pleasing your Players: Despite your best intentions, any change will be looked upon as a bad change to a large percentage of your players. Even those who forgot they asked for it to begin with.

Loophole Law: If something can be abused, it will be.

Murphy's Law: Servers only crash and don't restart when you go out of town.

Attention is the currency of the future. The basic medium of multiplayer games is communication.

Virtual social bonds evolve from the fictional towards real social bonds. If you have good community ties, they will be out-of-character ties, not in-character ties. In other words, friendships will migrate right out of your world into email, real-life gatherings, etc.

"The more persistence a game tries to have; the longer it is set up to last; the greater number (and broader variety) of people it tries to attract; and in general the more immersive a game/world it set out to be--then the more breadth and depth of human experience it needs to support to be successful for more than say, 12-24 months. If you try to create a deeply immersive, broadly appealing, long-lasting world that does not adequately provide for human tendencies such as violence, acquisition, justice, family, community, exploration, etc (and I would contend we are nowhere close to doing this), you will see two results: first, individuals in the population will begin to display a wide range of fairly predictable socially pathological behaviors (including general malaise, complaining, excessive bullying or killing, harassment, territoriality, inappropriate aggression, and open rebellion against those who run the game); and second, people will eventually vote with their feet--but only after having passionately cast 'a pox on both your houses.' In essence, if you set people up for an experience they deeply crave (and mostly cannot find in real life) and then don't deliver, they will become like spurned lovers-some become sullen and aggressive or neurotic, and eventually almost all leave." Violence is inevitable: You're going to have violence done to people no matter what the facilities for it in the game are. It may be combat system, stealing, blocking entrances, trapping monsters, stealing kills to get experience, pestering, harassment, verbal violence, or just rudeness.

Is it a game? It's a SERVICE. Not a game. It's a WORLD. Not a game. It's a COMMUNITY. Not a game. Anyone who says, "it's just a game" is missing the point.

Identity: You will NEVER have a solid unique identity for your problematic players. They essentially have complete anonymity because of the Internet. Even addresses, credit cards, and so on can be faked--and will be.

Jeff Kesselman's Theorem: An online universe is all about psychology. After all, there IS no physicality. It's all psych and group dynamics. Psychological disinhibition: People act like jerks more easily online, because anonymity is intoxicating. It is easier to objectify other people and therefore to treat them badly. The only way to combat this is to get them to empathize more with other players.

Mass market facts: Disturbing for those used to smaller environments, but administrative problems increase EXPONENTIALLY instead of linearly, as your playerbase digs deeper into the mass market. Traditional approaches tend to start to fail. Your playerbase probably isn't ready or willing to police itself.

Anonymity and in-game staff: The in-game staff member faces a bizarre problem. He is exercising power that the ordinary virtual citizen cannot. And he is looked to in many ways to provide a certain atmosphere and level of civility in the environment. Yet the fact remains that no matter how scrupulously honest he is, no matter how just he shows himself to be, no matter how committed to the welfare of the virtual space he may prove himself, people will hate his guts. They will mistrust him precisely because he has power, and they can never know him. There will be false accusations galore, many insinuations of nefarious motives, and former friends will turn against him. It may be that the old saying about power and absolute power is just too ingrained in the psyche of most people; whatever the reasons, there has never been an online game whose admins could say with a straight face that all their players really trusted them (and by the way, it gets worse once you take money!).

Community size: Ideal community size is no larger than 250. Past that, you really get subcommunities.

Law of Player/Admin Relations: The amount of whining players do is positively proportional to how much you pamper them. Many players whine if they see any kind of bonus in it for them. It will simply be another way for them to achieve their goals. As an admin you hold the key to many of the goals that they have concerning the virtual environment you control. If you do not pamper the players and let them know that whining will not help them, the whining will subside. In every aggregation of people online, there is an irreducible proportion of jerks.

Rewarding players: It is not possible to run a scenario or award player actions without other players crying favoritism.

Rewards: The longer your game runs, the less often you get kudos for your efforts.

Utopias: Don't strive for perfection, strive for expressive fertility. You can't create utopia, and if you did nobody would want to live there. That's it.

Some of the largest MUDs are still around. Simutronic's GemStone III and DragonRealms are still among the most popular online games. Both are text based, but have a world no other game can compare with.

Thousands of people active in the game world at any given time. A realistic working economy. A tight-knit community on thousands which frowns upon PvP combat. Houses, organizations and guilds which help, not war with each other. Hundreds of spells. Balanced items. A logical EXP system which focuses on skills, not level, which provides unrivaled game balance. Dozens and dozens of special events and quests monthly. A rich history and storyline which involves all who play. A courteous and helpful staff. Dozens of unique and complex skills. A marvelous combat system. And well... lots more!

Both of these games are FAR different from your typical MUD, and are definitely worth a try.
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Gemstone is still the most addictive game I've ever played. UO is a close second.

Love them or hate them, Simutronics has done a good job of building and maintaining text based adventure games that have managed to stand the test of time. (10+ years!) I happen to be a fan of Gemstone, but they have several other games as well. For people that enjoy MUDs, it can be rather fun, especially when there are as many as 2000 people on at any given time. Hey, I hear they use Linux too. :-)

I know this is tangential to the topic at hand, but neither Ultima Online nor Everquest "started" the MMORPG genre. They aren't even the first graphical MMORPGs.

Between 1993 and 1997, subscribers to online giant CIS and a little online system called AOL could play a text based, for profit, fantasy MMORPG called Gemstone III. After going flat-rate, AOL dumped it because far too many users connected for far too long to play Gemstone. Now Gemstone III players get along quite happily connecting directly via the internet. As far as I know, these were the first for-fee MMORPGs employing "gamemasters" to maintain the code, servers, and portray NPCs for the players. But there could have been even earlier ones, considering all the MU*s and MO*s out there... However, it was definitely the first to hit 1,000 simultaneously connected players. I was there. (And I was disgusted... I started playing when 30 players online was a huge crowd.)

Simutronics, the company who ran Gemstone, also offered several other games, all connected via gateways to several major online services. They're all still up and running, and quite fun, if you can harness enough of your imagination to abandon all the pretty graphics.

Then there was AOL's Neverwinter Nights. (Okay, it wasn't AOL's - they just hosted it.) I know little about this game, except it looked very similar to SSI's old Pools of Radiance series of single-player games, and it was multiplayer, and graphical... and offered no client for my platform at the time. (If someone knows more about the old NWN, please chime in.) Of course, if you've been paying attention at all for the past 10 months, you know that NWN will soon be reborn as the first networked virtual tabletop-style roleplaying environment.

Although I'm sure most players of EverQuest and Ultima Online have never heard of Gemstone or DragonRealms, and believe Neverwinter Nights is a brand-new title, the only innovations in these games are the pretty graphics, and perhaps some interesting server-side hacks... but the genre is an old one.

Remember that when purchasing "virtual property", such as a character account for an online game, you need to check with the owner of that game to determine their usage policies.

Long before Ultima Online went into production, a mud-style game called "GemStone III" had already experienced character and item sales. The players routinely sell their items or accounts for thousands of dollars, however due to Simutronics' [the owners of GemStone III] usage policy, they have absolutely no rights to the characters or accounts themselves. This means that at any time, the owner of the game could delete or modify the account at any time without notice to the buyer. Be very careful when paying for accounts in this manner. You have no legal rights to the data.