Slashdot Mirror
Achaea Switches To Anarchaea After HD Crash
Daki writes "Achaea, the flagship text-based MUD of Iron Realms Entertainment, suffered 'a massive hardware failure', and all of the current player and world data was damaged early last Friday morning PST. After sending the damaged harddrive to a data recovery firm in Toronto, it seems as if the world of Achaea will once again be up and running by Tuesday morning at the earliest. In the interim, they decided to roll back to a week-old copy, but the info gained on this backup version will be wiped when the recovered data is loaded. This has caused the birth of a world dubbed 'Anarchaea', where rules have no meaning, the gods fry the players at request, and players are killed by homicidal butterflies and socks. During Anarchaea, the text-based MUD even reclaimed the number one spot on Top Muds, which is quite a feat."
Thanks to slashdot, they're about to suffer another massive hardware failure.
But, seriously... Until I saw this article, I had honestly thought the MUD scene was dead.
Never really ever did get into muds. Maybe once their HD is back up, I'll create a character... (who in their right mind doesn't use RAID?)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
This is the funniest thing I have read all day. The mental image is classic. That said, thats the only place you get an image, as it's text based... so I would probably just be confused. (Uh Oh.. geek street cred dropping rapidly...)
I would've tried it, but they closed to new accounts until the hdd is restored.
That said, the most interesting thing is that the MUD is commercial. Which I would presume means that all those requests for death by god are being paid for. The game sells currency which players use in game for things.
Even if Anarchaea is free, Achaea is not... which means they just got some really great free advertising. If I was them I would have a yearly "hdd crashed" special event.
script -c "cat typescript"
I remember one time, someone had a their home directory as /home and I did a normal deluser. Boy I'm glad I back my servers.
Only happens once, and you backup the rest of your life.
I'm the CEO if Iron Realms, which owns and operates Achaea and a couple other text muds. First, I realize this is a low-value news article to most of you, but we didn't submit it (one of our players did). Second, I am fairly embarassed about this whole thing. The backup problems were a result of a minor but very crucial screwup on our ISP's fault that left us without backups since February 12th.
Anyway, believe me when I say this is hardly the kind of publicity we need or want. (We've only got about 5000 users but that's plenty when you're a text mud.)
--matt
I don't see any employment links on your website.
Please forgive me Matt, I didn't mean to reflect poorly on the Company, but in the two years I have been a customer of Iron Realms, I have never once been disapointed. When the character creation is back up, I urge you all to give it a try, as it is by far the best MUD out there.
"Sure I like deadlines, I like the 'whoosh' sound they make as they fly by" - Douglas Adams
where rules have no meaning, the gods fry the players at request, and players are killed by homicidal butterflies and socks ...my kind of game! Where do I sign up?!?!
Blarf.
but...what's a MUD? Multi User Dimension, ya ya whatever, but what exactly is it? Some kind of text-based MMORPG?
MUDs are the precursor to MMORPGs.... seriously, a little googling would have turned up the answer and a more comprehensive history.
Sorry. Yeah, google...I feel even more stupid now. :-( It' late...
Anyone document this with some wicked screenshots?
I want 2D games back.
Interestingly enough, I played another mud reguraly and at a certain point there was a move with ISP's, which took a while. In the mean time an old backup was set back, with no playerfiles. It was quite popular, cause there were no rules either, it was a killing spree so to say.
To my understanding this happened before on that mud when there was a big version change.
Anyway, it makes one wonder what it is that makes this so interesting to players. Perhaps the view that it will only be temporary and therefor the loss of gear and gold is irrelevant (it would be gone after the period anyway), also the lack of rules makes it like being alone at home when you are young (party!).
Interestingly enough to think about for MUD coders (there are as much around as there are MUD players;)), but for how long will it be interesting to the players anyway? A couple of days, or a month?
Dre
This seems interesting from a psychological viewpoint. The players have effective foreknowledge of the end of their world, with the knowledge that all actions undertaken in the short while left will, ultimately, have no consequence. Result - disruption of enforced and evolved social fabric.
I wonder if this has anything to say about how society would react if we knew that we would all die in a week; or if we knew the time was about to be rolled back by a week, and would have 'never happened'.
The true judge of morality is what one does if one could never be found out; however, on the other hand, as everyone is aware that there _are_ no consequences, can there be any morality defined in this sort of situation?
Just food for thought...
The only reason they were in the lead was because of the big news about the crash...Aardwolf which isn't run by or paid for by a company has been #1 on the list for as the couple of months I've played it. I just think it's funny that a company run MUD would not be running a raid for the player files or atleast better than a weekly backup system.
such is life...
MUDs are not a precursor, they ARE MMORPGs. They just arent MMO-Graphical-RPGs. The evolution from MUDs to what you see now is just a matter of degree, there were quite a few stepping stones along the way, including games that just tacked graphics on top of the original MUD room-grid world arrangement. People like to think of UO as a first generation MMORPG, when in reality it is about 3rd gen. First came the MUDs, which back in their time could have upwards of 1000 people playing at once on a single game, then game the very first graphical games, ranging from free to pay-per-hour games on AOL and Prodigy and such. Then came the third generation which includes M59 and UO and a few other notable games. Beyond that the lines grow blurred, although I think most people will agree the next big step after UO was Everquest. Beyond Everquest real deep innovation has stopped, just small improvements hidden in a mass of failures (which, on a side note, is the same problem the RTS genre has, all the best features are lost in sub-par games, and the most popular games are simply mediocre overall).
You mean Medthievia -- for breaking the Diku license.
h tml
Weblinks:
http://tinyurl.com/2g6py
Source Code Comparison:
http://www.kavir.dial.pipex.com/med.
I don't know about you guys, but I for one can barely contain my excitement about this bit of news :-p. The MUD I've played on off and on for the past six years (http://mud.arctic.org/) has something called a "Chaos Day" every few months. Basically, it's 24 hours of noholds bars, super characters going out and having fun. Immortals will take control of dragons and fly them in to town to have a little feast. Lord Soth (Dragonlance themed MUD) will saunter in to Palanthas to spread his special brand of love and happiness etc etc. It's nothing new, although it is fun. My suggestion to the Iron Realms folks is rather than doing it when your system FUBAR's, why not make it a special day for your player base once a year or so. It can be a little thank you for their support, plus it's a fun way to blow of steam and tension. There's nothing like killing your own clanmate who has been pissing you of for the past three months :)
I thought most MUDs didn't qualify as being truly "massive" until not long before the graphical jazz started coming out. I was under the impression that most systems could only handle a couple of hundred users simultaneously, but maybe that's because I never played pay-to-play MUDs like Gemstone or anything.
oh well. stolen code isn't stopping people from using Linux, why should it stop me from playing a game I enjoy?
and youre saying a couple of hundred isnt massive? where do you draw the line? a lot of Everquest servers often have less than 1000 people playing on them.