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."

Comments

Hilarious

[Nutcase]

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.

Re:Updates to my Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, it's ok. I know you did it with the best of intentions. It IS our fault that we weren't using a RAID array and that we trusted our ISP to handle the backups for us and while we wouldn't shy away from admitting that I would just rather not have broadcast it to the wider world. ;)

Seriously though, don't worry about it.

--matt

Re:Updates to my Post

[shadowcabbit]

Y'know, this is just a personal view here-- I haven't played a MUD in at least a year-- but the stance you guys are taking (ie turning a bad situation into something entertaining and attractive) is one I'd dearly love to see in more companies. I'd love for, say, Square-Enix to give players gil in their other games when the main FFXI server goes down for maintenance. But you guys did something really unique and interesting with what would otherwise be a major disaster. Good job.