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Achaea Switches To Anarchaea After HD Crash

Posted by simoniker on from the looting-panic-death dept.

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."

6 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Lets try this again by moosesocks · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Lets try this again by b0r0din · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There's no pretty much. The MUD scene is dead.

      I used to play MUDs a lot. And by a lot I mean the fail out of college type. But this doesn't really seem like news to me. Sure, it's nerdy. But this sort of thing happens to MUDs all the time, and there are about 1000 of them, and aside from its mild popularity, it's about a maintenance window. Equipment failures, bad HDD, etc, that's not news. IMPs going and making a crazy server for a week, that's not news either. I remember when we were switching over to new code on a game I used to play, he made a non-PK mud PK, and gave people all kinds of weapons and NPCs were switched into and killing people. That was a lot of fun. But I wouldn't announce it as news. So I guess for about 10 people who care, you just made their day :)

      But just for the record, who here still actively plays? And who doesn't? Who did?

    2. Re:Lets try this again by 0x0d0a · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Okay, clearly you're running a commercial venture, and there are clearly players that like your style. I'm not trying to bash your approach.

      However, I kind of liked having five to maybe twenty players active at any given time on MUDs I've played. It meant that you could know just about everyone that played.

      That being said, I'm sure there's something to be said for having a virtual city...

      --
      May we never see th
  2. Updates to my Post by daki · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  3. Apocalyptic visions? by thesp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:Apocalyptic visions? by AMystery · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Interesting, I have observed some of these same tendancies in people. I thnk it is more about the escape from normalicy when there is a lack of control. When we have strange things going on, there are others who join in just because it is different. Its a mini vacation in a way, i doubt if the deadline was longer than a week, that they would continue to act in the same manner. I've only tested it for a few hours though.

      I am a "god" on another mud shameless Barren Realms plug and while reading this, it sounded a lot like what we do when we are bored. We are free so there is really nothing to lose besides time. I often kill people because they want it. I don't know Achaea's death system though so I don't know if it had any major penalties, for us it just means you have to walk back to your corpse and get your stuff again.

      As for the giant butterflies, I usually have the vorpal bunny taunt people, although its a bit weak to actually kill anyone out of diapers:) There are some very powerful sheep, maybe I should go sic them on someone. Hmm...its 5:30, not many witnesses around...

      And just in case anyone is reading this, particularly any of my fellow imms. We are a very friendly mud and pride ourselves on community, but like any community, we enjoy having a good time and playing with eachother.

      Oh, this reminds of a time I tried one of my friend's muds and had no idea how the consideration system worked so I didn't understand the message that said that if I attack that hummingbird I would die a quick and painful death. Getting killed by a hummingbird is not the way I want to go.