It has a lot of frustrating things in it. You lose EXP if you die. The quests have a maximum level you can do them at and still get credit, and the monsters are designed to be too strong to solo. Items break down over time, so you need merchants to make stuff for you. Anything not in your inventory or a safehouse chest goes poof at maintenance. Just yesterday I was doing a quest to follow a treasure map and I got the message “a gust of wind blows your treasure map away!” and I had to start over. It’s certainly hardcore in a lot of respects.

While the difficulty is challenging, what pisses me off is two things:

1. A lot of the monsters are low quality. Meaning they have weird names, and no detailed description when you look at them. They also aren’t fully simulated creatures like the player is. Meaning they don’t actually have guild levels, they don’t have skills or spells like the player does (even if it appears they do) and they don’t have mana, so they never actually run out of juice to “cast spells” (which are just a type of attack they use). That’s right spellcasting monsters don’t actually cast spells. They all roll a dice that determines what attack they use each round, and if it’s a “spell” it just types a line similar to what a spell would be, and sticks on some damage. They mimic the appearance of a character in the game but they aren’t fully formed characters like players are.

I would love to play a MUD where all the monsters and NPC’s are fully simulated and detailed!

2. The game is piecemeal and doesn’t have consistent quality in its zones. I think different people made each zone and each zone has a wildly different aesthetic. Some places will have evil monsters and demons, and be really dark and foreboding. Other places are like Wribble Village where you have to save the cute pink wribbles from the meanie blorts who are bullying them. It’s weird and breaks immersion when you visit different areas that feel like they belong in a different game entirely. What’s worse is the cutesy areas just don’t fit with the hardcore game mechanics. The game is designed to be as brutal as possible - death is painful. Your items break down, you lose progress, you’re constantly struggling. Then you have to do a quest to save cute cuddly pink things in a barney the dinosaur style level.

That said, I suffer through it because it’s an established MUD with a large playerbase, lots of online resources and documentation, has a client on Steam, and I like the character customization and multiclassing system. You feel genuinely unique with all the race class options. Different backgrounds, different guild combos. Very few other MUDs have this much character customization.