Comment by viccis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by viccis | Hacker News Reader

Ah I remember playing this one. My first MUD/MUSH was Elendor. Looks like it went down in the last year or so. RIP

Aardwolf was fun, though I remember my big gripe was that it had a bunch of weird little themed zones like the Star Trek and Wizard of Oz ones that felt a little hokey to have in there. These days it wins solely by virtue of being one of the few that's still populated and free.

When I tried to go back to the Simultronics ones (Gemstone IV and Dragon Realms), not only was it a ghost town, which made random interactions almost stressful because you feel like two people walking past each other in a ghost town, but they have double, triple, and quadrupled down on squeezing their whales for every cent. A lot of people playing that game are paying $50-100 a month or more, and even normal players have to cough up more than the base $15 a month subscription if they want more than 1 character (!!!). Looks like their website has been stripped of all its cool character too. Shame.

These games in their heyday were truly a one of a kind experience. All of the weird online socializing you see people getting on platforms like Discord, but all wrapped up around a fun RPG game that felt so much more flexible and imaginative than other online games at the time.

Elendor is up? telnet mush.elendor.net 1893

https://discord.gg/H8Xr3UF - is a discord server people migrated to.

Thanks for pointing that out. I saw reports that the telnet endpoint was down and didn't think to check.

I spent far far too much time on Elendor in the 90's and early 00's.

Wow, I'd visit play.net from time to time to get that nastalgic dopamine hit. Sad to see that's gone.

LLMs could really make this genre incredible. Too bad they probably don't have the funding to do something with it.

No, they could not actually.

The important thing is to relate to other humans and to be sure of what kind of human you're interacting with: the creators of the game or other players.

The staleness that actually "shipping once"[0] gives is precisely the space where human player creativity grows and thrives in.

---- [0] I understand you can get the similar results and better base games if you patch things occasionally, but constant patches[1] hides the jank and repetitiveness with novelty.

[1] And dynamically creating "content" with LLMs is like a constant stream of patches.

How would they? LLM can generate content, sure, but do MUDs need more content?

Yes.

A new MUD needs a way to build several thousand rooms, mobs, items, etc. LLMs can help with that process, though I wouldn’t trust them alone with things like balance.

Similarly, existing MUDs adding new areas need hundreds of rooms, mobs, items, etc. In my experience MUDs tend to stagnate when there’s no new content for long time players.

Some of the coolest MUDs I played in had effectively only two useful rooms, and no mobs or items to really speak of. They were barely more than a couple of IRC chat rooms, but with the ANSI colors support and complex script languages a MUD Engine directly over telnet could provide to a good MUD client.

There were far more genres of MUDs than just the Diku-style ("EverQuest-like", to use as analogy the graphic MMO that took a lot from the Diku-style of MUD) that needed to be "endless" content farms of mobs and items and new areas full of more mobs and items.

But also many of the fan favorite Diku-style MUDs were procedurally generated and no one was actually building all those thousands of rooms/mobs/items by hand even then. In theory you could use an LLM as a part of procedural generation process, but that's not the kind of content I would have wanted from a good MUD at the time I was heaviest playing MUDs. (But then I also didn't play many Diku-style/Diku-inspired MUDs, either. I was more on the Socializer side of things at the time.)

I mostly played “Everquest-like” ones.

I’ll admit YMMV and my comment should’ve been better scoped — but it sounds like you’re not disagreeing that for those, LLMs are useful in the way I suggested.

Keep your AI slop out of my human-crafted adventures, please.

If you want an LLM-created text adventure, by all means, go and enjoy that yourself. I want no part of it.

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