[MUD-Dev] Re: Ugh, IS Diablo a mud?

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ryan Prince [mailto:jynx_ryn at mindless.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 1998 7:16 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: Ugh, IS Diablo a mud?
> 
> However, the term MUD has come to mean a little more than it 
> used to. It now
> means something different to every person that says it. My 
> interpretation is a
> multi-player online game with a persistant world and 
> player-driven action. A lot
> of games are now multiplayer, using the internet and 
> networks, but that does not
> neccisarily make them MUDs. The key here are the terms PERSISTANT and
> PLAYER-DRIVEN. Persistant refers to something which is at 
> least INTEDED to keep
> the effects that are placed on it for the rest of it's life, 
> until something
> else changes it back. Diablo looses here because it is not 
> persistant, it is
> meant to be reset often. MUDs on the other hand are only 
> reset when a major
> addition is being tested or added or it crashed. 

Many of the early muds in fact reset the entire world, because they were
based around the concept of a scavenger hunt. You tried to gather as
many of the hunt items as you could, and drop them in a central location
to score points. You can still see remnants of this design in AberMUDs
and their descendants, including the ubiquitous town squares in
Diku-derivatives... so in fact many of the early muds were not really
very persistent.

I do like the definition though, in that it states that the difference
between a Diku and Diablo is that Dikus are not persistent because of a
code failure, and Diablo is not persistent by design.

> Player-driven means that the
> outcome of the game is based on the actions of the player. 
> Again, Diablo looses
> out, as there is only one outcome of the game unless you 
> quit, which is killing
> diablo. The fact that Diablo is so one-track percludes it 
> from me being able to
> categorize it as a MUD.

Hmm, I quite successfully played Diablo without even trying to kill the
boss monsters (what passed for a plot in the game). What about PKMud or
HoloMUD or other such single-track muds? I am quite willing to exclude
them on this basis, but I'd note that they do exist, and many count them
as being muds.

-Raph