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Comments
Achaea: Achaea's biggest strength, in my opinion, has always been the size of its player base. It has enough people to supplement six organizations, it has some of the better conflict systems that I've tried to bring over in slightly different variation to other games (like Marks), and it has interesting classes, and it has ships. However, my biggest criticisms of Achaea when I've tried it over the years is that, coming from other games, there are some pretty big glaring quality of life things missing. Things like Balance Taken on a config, for example. Additionally, while I know that some folks put emphasis on role play in Achaea, it's not as "robust" as you'd find elsewhere. It's usually a lot of "pre-mote" usage with very little in the way of character development, though that may just be the Aetolian role play snob in me coming out. I will say that I've met some pretty fantastic people from Achaea though. People like @Farrah, @Mizik, and a few others that I've known in Achaea or helped out when they tried games elsewhere.
Imperian: Imperian was my first stop after I wanted to try something other than Achaea a long, long time ago and I fell in love with it. Primarily, my goal was to better myself as a PvP'er and, at the time, Achaea's PvP scene was not nearly what it is today. The classes were all very interesting (like Warden and Predator with Predator remaining my conceptually favorite class in IRE to this day), it still has my conceptually favorite org with Ithaqua, and was just an all-around fun place when it was at the peak of activity. It used to be said that if you learned how to PK in Imperian, you could go to any of the other IRE games and successfully PvP there at a high level. While that accolade probably now belongs to Achaea, it was true for Imperian back then. Imperian's PvP scene was by FAR one of the most competitive that I had ever been a part of and I look at the game rather morosely now when I see its activity.
Aetolia: My current and likely permanent stomping grounds for my IRE career. I tried Aetolia once a long time ago, made an Atabahi (Werewolf) but could never quite stick with the game. At the time, it lacked a lot of quality of life improvements, conflict systems (except for war), and the game was pretty quiet on a whole. However, when I went to Aetolia after Sentinels got their initial revamp (trading Metamorphosis for Dhuriv, which are basically dual-bladed spears) and a bunch of Imperian folk that I frequently played with decided to migrate over, I decided to give it one more shot. That 'one more shot' ended up turning into the game that I got the most emotionally invested (for better or worse) and committed a great deal of time. The war system had a very tangible, noticeable impact on the world. Wars were also 2-3 weeks of non-stop PK, so they weren't declared flippantly because of the burnout that they'd cause, but they had some pretty noticeable impacts for the orgs who'd win or lose because of territory gained/lost and the commodity production resulting from that. The role play is something engaged by both the non-PK'ers and PK'ers alike and beats a lot of dedicated RPI MUDs out there in terms of quality. I could really go on and on about Aetolia, but it's also the birth place of server side curing and other various QoL improvements that other IRE MUDs have implemented today, like quotes in emotes being colored with the config color of your says. It's not as conflict intensive, nor does it have the highest population, but we do have the 2nd highest in IRE apparently in terms of active population.
Lusternia: What started with a lot of promise for me quickly went down hill very quickly. Lusternia's biggest strength is that it dares to be different from the traditional mold of IRE. It incorporated neat mechanics like Influencing (and a third vital called Ego to go along with it), the village revolt conflict system managed to bridge non-combatants and combatants together AND it made it feel like you were growing your org. Hooowever, Lusternia has suffered massively these last few years for a variety of reasons. One, the game's PvP balance is virtually non-existent. A lot of classes suffer from immense power creep and the balance has not been adjusted for how complex systems are nowadays. Additionally, the game has six organizations (which the population could not and cannot support) with a bunch of guilds. Thankfully, the guilds are being changed (as they need to), but it might be a little too late at this point. To Lusternia's credit, they were also the first to have ships via aetherships, the planes are all very different, and the lore started out pretty neat. However, they've added a lot that can make someone just not take the lore seriously at all. Some of the items are just overly silly, over-the-top, and the plots are just hamfisted and goofy nowadays. I don't hate Lusternia, and I don't want anyone to think that I do with this post, but it has a LOT of room for improvement in a number of ways. What was once my favorite IRE game has quickly become my least favorite of the current four.
I lost a lot of hope for this game over the years, and even touching it again makes me cringe. At this point a Shallam may be the only solution.
I definitely still stand by the amazing if not best mythos and lore I have read. Robert French is a creative writer and naturally this is where he would shine....sadly not so much in othet aspects.
Along the same vein, I tried the Earthsingers in Imperian, which I found really interesting (they serve as the voices of nature) and also a good reason why I love Eleusis here on Achaea. There's so much potential left to be established and explored here, since Nature in Achaea is more than just the woods. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of people playing on Imperian when I usually log in. I think my character might have been deleted. Achaea is still the best MUD for me. Not only have I found people who login around the same time as I do, I have a bunch of people whom I am enthused to log in and play with!
I find it humorous how darkness/shadow faiths gain the most suspicion and paranoia ^^
It was a literal newbie trap. People would start playing, go "So how do I fight with this class?" and then find that the answer is "It's impossible. The best fighters in the game with L3 everything have looked over it extensively and their collective opinion is that this class is literal garbage, they should remove it from the intro, you never should have been allowed to choose it, pick a new class while you still have 90% lesson return, you seriously cannot PvP in this class even if you buy every artifact in the game", and then they quit.
By the time I quit the game Predator had been in that state for, oh, at least a few RL years. It's one of my major complaints about the production team there and one of the reasons I decided to retire. They did several full class revamps of viable professions over that time period, all while Predator sat as a completely non-viable newbie trap.
Unfortunately, I am a PKer. Can we just steel that class?
[ SnB PvP Guide | Link ]
Aetolia:
- Combatwise, the big thing here is that curing orders are static. That is to say, herbs always cure afflictions in the same order. If you have clumsiness and asthma and eat kelp, it will cure clumsiness first every time. This means that it is stupidly easy to get affliction tracking working with 100% accuracy and that means that combat is incredibly automated. Has a very mechanical feel. I'm really not a fan.
- Storywise, also not really a fan. I feel like Vampires lose something when they're brought down to the level of a player class that has to exist in a balanced PK environment, because it's hard to get that vampire terror-of-the-night thing going when they're balanced around 1v1's with everybody else. That's true for both the vampires and the non-vampires; vamps don't get to feel badass, regulars miss out on the feeling of having that horrifically powerful antagonist. Since Aetolia's billed as "the vampire IRE" it automatically fell short for me there.
- Playerwise, the feeling I get from their RP playerbase is they seem like the kind of people who enjoy the smell of their own farts. Very smug, very into five line emotes about how difficult is is to be a hero when the truth is that the 'evil' side has the same try-hard edgelord motif as Nazi Cthulhu Cultist Skeletor and 'being a hero' requires nothing more than "try not to be absolute chaotic kitten-slaying evil".
Imperian:- Combatwise: A bit overbalanced. I feel like the game's made most of the classes so complex that the average player isn't going to get real use out of them. It's like giving a soccer mom a supercar, only to have her never take it above 55 and complain about the lack of trunk space. Sure, the car is sweet as hell, but they're never gonna use 99% of the features and they'd almost certainly be happier with a decent hatchback that gets good gas mileage. They don't have static curing orders, but their classes still require a large amount of affliction tracking, at a pace that's so fast that it basically has to be automated. What happened here is that they have a small playerbase and their combat environment was dominated for so long by a small handful of A-list fighters that the game basically balanced around the A-list and neglected to leave reasonable kill paths for casual players.
- Storywise: It started out pretty good, but a decade of mediocre events has made it, well, mediocre. Huge potential here but they always managed to just fall short of it. The city of the gods rejecting magic on religious grounds could have been awesome, except they gave all the other cities gods who liked magic. Should have just given the other factions a Demonic Court and Elemental Spirits or whatever. Killed off all of the gods, which was awesome. Completely neglected to address the fact that they had an entire fucking city based on the gods, which was less awesome. Let Antioch ally with the Blood not-quite-a-God of the Orcish Horde, which was awesome. Realized that this meant that the Orcs had a chance to win events and canceled the alliance with a one line public post from the Blood God, who's been silent ever since. Designed a three-faction world specifically to avoid having one side be Chaotic Evil, only ever run events whose only two sides are things like "Release potentially world-ending hellplagues for no fucking reason at all" and "that's a horrid idea we should avoid that".
- Playerwise: I like most of the playerbase, but there's not enough of them to maintain a healthy game.
Lusternia:Haven't really played much Lusternia. Retired my Aetolian, made a character there to play with friends, got too fed up with the lack of server-side curing and the absolutely fucking stupid planar system that results in "cwho" having 2 names on it along with a tag that reads something like "Oh and 12 other people you're not allowed to see or hear, if you want to talk to people you can either trans planar or go fuck yourself".
Achaea:
It's the best of them all, largely due to a large playerbase giving it an active feeling and a living world. Also has, by far, the best production team of any of the games, in large part due to the fact that the person who does combat balance in Achaea actually knows how to fight, which doesn't really seem to be the case anywhere else, judging by the kind of stuff that gets approved/released over there.
@Nazihk Our RP'ers aren't really all that smug. Some have their cliques, sure, but we're not so self-absorbed that we won't take the time to interact with folks. The five line emotes can be definitely be common, however, depending on who is RP'ing. Combat wise, we do have static curing orders. In my experience though, people who completely automate their combat generally end up losing against some folks. The exception might be Syssin (Serpent on steroids) in its current state because... well, it's Syssin. Can make you fail on your herb eats via an affliction that operates off a separate shadow balance, hypnosis can have the same affliction repeatedly in your hypnostack, they can knock you off herb bal with the shadow balance, and just all kinds of other crazy things. Additionally, our guy who handles combat balance still maintains a system as far as I know and gets down into the trenches to test things. I'd actually go as far to say that Aetolia's combat balance is in one of the better shapes it has been in a long time with a few outliers. The game was horrendous back when the liaison system was in place because liaisons just became a massive partisan battle.