A little irrelevant, but I need to vent about something MUD adjacent.

I really wish MUDs were still a thing. The text-based roleplaying communities were largely swallowed by Discord, where as before they existed scattered over proboards, jcink, and a few others.

Discord, being the imperfect text platform, limits the text and leaves most interaction limited by awkward formatting. To boot, even when a better ecosystem is invented, players refuse to give it a shot even if directly invited, because they got comfortable with Discord's terribleness.

It's so frustrating, and I don't know how to voice it, or even what can be done.

MUDs never disappeared. People stopped finding them engaging enough to use. Blaming Discord reverses the causality. MUDs lost engagement long before disco was created. People congregate on disco because it offers a more compelling social interface, even if it lacks the depth of a persistent game world. The opportunity I'd draw from this isn’t to convince people to return to older and less engaging interfaces. It’s to build persistent roleplaying systems around the interaction modes that have proven to be more engaging already. Potentially combine voice, speech recognition, text, tts, and synthesized characters with a proper world simulation underneath. If roleplaying communities already gather in disco, then deliver the experience where they already are. The interface was always irrelevant to what made MUDs fun anyway. Imagination and connecting with other people was always the thing.

I agree with you. You've also got more / easier competition. IIRC, MUDs peaked in the mid-late 90s. MMOs were really the death knell, then the explosion of other types of games, mobile games, then to your point things like Discord.

One adjacent project we're exploring for the future is if you took all of the current understanding of game design and mechanics with modern AI functionality, knowledge bases, etc, and built a MUD, what would it look like and would it be enough to bring back players from other games?

Simutronics is has been running and developing Gemstone and DragonRealms for 30+ years and counting. The communities are about 400-1000 players each. They've embraced microtransactions (in the form of quarterly events), but both games are entirely playable without participating in that aspect.

With modern technology, training in both games is very automatable. But developing and optimizing your training routines is (in my opinion) incredibly fun. Actual roleplaying is less common it was in the 90s, but there are still nightly events where dozens of players will get together to socialize and explore the worlds in-character.

Technically MUDs still are a thing, there's a good number still running. Though sounds like you don't really just want a MUD where you want to go out mobbing but a more social thing (but not IRC?).

I suspect MUDs may have a bit of a resurgence soon, I've seen more and more interest in them as of late simply because they seem like an excellent pairing with LLMs which easily consume text. Though I think for your needs someone would need to work on the barrier to entry to getting on a MUD as well as the modern UI/UX expected today.

MUDs are still kicking around and if you'd like to play in one you'll find a few solid communities with good engagement that would love to include you. They're in an odd spot though since MUDs existed in two sorts of categories 1. I really want to adventure and text is the only way to do that (these sorts died off to MMOs) and 2. I want to roleplay - those survive but the mechanical portions of those games are becoming more and more irrelevant as new games are constantly supplying better systems and mechanisms than MUDs were able to.

This leaves MUDs in a weird place since things like MUSHes generally have most of the roleplaying tools without as much weird code for attacks and PVP interactions being involved so I've seen those thrive more recently.

They aren't all gone. E.g. this is a mud I've played on occasionally for the last 30 years: https://theforestsedge.com/

The MUD I play (Aardwolf) averages about 200 players online at any time, but it's effectively dead as a MUD. There's very little player interaction, which is what made MUDs special originally. Part of this is that nearly all multiplayer features have been abandoned, and the rest of the features are centered around loot box equivalent features. Despite this, there are a couple hundred people who seem to enjoy the gamification. The MUD is highly optimized for scripting, so it scratches the side project programming itch for me.

> even what can be done.

I think this could be solved with bridge bots to make your MUD multiplatform. You could have a dedicated web app, an IRC bridge, a Discord bridge, etc.

Discord-brained users can still use your MUD and contribute to network effects, and you can provide an off-ramp ("I just want to play VarelionScape, maybe I'll just open the dedicated website on my phone instead of going on Discord and digging through the server list").

Fully agree here. I love MUDs. The shear level of creativity that you can have in an MUD is practically infinite, and MUDs are just so fun to play in general. Especially when you start adding in triggers and sound packs and all that

> Discord, being the imperfect text platform, limits the text and leaves most interaction limited by awkward formatting.

I don't think I understand your meaning here. I'd much rather use Markdown than BBCode or related.

I have a pile of ideas and not enough time to get to them all, but one of them is the opposite direction. Embrace Discord, and build a MUD whose social systems are funneled through it.

Mine is still running

> telnet playlom.com 4000

Owe my programming skills to it, and also dropping college, only to start a company later.

discworld mud (any many others) ase still totally worth playing

They're still a thing

> I really wish MUDs were still a thing.

About 15 years ago, for a while I ran a MUD over AX.25, because MUDs aren't nerdy enough on their own, and amateur radio - even packet radio - isn't nerdy enough on its own.

All three of us that used it found it pretty entertaining.

>I really wish MUDs were still a thing.

They aren't as popular as they once were, but they are still out there. One of the hardest-core OG muds, Armageddon Mud (which was based on the Dark Sun world) recently went down, but the founders have been working on a new reboot with a totally new code base. Looks interesting (I played the original but have no connection with the MUD itself). They are aiming to launch BETA in the relatively near future if anyone wants to check it out.

https://www.zalanthas.org/

There are also some OG muds still chugging along after 30+ years, like the hardcore PVP mud Duris:Land of Bloodlust. The player base has dwindled mightily over the years but people still play and it is a load of fun to explore, if MUDs are your thing, as it incredibly expansive having been in active development for decades.

https://www.durismud.com/

You would probably like my project https://github.com/timbran-project/moor

ssh to late.sh

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49001127