Welcome to MUD2!

I'd never heard of a MUD two years ago but then again I'd also never heard of Dclxvi, Serenety, Astral, Foz, Jesstar, Syl, Benny or Maverick two years ago either. "Why play MUD?" you probably ask. Well I read about it in a magazine, downloaded and played it. I'm one of those rare creatures who went onto Wireplay to play MUD, now that doesn't happened often!

MUD did not surprise me with its text graphics; I was in no way startled or shocked. I remember whiling away office hours playing Adventure, in my mind one of the best games of all time. The thing that did surprise me was the sheer scale of it all. People had spent years of their lives with the game, seen it evolve, seen it grow. Many of them knew each other better than they knew some of their friends. They'd spend hours of their life playing this one game, I thought only of two things, "How sad," and "What's so great about the MUD thing anyway?" People talked to me, "You wanna do icons or dwfs?" but three letter words went straight past me. I can't remember my first game well; I was too busy worrying about my phone bill. I think one of the first things I did was attack a mage with my novice, no one came leaping to my aid identifying me as the newbie I so obviously was. A fact that I'd like to think has changed, well on the mortal side of things.

I felt isolated, alone. I just sat there while chatty comments between people that knew each other passed comments on Pk'er and PP. I tried to butt in but was shaken off quickly; by this time I had grasped the basic concepts of the game, well movement, killing things and in a vague kind of way swamping things. I never thought of typing in obscure commands such as INFO or TOURS. This had to be told to me by the only newbie helper I could find at the time, a nice guy called Mortex (who sadly doesn't seem to play anymore).

The truth was that I was already an addict, I had to find out more about this game and I'd like to think I still am learning more about the game now as a slightly more experienced player. Using the Wireplay Client, facing a world of acronyms and abbreviations it's not easy being a newbie but you have to cope, I always look back at newbies now and look at their often unstoppable attitude, it's always sad to see yet another play beaten by the system and quit after their first game.

It's pretty difficult to teach yourself MUD but I tried to do my best, but I must say this cannot and must not be the only available option to new players. Suggestions for newbie help should always be considered with great care because they are, at times, more important to the game than wizzes themselves. The game also relies on people to help the newbies; my first few sets (not that I called them that) were wanders aimlessly, often killing things like the man and the banshee as a protector.

Being a newbie I died, I died a lot. But I LOVED it, that's right I liked dying. Maybe more than that there was something there, something that had been missing in my life all along - MUD. The mausoleum puzzles were soon stuck to the fridge, maps hung on the walls and there were many important tasks to be worked out. I will never be as amazed at a computer game again as I was on that first day, two years ago when I played MUD.