I've been playing Medievia since 2006. Medievia was the first MUD I had ever played, and while I have tried others, nothing compared to Med. Everything about Medievia is perfect: the quests, the trading, the catacombs, the Mudslinger (I'm a reporter), the Learn Module, my fellow Avatars-Medievia offers something for anyone from a brand new player to an experienced hero.

Nothing else is Medievia. Zones are being updated and revamped for players of all levels (visit The Great Tree for a new and fantastic low-level dagger!), new autoquests are appearing to challenge players and as always, the Medievia staff is as warm and welcoming as ever.

Want to wander the roads of Medievia with a covered wagon, battling haunted forests and evil centaurs on your way to make millions of gold in a trading post? Battle epic sea serpents on the oceans? What about slaying deep sea creatures for magical fae and fame? You can do all that and more in Medievia.

So, what are you waiting for? Are you a healing cleric, a powerful mage, a brutal warrior or a sneaky thief? Pick your class and come join us in Medievia! You'll never find anything else like it online. Take it from an Avatar-God who 7 years ago had never played a MUD in my life. Medievia is unique and very, very special!

I started playing Medievia in 2001. I've watched the game grow up for the last 10 years, and all the players too. Of all of the other muds that I have explored, Med is the most comprehensive of them all.

There is a community of people and a closeness that is unrivaled by any other game. There are so many things to do on Medievia, to explore and to try that after 10 years, I still have not done 'everything' in medievia.

Vryce and his staff keep adding new things to try! Log in, look for me, Kwexania, and I will take you on a little tour of what we are all about! It isn't something you will ever regret.

Medievia in the 1990s was one of the foremost MUDs (in terms of popularity). The current playerbase appears to be predominantly from the mid-2000s: there are few real new players in the game anymore, and also only a few older players. The size of the playerbase is dramatically reduced from 500+ online at peak times a decade ago, to 100 or so now.

There were two keys which made this MUD special at one time: balance and the size and activity of the playerbase. Medievia traditionally attracted a strong gamer element, role-play was never wide-spread, and the emphasis was on skilled combat, singly or in groups. Unfortunately this is how Medievia was, not how it is. I want to try to explain why later.

The game at present consists of a handful of activities. Exping is still a major activity, although it now takes very little time to reach maximum level with help (a month at most). Most players now have many maximum level characters. Multi-level requirement means you will also need to perform several other kinds of tasks to level.

You will need to do AutoQuests: incredibly tedious 'fetch this, visit that mob' trivia hunts that are accomplished by looking them up in Internet databases. This feature is essentially a very poor copy of another game's excellent quests. You may need to do trade runs, which means running through hundreds of almost identical rooms between two places, occasionally being overwhelmed by very poorly coded AI swarms. You may need to go to the catacombs, a vast six level, thousand room or more zone in which 'eggs' load on the ground and mobs. Unfortunately, almost all the rooms are from one of a handful of patterns (seeing a theme here?) and there are quite a few special procedures to make this search frustrating rather than enjoyable.

Medievia promotes its dragons heavily. They come in three varieties. There are dragon taxis, which you hail by typing 'call' and which for a fee will slowly (unless you pay dollars for a speed-up) take you to most places in the game. There are wilderness dragons which may attack and kill you out of nowhere if you are outside a zone (unless you hail a dragon taxi for more money, which can double as your savior here). Finally there are lair dragons, which provide more points for leveling, usually require 14-18 players to attempt, and the experience of which is mostly pages of spam as you fight and or die without what you do making much difference.

There are several other features Medievia has added in recent years. Shipping was a much heralded new feature to allow sailing on Medievia's oceans. Originally envisaged with piracy and trading, perhaps involving skill and teamwork, it rapidly devolved into one person sitting solo at sea for five or six hours shooting 'serpents' (more poor AI mobs) with ship ammunition and winning 'fae': a new class of stat the game invented which can now be had by the billions. After all, bigger numbers means more fun?

Underocean was a new idea, fancifully described as a first person perspective raytraced display (in text). What this means is you have an incredibly spammy ugly display as though you are looking through the water at letters. With practice, you can read the display, and if you can overcome the many remaining bugs, you find that incredible amounts of money and, yes, fae are available if you have 10-12 hours free to fight more poor AI mob swarms, of a handful of different types.

Adversary is a MUD within a MUD. Billed as a PK fragfest with disposable characters, it was hyped for several years before its release. It was the first big failed new feature, and the pattern was informative. It was a zone with no mobs, a lot of new spam (a 'listen' channel that tells you who is around you, totally broken by the fact that it takes no account of walls and floors). The equipment that loads is poor and hard to become excited about. Death is permanent, and you start as a low level where anyone can log in a saved maximum level to kill you. When it turned out people didn't want to play, the playerbase was bribed with quest points in huge numbers to do it anyway.

The real story of Medievia over the last few years has been poorly designed and poorly implemented new features in which the playerbase had little or no interest. The initial negative reaction was met with freezes and gags, and an unbalancing system of rewards set up to bribe people to use it anyway. Thus gold is almost worthless now because of shipping and underocean, and the easiest source of quest points isn't questing, it's sitting in adversary with a friend, without any risk or skill being needed.

The old features do in part remain. Chaotic player killing allows the stealing of equipment after a kill, and was a mainstay of older and more experienced players (just killing each other with nothing at stake becomes tedious after a while). The introduction of delevelling on death in CPK chased a lot of players away, because it forces the people who want to fight most to spend most time doing things they don't want to do, like exping, trading, egging and so forth.

Medievia has many excellent zones available to a hero player, although only a tiny fraction of the playerbase at any one time knows their way around the top end zones. More common is for 4-8 semi-afk sheep to be dragged from one equipment mob to the next by a 'leader'. This is what is meant in Medievia by an 'eq run'. For the few players who learn them however, these zones can be a worthwhile source of entertainment. Due to the tweak system (items don't always have the same stats when looted) and the deterioration system (items only last 6 months to a year at most) there is a constant demand to run equipment zones.

This has so far been about Medievia from a technical aspect. The bigger problem for Medievia is that it has always had problems with its immortals. Accusations of cheating in a MUD like this are always going to be rife, when it caters primarily to a gamer crowd. However there have undoubtedly been serious incidents of cheating over the years. More troubling still is the disdain with which players are treated by the staff.

To understand the reason this is significant, you should realize that Medievia is not free to play. A typical maximum level character ('hero') is an investment of hundreds of dollars of someone's money. This can be taken away on a whim; for cursing, for insulting an immortal while drunk, for using a feature that turned out to be a bug, for criticizing a change, for complaining that your friend was just deleted. All of these can and do regularly result in the loss of your character permanently. Medievia now charges up to $50 per character to have them restored, no matter how unfair or unreasonable the original deletion was.

In an almost unheard of step, Vryce (Medievia's owner) has instituted an enclave system whereby he hand picks players to provide feedback. Anyone else providing feedback risks a gag or a purge. Players in this enclave are removed if they provide feedback he doesn't like. It's important to understand that Medievia will take your money, but that no-one at the top plays or has played the game in a long time. And absolutely no-one wants to know what the players think.

The vast majority of the people I have known have been purged. Some made more characters, to spend time with the friends they made in game rather than to play it. Some did not.

Be warned, playing Medievia almost certainly means losing friends, time and money. Once, it was a good enough game that that could be ignored. Today it certainly is not.

Incidentally, this submission is anonymous because it is understood that criticizing Medievia publicly results in forfeiting one's characters. Conversely, had this review been positive, I would have been entitled to in-game rewards. Read anything on the subject of Medievia sceptically.

At one time, this mud was one of the best out there. It was large, had many different zones to enjoy and had a unique setting to make it far different than a standard Moo or Circle or even heavily modified version of either.

No Longer. The best parts of the game have been tampered with and made pointless. Catacombs of Toshi is just one of many. Toshi was one of the best areas for a Solo player to go and level up, collect gear, and otherwise relax, it was difficult but also very well built in terms of varying Monsters and loot. Now it has a level restriction which makes it impossible to play after a certain point.I have played this mud for 16 years, with a few times of being away for about 6 months or so because of work. Since the last time I played, they have ruined the greatest mud ever built.

It is a sad day indeed when you can no longer enjoy a game because the Moderators have totally ruined it.

I know there's a lot of controversy surrounding this mud (no, I'm not going to post any links to taint the review; curious readers can go look stuff up themselves and draw their own conclusions), but I thought new players would find it helpful to read a more /neutral/ review. In other words, I'm attempting to give something that's neither hater-spam from disgruntled players/people who don't like the mud (so no hate posts please!), or unequivocal praise from someone who's played years of Med and nothing else (obviously such players will love any MUD they've sunk so much time into, no matter how good it actually is, and I tend to find such reviews unhelpful since those players tend not to play other MUDs regularly). I've spent significant amounts of time in three MUDs and tried dozens of others off and on, so that's about where I'm coming from.

First, dispelling the hype: 1. The website says 1000s of players play, but realistically, you're looking at about 50 players off-peak and a little over 100 on peak times. Maybe they're referring to all the players who've ever played, since it's their policy never to delete inactive players... In that case, 1000+ could be true, given the age of Medievia. Med's social scene is pretty quiet though, given the small player base, compared to other MUDs which have bigger player bases and are chattier.

2. Med is definitely big, but most of the millions of rooms they advertise are admittedly a few default 'wilderness' rooms copied and pasted over and over again. As far as unique areas go, they're about average in number compared to other MUDs that have been around a similar number of years. However, the areas that they DO have are nicely rendered with ASCII maps, and many of the areas have exploring objectives so that a solo player can have a list of things to do when looking at an area for the first time. (I wasn't a big fan of the time limit though, since that kinda defeats the purpose of taking your time exploring an area.) The mobs, objects, and room descriptions are not all that detailed or unusual, if you're into that sort of thing (mobs don't really interact with you, objects are stock).

3. The thing that initially drew me to Med was their advertisement of a unique 'DM' mechanism that adjusts your gameplay based on how you're doing in the game. Basically what the DM does is send a whole bunch of mobs your way while you're traveling, so that it's not totally predictable going from point A to point B. Don't get me wrong, hack n'slash can be fun, but I was hoping for something more than just encountering more agros (e.g., I would have preferred encountering more intelligently scripted, interactive mobs than just getting more mobs to kill). I don't think that's a fault of Medievia though; I think I was simply misled by the 'DungeonMaster' name because I associated that with DM-ing in D&D (e.g., a real-life DM would create more conflict/interest for his/her players by creating a storyline or launching a quest, rather than just sending more waves of stuff to kill). There wasn't any RP-ing on the MUD that I saw, so events like that kind of feel like more mobs to kill rather than part of a story.

Second, the good bits: 1. Newbie startup is really easy, with no races, four classes. I tend to agree with Med's philosophy on this, that tons of classes and races don't really add anything to mudding. Although the newbie channel was kinda dead while I was starting out, there are experienced players (called 'avatars') that answer questions quickly and courteously. A big plus, considering how intimidating MUDs can be to those of us who haven't grown up with them!

2. Dragon transportation makes traveling between areas easy (comparable to flight masters in WoW, except you can call a dragon anywhere); plus you don't have to memorize elaborate directions and speedwalks just to get somewhere.

3. There's a lot of cool features coded in to support a potentially rich clan life. As a concept, clan towns seem like a really cool idea. There's several of them, and several active clans, but during the time I was there and looking for a clan, it seems like some of the old clans are no longer active (or at least I couldn't really find active players online). I would have loved to have seen the clan features in action that the site talks about, but I didn't see a lot of clan activity. I think the infrastructure and potential is there, but the active player base is not. Maybe the way to go would be to consolidate and have fewer clans with more active players, but obviously that's the players' judgment call, rather than anything the MUD admins can change. I also wish there were more player-run politics (more than just voting for two representatives who give feedback to the gods), like some other MUDs with player-run social structures but I don't think that detracts from the good potential features that are already there.

4. One of the touches of realism I like is the weather and catastrophe system. Scouting out the weather affects your gameplay significantly; not paying attention to storms can literally kill you (e.g., if you're in a firestorm and you're a spellcaster in the middle of a fight). Catastrophes can affect large areas, and it also has the effect of setting profitable prices on stores in the area so you can trade to earn gold (the game's way of seeding money to the player economy).

Last, I admit I'm not experienced enough of a player to figure out whether bloodlines are a cool idea or not. Basically, you can have two kids per fully-developed character, and kids of the next generation get some bonuses, up to five generations. Think of this as having alts that you can legitimately give away (or you can grind up the alts yourself), and the more generations (up to 5), the more benefits your original character can gain. (Compare with Granado Espada or MapleStory's family systems for rough analogies.) I'm not aware of whether bloodline affect gameplay in another way, and from discussions, it seems like there's mixed feelings on whether its effects are too easily canceled out by more easily gotten boosts through donation equipment, but that part of the debate always seemed silly to me, since if you're a player who's stuck around long enough to have a five-generation bloodline, you probably are hooked enough to the game to spend a couple hundred dollars in donation eq anyway (which is not necessary until after reaching level 124, where all that's left is competition with other players, when you need to face others with donation eq to win battles and titles). I kind of got bored of the game before reaching that point, so I never got the point where spending $ was necessary to be competitive.

In short, there's a lot of creative new ideas added to a classic MUD concept, but there probably needs a more active player base and/or a more social climate to put those good ideas to actual use. In a way, I wish Med wouldn't oversell itself so much (e.g., not advertise that it has 1000s of players, or take credit for 'game features never before seen' when the average Internet player who has experience with other MUDs or MMORPGs out there will probably have seen similar features)... because it doesn't /need/ to resort to overselling itself or stretching out claims to stand on its own on features it DOES have. (I also think the do you DARE enter?[!?!?!?!!!!] ad campaign is super-cheesy :P) Overselling is just never a good idea, because once people find out some of the claims were exaggerated or untrue, they undervalue the actual things the game /does/ have to offer.

Conclusion: Kind of underwhelming because of the unnecessary hype. Several cool features, but realistically probably needs a more active player base to work.

I began my first mudding experience as a diversion from the tedious work I had at hand to get my house ready to sell and to get ready to move. The makers of Medievia have made a fascinating online world that remains out of reach for the new player, however.

The game claims to be friendly to new players, but most of the game remains closed off to a new player, even after a month of intense gameplay. One must attain 'hero' status to even begin to enjoy this game.

My time in Medievia was not only a frustrating 'gaming' experience, but perhaps one of the most frustrating experiences of my adult life. It finally occurred to me that the game did achieve something very profound.

It allowed me, a white American male, to experience discrimination for the first time as a low-level character in a world of petty 'gods'.

I am a newbie to medievia. So according to many people I am at a 'severe disadvantage' All I can say is What?

As a new player I have been given help by everyone I asked. I started out as Shonjir a warrior and quickly was able to get the basics of trading down and level up to 21. At that time I, as a new player, was offered a bloodline Character named Roloch.

A bloodline is a feature where after leveling up to 124 you can create up to 2 children. The more generations under you, the faster you regen. You may play your own children or, as many players do, give these characters away to other players. This made it much easier for me, not harder. I was tutored through all the aspects of Med that I was ready for.

Obiously there are some non-newbie aspects and that is a good thing not a bad. If everything was so easy you could do it as a newbie what would you do as a higher level player? These aspects provide a longer lastng gameplay that can keep you going without becoming tedious.

Then there is Donation Eq. where if you donate money to keep Medievia running you are given Boosted Equipment. I dont know enough about it to judge, but it seems to me to simply be a more reliable way to keep this popular game going and to pay the bills than relying on people's generosity with straight out donations. Plus this way when you make a donation you get recognition for it.

Plainly put I like Medievia and if you have the chance you should try out Medievia and judge for yourself.

Quite possibly the worst stable mud I have EVER had the misfortune of connecting to. Every 10 mins tops it would die. It's a wonder a mud this unstable makes it to 4 on the rankings. While it seemed a somewhat interesting mud, the stability rendered it a most unpleasant experience. New players looking for a new mud, look elsewhere, you'll thank yourself later.

I'm a newbie to Medievia, and apparently chose a difficult first class (Warrior). Despite the difficulty of being pretty new and not very good at pressing buttons and typing the right thing when I need to (doh! don't kick *that* gnome, kick the *other* gnome! Uhm, uh oh... where's the escape potio ... n ... er, well, never mind *sigh*).

I've found the community in-game and on discussion boards to be friendly and helpful. The number of players logged-in during the early morning (eastern US time) and during the evenings is staggering to me. Just this morning I made level 21 and was the lowest level character online of over 100 players *laugh*

There are over 500 zones and 4 *million* rooms. I don't know how much of that is stock and wilderness, but the game has a handy feature to suggest zones for a given level, level range, or party, and it always lists about 20-30 zones for me when I ask. The puzzles are great (some of the zones are mostyl MOB-free; they're just puzzles) and there's so much to do. Yeah, it's not a game a newbie (well, at least, not a newbie like me) is going to learn quickly, but learning a new game, its mechanics, its geography, its people, and its inhabitants, is part of the fun, isn't it?

I also like that I don't have to be involved *at all* in PK if I don't want to be.

Two thumbs up!

Imagine starting as a single class, and then eventually moving on to further adventures in this world of swords, magic, mayhem, and dragons. Creating your own bloodline or even somehow become a legend in your own right.

The game is full of wonderful things to offer such as clans, towns, fighting dragon in lairs, adventure on the high seas. The options are endless.

Master all four life paths of Cleric, Warrior, Thief, and Mage to become an immortal Hero and then go one to fight in legendary wars that players talk about or live the war itself or fightthe mob factions from afar in what is now in Medievia V.

The lines of Order and Chaos have been drawn, what side of the war will you enter into in this game? Step in if you dare...

Imagine flying around on a friendly dragon or forming up to go slay an evil one! Running through the Catacombs fighting off creatures, all for its precious eggs! Running after, or from, enemies in the player kill areas! No matter what it is that attracts people to MUDs, Medievia has it and much much more!

As a veteran of Medievia since 1992 I have seen its many changes and transformations. Though Medievia stands in a category of its own, as the best mud ever created, and though changes are added sometimes daily, Medievia is always the place I will call home. To me Medievia is like my home and my best friend all at once.

Medievia goes far beyond the Mudding worlds I have seen in passing. With its dragonlairs, serpents, npk, cpk, clans (in which I have been blessed to lead a few of), friendships, and many wonderful and creative zones, one could never get bored. It’s a constantly changing MUD that always adds more to do, however still allows you to do the parts of the game you love most.

In the many years of playing Medievia, I have made unbreakable friendships and met many wonderful and interesting people. There are also fun activities for holidays or just no occasions at all. There are many of zones for all types of gamers, from the player killing to the exploring type, Medievia has you covered.

Vryce (the owner of Medievia) and all the other Gods are warming and wonderful and know how to make you feel at home. There are players that volunteer to be 'Avatars' that help new players learn the game as well. Easy to learn and fun to play, Medievia definitely gets my free time. So check it out, and bring your friends too!

Excellent game. First rate entertainment if you enjoy an intelligent 'reading' game versus a 'point and shoot.'

Come play with us.

Enter Medievia, realm of excitement and dynamic monsters. Medievia is anything but a mere game. Medievia is a world, with players from across the globe enjoying it. Through gaining experience, traversing the catacombs in search of special eggs, to venturing into the bowels of the earth, the lairs of dragons and other fanciful creatures. Traverse the continent in search of gold by other means, in the form of trade runs. Here we see one of Medievia's greatest strengths: its large array of MOB FACTIONS. Some help players, while others seek to hinder them. Travel from one city to another with your covered wagon, but beware, lest the very forests themselves reach out to steal your freight. Search the corpses of monsters for scrolls that will lead you on quests to kill, to find, or both!

Most of all, new players will find themselves welcome with open arms by the many clans that help make up Medievia. Will you join a clan devoted to attacking other players? Or will you join clans devoted to helping new players grow and thrive in this mystic realm, in MEDIEVIA.

I first started playing Medievia in 1996. It was a great game, and I really enjoyed the PK (Player Killing) quests. However, all the balance was taken out due to the greed of its owners. I hope this review will be helpful to anyone thinking about playing Medievia.

How much does Medievia cost to play? Well, you can play it for free. Most players, however, pay for equipment and items. Medievia allows a player to “donate” for items such as talismans ($75 each) that increase a players hitpoints and damage roll. There are quite a few “donation” items that one can buy. How much does a typical medievia player “donate?” I do not know of any hero (max level character) that does not have at least two talismans. Your typical Medievia hero has at least two talismans, an aura, a focus, and a pocket. That comes to $250. Every “donation” item besides talismans have a shelf life of one year. So in addition to the $250 start-up fee, the typical player spends at least $80 a year to play Medievia. If you do not have the basic donation items listed above, your character is at a severe disadvantage compared to other players.

New players are severely handicapped also. Bloodlines came out in 2000. Basically, this ruined any balance in pk, but it added much revenue to the owners of Medievia. Bloodlines allow for a player’s hero-character to have two kids. Once the kids reach hero (level 124) they can also have two kids. Once a character’s bloodline reaches 5 generations, he gets 2.0 times the normal regeneration of both HP and mana. This is a huge advantage. Basically, what bloodlines did was to have old, experienced players create a bunch of new ones. This means that true newbies have to compete with experienced players for experience points, zones, equipment, etc. Old players will own the PK zones over newbies, because they can just log on their hero character and kill the newbie over and over. Bloodlines greatly increased the number of characters in the game, but the number of players online at any given time has steadily decreased. Why would a new player want to play a MUD where it will take years to get the same regeneration rate as most players?

Medievia is in a downward spiral. If you are thinking about starting a character on Medievia, do yourself a favor, and DON'T do it.

Medievia is the most exciting, socially engaging, and addicting MUD on the net. There isn't a MUD out there with nearly as many features to enhance gameplay. I've played other MUDs, I've even attempted creating my own MUD, but when compared to other Medievia no MUD has been able to keep my attention. You simply can't keep up with the every increasing greatness of Medievia!

Bloodlines allow you to adopt new players to teach them the ways of the game while increasing your character's legendary status. This feature is a win-win for both new players and those super old guys like myself!

Med Font gives text-base games a new angle in playability. Listen to me when I say there isnt a text-based game out there with this cool feature and not a graphical multi-user interface with nearly as much player interaction and features.

Im writing this review because I want everybody in the MUD world to experience what is the greatest MUD ever. Join here for unbeatable creative features, awesome players to become your best friends and worst enemies all in the name of role-playing fun and most of all play a game that will be around for as long as you will and will keep changing to become better and better!

Medievia is the final word when it comes to text based MMORPGS. Trust me when I say graphical MMORPGs can't hold a candle to Medievia. Medievia will appeal to hardcore, casual, and social gamers all while keeping gameplay balanced for everyone without isolation. Here are some things that have caught my eye that you may like to know.

IMMERSION: If that's what you're looking for you're going to get it. The codebase is well done with bugs practically nonexistent. Descriptions for areas/zones is excellent with repetition minimal and creativity abundant. Might I add that quality is consistant throughout the game, even in the player created 'clan towns'. Character naming is regulated so you won't find people with stupid names wandering about unlike commercial games. Server stability is also good; Crashes and restarts do happen but the downtime is very small, usually back up in less than a minute.

COMMUNITY: The playerbase is quite friendly for the most part. You will find people willing to help newer players and social chatter is common. What you won't find is roleplaying, which is a shame because Medievia has the potential to have one of the best 'stages' for roleplaying in my opinion. The staff doesn't seem interested in trying to get any roleplaying activity going, however they don't appear to frown apon it either. This in my opinion is the only serious flaw of Medievia.

FEATURES: I'm not going to list a bunch of features because Medievia has pretty much every feature needed to make a complete and good game. Instead I'm going to describe stuff in Medievia you're not going to find anywhere else. The wilderness is Medievia's strongest feature. If you use the special font designed specificlly for Medievia you'll be amazed at what the wilderness looks like. If one were to wander around the wilderness before entering a text area you'd think you were playing an old graphical game.. which for a text game is brilliant! Not only that but it's huge, walking on foot to get to areas would take far too long. But fear not.. dragon flight is available for quick transportation. There are many more features unique to Medievia and trying to describe any more would make this too long, eitherway you won't be disappointed.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Two things I will bring up that will probably be of concern to some players. One which I already said.. that which is lack of any roleplaying. Medievia is free in almost every sense and casual players need not worry but if you're a hardcore gamer and you want to be competitive you're probably going to want to donate to Medievia when you near the end-game. (Which is essentially pay-for-perks, but not nearly as bad as it sounds because in the long run it's MUCH cheaper than commerical MMORPGS.) Other than that.. Medievia has it all. As I said above.. the final word when it comes to text based MMORPGs. Now stop reading and go play!

I've been enjoying the varied world of Medievia for the past eight years or so and have had the opportunity to experience the development process that has made this game, in my opinion, the pinnacle of the MUD world. When I started playing Medieva it was a game that, in it's old form, would rival any of the MUDs today, from massive battles between warring kingdoms to exhilarating player-versus-player battles, I believed Medievia to have it all. Only recently have I been shown how wrong I was. While Medievia contained all of the elements required to make a fantastic MUD for many years only recently has the wonderful programming staff of Medievia shown me the true potential of their game, of our game.

After 8 years of playing I am now beginning to envy new players, for while I had many exciting things and many wonderful adventures from the time I started until now, it is nothing compared to the things that are being implemented every day. Medievia, to me, represents something for everyone. From the part time Player Killer to the diligent clan leader, the eager socialite to the happy loner, there is truly something for everyone, all paths being equal in their enjoyability and success.

Medievia today scarcely resembles the game I grew to love years ago, on the surface similarities are there, but inside it has changed a lot, the feeling has changed a lot. However, even with all of the changes I continue to enjoy the game immensely, because never before have I played a game that allowed the players to take an active role in helping direct the future of the game. Never before have I seen a staff so willing to listen to suggestion. Never have I witnessed a game I love change and know that I have nothing to worry about, because these are changes that I want, that I have been involved in and know about.

Medievia now advances into a new age, as it were, an age of massive AI control and full scale naval warfare. The land of Medievia is under attack from afar and it is up to the players to keep it safe. Normally such a ridiculous line would never be written by me, however the story and implementation of the new events has made me want to protect this fictional world, has made we want to be part of the story.

Upon first glance, Medievia seemed just like any other hack and slash em, cast spells to slay evil and save the day blah blah blah sorta game. However, upon immersing myself in the deep text for a few hours, I started to realize there was something different about this. This was no ordinary mud, as a matter of fact, I wouldn't even use the term mud to describe Medievia, no it was something much more.

Not only does Medievia have an AMAZING automated, in game, new player helping tutorial, it is also full of Avatars (of which I am one, and being so greatly), who stand ready to help anyone new to the game. Medievia has an extensive system of help files, not that the game is hard to get accommodated to.

The beauty of Medievia, is that there is no end to it, no 'final boss', for all you hardcore console rpgers, Medievia, unlike most games never truly ends. The goal of Medievia is to become a hero, and upon doing so, an entire new world is opened up to you. Whether you chose the path of killing mobs deep in the catacombs, assaulting dragon lairs, participating in various quests, herobattles, trading goods from one city to another, or whether you are more into helping new players, or running one of the countless zones Medievia has to offer to enhance your own skills/stats further. Or if you prefer to choose a more fiendish style, you can go around pk'ing people, or even cpk'ing people(which if you don't know is like pk, except you can actually take your opponents equipment upon killing them).

Another beauty of the game is the equipment code itself, in the fact that there is no pre determined 'best equipment' in the game. Since most equipment in the game does in fact tweak (that is, the stats of a set piece of equipment does not remain constant), no two players are exactly alike, even if they are a different class.

So whether you would like to be a powerful mage, slaying countless foes with devastating spells, a valiant knight, fighting for the better of the entire population, a stealthy thief, or a helpful cleric, Medievia is at the very least, worth connecting to.

Ah, the world of medievia. It casts you into a chaotic world with dragons, monsters, quests, and mysteries, just like every other mud. This mud thrives on making it more and more difficult for any player to succeed by adding more and more requirements to do so. They decided it was too easy to hero (Maximum Level) your character, so they made it harder.

If i could take back the years i've played Medievia, I would. If you don't donate money to them (50-150dollars) you're a step behind every other player, because they all have the equipment rewarded to you when you donate. The whole mud is full of rules that, if not followed to the dime, your character is immediately punished by revoking hero status, freezing, lowering of stats, or even purging (deletion of your character). They don't care how long you've played, or how much you've donated to them. This happened to me once, after which I decided I had had enough of the game.

If you're looking for a FUN mud, don't go to medievia, go elsewhere, muds that are based on having fun, not on sucking up your time, then making you frustrated and angry. Of course, these are purely my opinions.