Review Submitted By: Semaj
Author Status: Player
Started on Accursed Lands: Around four months ago.
Submission Date: Aug 2, 2006
TMC Listing: Accursed Lands
The following review is the opinion of the review's author [Semaj]
and in no way represents the opinions of this website or its staff.
Accursed Lands is quite an experience. In it you will find a very
interesting world with a plethora of stories to tell and many players
willing to share their own. However, you will also find that while the
game revolves around roleplaying, much of the community acts as if
roleplaying is a simple hassle that gets into the way of grinding
their skills slowly, and by slowly I mean very slowly.
Much of the older more experienced players seem to look for an IC
reason to kill someone, no matter what, and it only gets worse as you
have some very powerful players who roam the lands killing people at
random, all in the name of roleplaying a bandit type of character.
Nothing wrong with that, but in game reactions end up leading to
clueless beginners being slaughtered. I enjoy rolling a goblin often,
as they are a race that interests me and are open to me, since to use
any other races besides the three basic ones you have to be rated by
other players. However, I find it difficult to play to my liking, as
I've seen with my own experience and with many friends that if you
choose a race that has some background as being seen as weak thieves,
you will usually be instantly distrusted by other players and
questioned about where you have gotten some item or what your
profession is, and you will find yourself dead within the play
session.
Apparently player killing in this game is justified by killing others
if you think they may have committed a crime. Which would be
acceptable, to me, if the staff didn't impose the idea that they are
willing to punish players that do that. The admins are, however, very
active, but don't respond to you much(If at all) if you need help
dealing with game problems. However, I found that while rerolling
characters and trying out different paths, the admins were more than
responsive by sending me a message telling me that they will punish me
if I reroll anymore, and this was after going through only three test
characters which were a Mysrra, a Goblin, and a Human. Accursed Lands
has a lot of potential, but it is squandered by irresponsible admins,
and an uncontrolled community.
I felt alienated from the first day I played on AL, I stuck with it
for a while, however, because the world was fun and interesting, but
now it just hurts me to even log in.
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Submit Comments About this Review
Comment Submitted By: Smith
Author Status: Player
Started on Accursed Lands: Over a year ago.
Submission Date: Aug 4, 2006
(The following review comment is the opinion of the comment's author
[Smith] and in no way represents the opinions of this website
or its staff).
I agree with a lot of what Semaj has said, however it could use some
clarification and expansion. The entire structure of Accursed Lands is
flawed in its current state, for several reasons:
a) The community is heavily stacked against newbies. Asking pretty
much any game-related question on the newbie channel will not be
answered, or will net you the answer 'no ic in ooc'. Hope you like
figuring out crafting recipes and unintuitive syntax by yourself
because you won't get any help in character or out of character.
Furthermore, half of the IC community will make up reasons to provoke
you or attack you, and some of them will just flat out attack with no
apparent reason. There is also an IC/OOC rating system in place which
ensures that no newbies will ever get a high enough rating to use the
advanced, much stronger races which require high ratings. Then all you
see in game are advanced races being roleplayed horribly.
Moloks are supposed to be vehemently non-combatant except in dire
need, but you'll be seeing a lot of them 'sparring' outside of town
in the local hotspots. Why? Because they're wickedly strong in combat
and who cares because all your friends do it too. Add to this the
rabid cliqueyness of the veteran community and stir for maximum
effect.
b) The gameplay is also stacked against newbies. Most skills raise
like a snail stuck in molasses, and last I heard, it takes 5 real life
months to raise a skill to master level. But what's the first thing a
newbie player sees about all the other players? Why, they're all
decked out in great armor and they kill you in two hits! How's a
newbie supposed to compete when everyone around them has extremely
high skill levels and dying to a player means that you will not be
able to respawn? To top it all off, you'll get yelled at if the
admins notice you making new characters a lot, which is inevitable
because you keep dying to overpowered veterans. The standard races
(mysrra, goblin, and human) are flimsy as paper and have very poor
stats compared to the advanced races which only the veteran players
have.
How's that for balance? You've got a group of players who have all
the knowledge and all the power and will not help anyone but their own
little group, going as far to slaughter newbies effortlessly because
they looked at them the wrong way, or less. I highly don't recommend
this MUD.
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