Review Submitted By: Buffy Guy
Author Status: Player
Started on Buffy Mud: 2005
Submission Date: Mar 10, 2007
TMC Listing: Buffy Mud
The following review is the opinion of the review's author [Buffy Guy]
and in no way represents the opinions of this website or its staff.
Buffymud is set in the town of Sunnydale, California a few years
after the end of the show, people who haven't seen the show
shouldn't worry though, it's basically just this world, but with
real supernatural forces, most of whom reside in Sunnydale. There's a
back story to explain it, but you can read that in the game.
One of the first great things about this game is the amazing level of
creative freedom given to the players, while you are constricted to a
set of races and classes, you can completely customize your stats, as
well as special abilities called techniques. You can have basically
any history you choose, describe your hair, eyes, build, height, as
well as a normal desc and focused descs for different parts of your
body. You can also go under false names, often several at once, demons
can customize their skin color as well as how their demonic attributes
such as horns look. You can even create your own languages and create
almost completely customized outfits. People have made characters as
widely varied as robots, zombies, even dragons with ease by using this
system. While it's not strictly speaking a feature I guess, it is
really cool that the world is such that you can make pretty much any
character that you think of, limited only by your imagination.
Something I like about the game is how much it relates to real life,
you can actually make yourself in this game, just a you who moved to
Sunnydale and likely uncovered some sort of supernatural powers, you
can even generally talk about real life events and movies and things
if you want to, but doing it all as your characters, and there's just
something amusing about try to talk to a big red demon of the
apocalypse about the latest Kevin Smith movie.
One of the first things you'll likely do is leveling, unlike many
muds with set zones for levels on Buffymud you can patrol pretty much
anywhere in the game and you'll encounter mobs walking towards you or
sometimes fighting other mobs, you also constantly have missions to
complete, and many people will do their missions and just kill
vampires and demons and the like on the way to and from their mission.
You don't level up in the traditional sense, you train one of your
stats, and every five trains gives you a level, there's an amazing
amount of freedom in how you want to customize your character from
this system, you can make a slayer who's proficient in magic, or a
witch who also knows how to use a gun and throw a mean roundhouse.
Obviously a pure magic witch of the same level is going to be a lot
better in magic though.
The system is capless, you can keep on leveling forever, but it does
get progressively harder as you go up, so even new players can get
pretty close in level to the one's who've been around a fair bit
longer without too much trouble. There's also tones of other stuff
you can work on, there's 45 different jobs you can take, many of
which form part of long career chains you can work your way up. You
can work on your fame rank, something you get from RPing, fighting
players around your level or higher, and running RP plots or events,
this is fairly prestigious and gives access to some cool powers. You
can work on your legacy, from RPing and participating in global
invasions, which will give you a cool publicly accessible list of your
accomplishments. You can try and get one of the cool houses or
apartments and customize them how you want them to be or buy a shop
and set it up how you want it and start selling items to try to make a
profit. You can also work at getting one of the powerful and unique
artifacts. Then try to get a good set of techniques by leveling in
aggro areas, or try to get one of the rare items only accessible to
people who've killed a huge number of certain types of mobs.
Any player above level 10 can also make a circle(like clans) you can
choose your own name and write a little description of the circle,
once it gets big enough you get access to minions which you also can
customize, you can use these to attack people, bring you drinks, or
wage war to try to take control of different areas around the game,
fighting often against NPC gangs or other circles.
To get artifacts you need to do dungeons which're quite a lot of
fun, they're basically big mazes filled with mobs and traps, you
fight your way through, dodging through traps, occasionally killing
sub-bosses that might open doors for you or shut off different types
of traps, till you get up to and finally defeat the end boss, earning
you a relic you can save up to buy an artifact.
Each player also has an NPC nemesis, who'll occasionally send guys
to attack you or start big evil rituals you have to stop etc, you get
quite good experience from doing these things, so it's not really
much of an annoyance, and if he's really getting on your nerves, you
can always enter a special dungeon to kill him off, but be warned
another nemesis is likely to come along eventually.
So between working on all of that, you'll probably want to get some
RP in, Buffymud is a completely IC environment, everything you do and
say, every vampire you slay or thing you wear is IC. You'll get most
of your RP at the bronze, most people go there to heal between patrols
and there's usually some people chatting at the bar who'll be more
than happy to talk to you, get your name and start to involve you in
the RP plots.
There's almost no OOC in the game at all, while that takes a little
while to get used to it's actually quite nice, people focus a lot
more on their character and RP instead of who's OOC friends with who,
and you don't have to worry about people badmouthing you OOCly cause
they don't like your character.
Plots often take the form of events, which are completely custom
written plots which exist for a time before bringing about some large
effect, anything from a curse to mute someone to ending the world.
Everyone can see events and will get involved on both sides helping
people out with them or trying to stop them.
Aside from introducing new code the immortal staff is pretty hands
off, they do enforce the rules though which're pretty standard stuff
like no bug abuse, and they enforce a set of RP rules, which are also
pretty common sense stuff like don't RP having the power to turn
people into trees with a wave of your hand, but by and large it's up
to the players to generate the RP plots and make things happen.
The fact that it's completely IC does mean that pretty much anybody
can attack pretty much anybody else, but there are exp penalties and
the like which increase the bigger the level difference that help stop
this becoming an issue.
One of the only problems with Buffymud is it can be quite daunting
and hard to learn, the older players will always be happy to help you
out via the newbie or mentor channels but it will take a while before
you've got everything down, just because of how complex and different
so much of the game is.
The other big problem is there are the occasional bad apples, and
while small in number they're often disproportionately loud. This
isn't anything new, there's a reason most big muds don't allow
player reviews after all, and I'm sure most players have met these
kinds of people before. The theory generally goes you beat me, leveled
faster than me, stopped my event, stole my IC girlfriend etc therefore
you are an immortal/a friend of an immortal/a distant relative of an
immortal/ or some kind of hacker. I've never seen any speck of truth
to any of that stuff and it's really just people being people. You
really won't have to deal with it much, but if you stick around long
enough you'll probably eventually get to hear a bunch of the
conspiracy theories, some are kind of funny but a lot are just kind of
dumb.
Feels like there's a lot more I could talk about, like how combat
works and the slaying system and all, but I don't want to write a 20
page review, so you'll have to see it for yourself.
Buffymud is very challenging, it's very realistic, and it's very
adult, it's unfortunately really not suited to everyone. Everyone
gets beat up or has a plot thwarted occasionally though for many of us
that's what makes success all the more meaningful. If you're someone
who likes stuff to be easy, hates having to work for things or likes
to play characters that never lose this mud probably isn't for you.
Also if you can't handle RP, can't handle PK, or are someone who
needs to plan out their RP a month in advance and doesn't like any
deviations from the plan, it's also probably not the place for you.
If you're looking for a place that's a bit different, that'll
always give you a challenge, where things almost never go to plan and
with other characters that are realistic, flawed, and human, where
everything people have has been earned and just about anything is
possible, if not easy, this is the place for you.
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Submit Comments About this Review
Comment Submitted By: Ray
Author Status: Player
Started on Buffy Mud: 2005-08-10
Submission Date: Dec 1, 2007
(The following review comment is the opinion of the comment's author
[Ray] and in no way represents the opinions of this website
or its staff).
To my mind this is a very interesting but heavily biased review. if
you've played this game for any length of time - I invested about
1200 hrs, and my wife invested about 2000 hrs playing on BuffyMUD -
it's obvious just what is wrong with the review above. Each of the
arguments in this review, pro OR contra the MUD's qualities, have
been presented on the MUD's forum or internal note system by its main
administrator. Many of them are even worded in the exact same way as
when the chief admin spouted them. That suggests that either the chief
admin himself wrote this review of his own MUD, or he asked someone
close to him to.
It seems every time there's an independent, critical review of
BuffyMUD, especially if it's on one of the major MUD networking
sites, the BuffyMUD administrators go there and post a super peppy,
positive review like the one above, in order to counter the negative
publicity. (In academic media theory this is referred to as a
"diffusion strategy".) I've seen this happen before, including on
BuffyMUD's own forum (!). I've observed that it's usually the case
that the chief admin, Tyr, masquerades as one of his in-game
characters' player when he posts this counter-information. This is
especially problematic as Tyr and all his administrators claim that
they do not play mortal alts on BuffyMUD.
The truth as I've observed it is that the immortals (admins) of
BuffyMUD play as powerful characters on BuffyMUD, and that they abuse
their imm powers of information gathering, or setting stat or
possesion boosts, (experience, money or equipment) to get ahead and
outdo their actual playerbase.
But the reviewer I'm commenting on has already adressed complaints
such as mine, calling them "delirious conspiracy theories". Is he
right? Am I writing this to try and torpedo a perfectly good MUD?
Hardly. The cheif immortal, Tyr, has provided us players with ample
evidence of his hidden abuse.He has, for instance, mischanned through
his mortals alt(s) OOC channel, continuing conversations he was
involved in on his immortal account, thus clearly proviing that he
does play mortal characters on the MUD. This in spite of Tyr's
consistent and loud denial of his playing on his own MUD. On the
contrary, he's proved beyond reasonable doubt that he does play, and
that he does play the most powerful/successful characters on his own
MUD. He also manages to do this without investing much time as a
player - levels, money and titles simply "seem to come easy" for the
characters of himself and his small group of admin friends.. Other
imms, recruited from the player base and with close ties to myself and
my wife, have explained the behind-the-scenes machinations of Tyr et
alia. There are IM logs in circulation, of which I possess copies, of
Tyr discussing his abuse with trusted players/admins.
In my opinoin these double standards turn Buffy MUD into a
penalistic, power tripping, ego boosting tool designed to lift the
spirits of the owner and his circle of friends and close supporters.
As complaints from the playerbase grew louder and players no longer
accepted what was seen as blatant power abuse shoddily disguised as
"fair play", the administrators decided to remove OOC channels
altogether, and making IM contact outside of the game a bannable
offense. Interestingly, OOC channel privilleges were later to be
included in a privilege package avaliable only to players who pay Tyr
IRL money for it - and even then, it can be taken away at the
administators' sole discretion.
What do I think this means? Well, players are lured to the MUD to
feed Tyr's need of spectators and victims as he and his small circle
of afficionados act out their Buffyverse related power fantasies.
Regular non-admin players are never allowed to play any meaningful
part in the goings on of the MUD. If a player grows too powerful in
level or social influence, an admin-played "player character" will
appear and permanently kill that player character. This has happened
to my wife, and to several of my friends. If a player initiates a new,
interesting plotline, admin-played characters will appear and hijack
it, ousting the actual non-admin players from the plotline. This has
happened to me several times.
Instead of adressing any of these issues directly, it my experience
that Tyr posts misinformation and fake reviews, bans inter-player
communication, and threatens "severe punishment" for anyone who
questions these draconian measures. By dividing, isolating and banning
players who aren't comfortable with this untruthful, morally dubious
power abuse (it would've been better if only the admins came out and
officially admitted they play on their own MUD) the admins strive to
maintain their own privileges at the expense of "unsuspecting"
players.
As things stood at the time of my leaving the MUD, players who
questioned the policy making of the admins were instantly permanently
banned (though this was not described as a bannable offense anywhere),
but players who commited offenses officially posted as bannable, like
botting for money, were barely reprimanded as long as they remained
loyal to the administrators.
In my opinion this is a sad state of affairs, further compounded by
the fact that a lot of the actual game mechanics of BuffyMUD are quite
good, if sloppily/buggily implemented, and the fact that the MUD as a
game system is well suited to friendly competitive play and in depth
roleplaying.
Since the ban of OOC commuication and the addition of help files that
state that evil players must harass, kiill, annoy and belittle
everybody else, roleplaying quality has decreased dramatically. The
one final venue of fun on BuffyMUD - competitive PvP play - is voided
by the fact that admin-played (or, in the case of one "Damien", admin
sanctioned) mortal characters dominate all.
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