TMC Player Reviews: Xyllomer

Review Submitted By: Dave
Author Status: Player and staff member
Started on Xyllomer: 2002
Submission Date: Jul 13, 2008
TMC Listing: Xyllomer

The following review is the opinion of the review's author [Dave] and in no way represents the opinions of this website or its staff.

As a MUD, Xyllomer turns out as an excellent example of why not to
play one.

You can still see the original brilliance behind the design of the
game. The original designer/writer was clearly extremely good, putting
their personality and their soul into a quirky and interesting
creation that can still sometimes be glimpsed through the noise every
now and then. Sadly, that creation has been buried and obscured under
years of 'writing by committee' and hand-me-down admins which have
really had no idea what they were doing, pulling the unique and quirky
flavor steadily into generic and bland. What started out as
roleplaying Cordon Bleu is nowadays a month-old freeze-dried TV
dinner.

At the beginning, though it's nice. You walk around, you meet
people, you make friends. And these friendships grow unusually strong:
The lack of a transparent who-list, of any kind of world maps, of
channels and the very restricted tells system seems annoying at first
but actually sets up an ambiance where you take other people more
seriously than on other Muds. And that's where it all really falls
down.

There's two kind of players on Xyllomer; the Germans and the
Not-Germans. The germans are hosts and the original players of the
game, while the Not-germans are everybody else. You can already see
where I'm going with this, can't you? Yes, there is a very strong,
very profoundly rooted 'ruling class' on this Mud, and while at
first this isn't a concern for the newbie player who's just
exploring the world, once this newbie becomes an oldbie and tries to
rise up and affect the other 'fun' areas of the game, all he will
find is an unclimbable wall of hostility and derision sneering down at
him.

What happens then, largely due to the aforementioned ambiance, where
every player seems just a bit more important or larger than they
really are, is constant never ending feuds and bickering, where one
piece of the playerbase tirelessly and intensely pushes for change and
for improvement, while the other piece, the piece that could MAKE
those changes and improvements, laughingly dismisses their pleas
calling them childish and misinformed. This circus is always to be
seen in the game's forums and message boards, both in and out of
character.

What's sad is that Xyllomer's law and guild leadership system is
almost genius, letting important decisions about justice and
leadership be up to the playerbase and cutting out the admin. Of
course, the system has always been in the hands of these German
'ruling class' players, who all know each other outside of the game.
Whenever an important vote comes around it's common to see dozens of
characters who havent been online in years suddenly waking up again to
cast their vote and go back to sleep. Guild leaders are for the most
part players who are never online or active in any way except for when
their buddies alert them that someone else is trying to become leader
themselves. Then they come online with their friends just long enough
to win the vote and disappear again. The judge system is exactly the
same, as is the stagnant merchant system and the paralyzed alchemy
guild. They live in a state of abandoned stasis.

Finally, the admin. I have been priviledged to listen in on some of
the discussions between admin, and have come out of that experience
both baffled and horrified. In summary, the default answer for 90% of
player requests, questions, doubts or criticisms is 'No answer of any
kind is necessary'. I'm not kidding with this; I've literally read
post after post by the head admin calling on the rest of the staff to
'be mature' by not answering and not making any kind of reply to a
player's concerns, regardless of whether it's positive or negative.
Ignoring people with stony silence is held as the height of
intelligence and sophisitcation, and wizards are actually encouraged
and rewarded for letting problems lie without an answer until the
questioner just gets tired and moves on.

You can see as an example the negative reviews this Mud has had on
this site, below. This is but one single example of where I've seen
the admin be directed to not make any kind of reply and be expressly
ordered not to bother with posting any kind of communication or
explanation for the issues being brought up; this kind of thing is 10x
more pronounced in the actual game.

Well, I don't want to be completely negative here, so I'll admit
that the game was great fun - for the amount of time that I remained a
newbie. Once I 'graduated' from that, and became aware of the state
of the game from a higher point of view, Xyllomer as a Mud quickly
became what I describe above; an excellent example of why not to play
one.