Review Submitted By: Katrina
Author Status: Player
Started on Advanced Universe: Late June/Early July
Submission Date: Aug 22, 2012
TMC Listing: Advanced Universe
The following review is the opinion of the review's author [Katrina]
and in no way represents the opinions of this website or its staff.
For the most part, the playerbase on Advanced Universe is decent.
I've had a lot of fun interacting with them, with a number of
long RP sessions that last until close to dawn. The mud has
certainly had it's ups and downs, with the server it is hosted on
sometimes going down for the weekend.
Now, the game had both an active playerbase and a number of active
immortals, with a number of code changes and areas going in.
Notice my use of had. Over the past week, a lot of things have
happened. First off, because the two owners of the game - Boran
and Eric, are not all that active, they weren't around to
enforce their rules, and a problem arose. The game's old Head
Builder, Gage, had a tendency to cheat. A lot. A number of his
characters were given force, given max levels, given max skills,
possibly given tons of credits, it's hard for a player to say
exactly what the extent of his cheating went to. Gage also
had a number of policies that made the game less-than-fun for
players - namely, 1% drop rates on the high-end crystals, 10%ish
on the high end armor material, NPCs that could stun and beat
pretty much any character. Some of his NPCs could in fact lock a
person so that they couldn't enter a single command, not to fight
back or to flee, only ending whenever either the mob died, or
you got stunned. This is in addition to him just generally
harassing and mocking players and oftentimes just ignoring
requests that players made - and did I mention doing things and
then blaming them on another immortal when players asked about
them?
Thankfully, the other immortals listened to all of the player
complaints about these policies and decided to fix things,
adjusting drop rates to reasonable levels, removing the permlock
skills from the NPCs, and in general cleaning up his mess.
The day after all of this happened, things started to come to a head,
as Gage made a new character and started being a general pest to both
the players and immortals, complaining that things were now too easy,
that people are afraid to RP, that they never RP, complaining that
his chosen race wasn't as good as others for his main, and in
general, being a pest.
Finally, one of the coders, Raek, catch Gage cheating right in front
of him and had enough, and proceeded to slay his immortal and strip
some of his characters of their ill-gotten gains. A number of us
cheered his decision, and cheered even moreso after he went and
deleted the worst of the offending characters. Eventually, Raek
banned Gage, as what should have been done the moment he was caught
cheating according to the rules. One of the owners, Eric, supported
the decision.
There was some downtime when the server went down for the weekend,
and when it came back up, the other owner, Boran, had decided to
unban Gage and allow him to keep building on the builder's port.
Players and immortals alike were furious over this decision,
resulting in an exodus in the immortal staff.
Due to another server problem, all of Gage's cheated characters are
back. Gage has been slinging mud on Raek, the coder who has now quit
over him being allowed to build again, as well pissing off players
and causing massive arguments over OOC. As of right now, it's the
calm before the storm as everyone is waiting to see if Gage gets
rebanned again.
