After several years away from Darkmists, I decided to give it a try again. When I played before there were some cheating issues with some of the immortals, as well as some immortals taking their out of character feelings and messing with people's characters for them. Sadly, after 5 years away it seems little has changed, and what little has changed was for the worse.
When I first returned to Darkmists, I was astounded at the changes to the mud. Many sub-classes were now available, as well as new houses and races. I eagerly looked forward to getting back into Darkmists. Sadly, my anticipation was the best part of the experience.
In the three hours I played, I was bombarded with OOC tells, frequent and flagrant OOC things being spoken out loud, and a seemingly never ending stream of childishness from the playerbase. For a 'roleplaying enviornment' I saw very little roleplaying, and quite a bit of immaturity.
One area of the mud, called the Gymnasium, is designed for lower level players to gain experience and hone their skills in. Inside of this area, are hallways full of rooms on either side. The class I was playing, a monk, basically cannot use much in the way of equipment and at lower levels killing mobs and training skills can be difficult. One player in this area was repeatedly running into the room where I was fighting a mob (in some cases for several minutes) and finishing them off after quite a bit of work on my part, and stealing my experience.
The first several times this happened I attempted to roleplay with them, only to be ignored. It continued to happen time after time. Time and again any attempt to interact with this player was simply ignored. After a few more times, I noticed a pattern in the way the character was moving through the area, which seemed to indicate the player was using a bot, which is supposed to be against the rules.
I sent a tell to an immortal who was visible, and was ignored. Finally this character did it again, and I sent him an OOC tell (Darkmists has an OOC tell as opposed to IC tells) asking him to stop being a jerk. No big surprise, I was ignored.
The big surprise however came when I was transferred to the realm of the dead, and berated by an immortal for MY conduct. I had had a description from level 1 on, had been consistently roleplaying with others, and was not botting. It seems however that the immortal staff would rather have people who are botting, not having descriptions, and who are refusing to roleplay at all.
Darkmists would likely be a wonderful game full of fun and challenge, but the staff seems to still be intent on running it into the ground and encouraging nothing but the worst kind of powergaming and non-roleplaying nonsense, while paying lip service to the concept of roleplaying. The code and variety in race/class abilities is unfortunately too far overshadowed by the immaturity of the playerbase and the bad attitude of the staff.
If you're looking for a good time, I'd give this one a miss.
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