What could be a stress-free MUD with a refreshingly open-ended character creation system of bountiful race options is marred by a crude mishandling and gross misinterpretation of expectations and obligations on the part of the human element. If you expect a professional level of primary responsibility, don't look for it here. While there may be plenty of monsters to slay and a very broad range of characters to play as in terms of species, the whole premise is instead limited by infantile moderators who lack the pulse of what their target demographic is actually seeking. There are some great features conducive to variant roleplay, and even an experience system doled out to reward players for roleplaying (presumably without human-driven bias), but these innovations become sorely pressured by the severe amount of practical flaws at hand here.

Let's get the technical issues out of the way first. There are still a lot of missing help files and mountains of typographical errors, and the mapping is bloated, disjointed and easily distracted to the point where areas don't appear to logically fit together. Now, online games are always going to experience consistent development because they're intrinsically organic. They're prone to change all the time. We know this. The pacing of the work is the crucial issue here: While much of the mechanics still need fixing, the focus instead has turned to building outlying areas, a feature which is not in such a crucial status as other fundamental elements of the game. In actuality, when a portion of the system is exposed for its flaws, the staff has routinely shoveled over it entirely: Certain whole classes are essentially hidden, and an otherwise- innovative breeding system for creating complex racial hybrids has been disabled and ignored. Another such example indicative of the staff's eclectic thought process is in trying to divert traffic by cordoning off an area: This just moved the heavy traffic issue one room away (to a more bottle-necked area, with more NPCs and objects standing about).

This MUD seems to have digressed heavily from the first and foremost rule of any software which caters to end users: User-friendliness is attained by adhering to intuition. This especially pertains to terminology in the help files which is misleading, inconsistent, or non-specific. Several features have a one- direction-only error: One cannot opt back out of Player Killing. This even affects maps, shockingly enough: Many maps do not logically follow physical rules of connecting two rooms together, which becomes multifold due to a bizarre gimmick where commands to recall to a set area are inexplicably disabled. These grievances ultimately punish players for exploration, particularly as any area can be warped to, with other towns remaining empty and set next to each other. Remnants of old changes still linger to produce inconsistency errors which can alternate between player characters. Some characters still recall to an older location, but this claim mainly pertains to so many arbitrary changes to an already terribly inefficient and mind-boggling inventory and equipment system which necessitates the use of spreadsheets to coordinate a character's possible outfits.

The emotional state of the MUD has to be rated at no less than 'drama hell'. It's not unheard of for new players to receive abuse when driven to using the Help channel when confounded by some of the more counter-intuitive terminology and functionality of the game's mechanics. Red flags show up concerning a counterargument by the staff stating that simply because the game is free to play that they are somehow merited no obligation to validate player concerns. This is as if to imply via power-drunk, almost Orwellian double-speak that they are infallible so long as they don't outwardly project this subconscious egocentricity. This is textbook psychology stuff. This puerile attitude amounts to a self-serving tyrannical playground hosted solely for the benefit of the 'Immortals', where new players are permitted to suffer at their mercy. This even extends into 'global roleplays', where players are subjected to game-wide messages (essentially a non-interactive playlet) which routinely involve unmitigated over-the-top events of adult-oriented violence such as infant mutilation and rhetoric praising the game's deities which appear to be named after older game moderators who have not visited the server since before this reviewer's memory. Further example of moderator abuse lies in their choosing to hide from other players and responding to their duties by using an invisibility function, rendering the alternative from their dictatorship to be utter anarchy until such a time as they decide the way to fix everything is simply to reset the server--an act which apparently becomes necessary at least once a week.

The server resets should be in the above technical issue paragraph: Lately these resets have caused crucial NPCs to be deleted entirely, including quest NPCs and even shopkeepers for beginner equipment (for the combat-leery Mage no less). These issues have not even been acknowledged let alone fixed for what appears to be months now.

When an objection is raised, it always ends in drama. Clearly those 'inalienable' rights are, in fact, alien after all. Moderator abuse is rife in this aspect, with a certain moderator having repeatedly disconnected a user multiple times due to a simple disagreement, rather than dropping the issue or instead using a temporary ban which (while still excessive in this case) could have reduced on channel spam. When other users stand up to object to these practices, the moderators routinely proceed to flame, whine and threaten any free-speakers with revealing personal information, hyper- and hypocritical personal judgements, and of course banning. This occurs even in the glaring face of their ability to view room and channel logs on a whim which should easily expose how any conflict occurs without doubt. These emotional defenses are typically accompanied with some gaping, irrational flaw of logic that cries out for more poignant counter-arguments, which only fans the flames of controversy (or rather bald-faced contradiction) hotter. This negatively impacts the players who are forced to feign ignorance of moderator activity for fear of evading the scathing dirge of retaliation, and encourages cliques of apathetic yes-men who are content to exploit the 'Adult-Oriented Sexuality' rating as if this was a social networking website designed for quick real-life hook-ups rather than an online multi-player role-playing text game designed for an immersive fantasy world. Has it been mentioned that most of the moderators speak as if they share an apartment together? Perhaps what they wanted instead of subjecting themselves to other human beings was to just play Dungeons and Dragons together.

This is a fantasy role-playing genre of MUD, and yet it emulates, unintentionally, with such accuracy, something more along the lines of a paranoid post-apocalyptic setting complete with anarchy torn at by tyranny from all directions. While this MUD has a much lower learning curve than most, it is not at all recommended for players new to MUDs who wish to have a positive experience for their first outing. It seems a tragic shame, because this could be an excellent MUD in its own right if only it returned to its roots and remembered what it wanted to deliver and who it wanted to deliver it to.