Godwars II is what you might imagine a classroom full of first graders devolving into after a teacher has left the room for 20 minutes. I have seen a lot of reviews (mostly negative) and a recent forum post where KaVir can not make up his mind as how to handle this group of players and wanted to give it a try. first off, I want to say that the mud itself is amazing. If I could just connect to my very own godwars II and play, I would be fairly happy. My only hitch as far as the game goes is the lack of players around my age as a newbie to pk with. As I am really into PK, this is a rough spot for me. There are more people as I go up the ladder, so I guess I will have to work up to that point.

My second and largest issue is the playerbase as a whole. These are the sorts of players you need a lot of beer or some good medication to handle for to long and nothing is off limits. I have seen reviews where KaVir basically trashed a player for complaining about all the spam and issues and stated that he provides the tools to allow you to deal with yourself. This is half true and half not. Firstly, at this very moment when I create a character I land in the main village, where there are three characters whose purpose is to do nothing but stand around and be used to spam chat (more on that later). There is also a bot (sealboy) who was made to make fun of another player who basically just says and emotes random stuff over and over again. There is also a player who has botted tossing the heads of two people he dislikes back and forth from one hand to another. This is obviously a wonderful place for newbies to be introduced to the game. While they're trying to learn their way around, everything is cluttered by these useless chars and all of this spam (which we don't actually have the tools to deal with). As I mentioned before, nothing is off limits--it's not all that uncommon to see insults flung back and forth on the newbie channel (or even at the newbies, for that matter).

My final biggest issue is the use of the channels and bots themselves. I have seen references to characters being set up to be used in response to another player chatting, but I never really thought it would go as far as it has. Right now as I write this, there is currently a bot called troll whose purpose is to do nothing but send a random prewritten message to the chat channel when hellbane or one of the many alts previously mentioned standing around in the village uses the channel. While I am told that KaVir previously asked for this to be kept off of the chat channel, he is not here (nor has he been in almost a week now) and the aforementioned tools to combat these issues are doing us all a lot of good. Along with the spam bots, the bots I mentioned earlier are also used for their own form of spam. There is a bot that someone wrote that will remember everyone's chat messages and which you can use over a public channel to see what someone's last chat was, as long as how long ago it was sent. Naturally, this is being abused as well. There are probably at least 5 characters per every unique player (on the low end) that were created and whose purpose was to send some insult over chat and quickly disconnect. These are triggered by the bot any time someone goes into a fit of rage and feels like sending insults at someone else's clan, mother, brother or famly. It's like having a hotkey with preprogrammed insults for the players you hate the most you can use without requiring to much effort.

I enjoy the game quite a lot, though I am not sure if I want to stick around and watch all this drama play out. Using the ignore feature would basically have me ignoring ~90% of the current active player base which is a bit depressing and irritating all at the same time. I don't mind it off and on, but eventually it's a bit like listening to a couple of kids constantly fight with each other back and forth and it gets old really fast. KaVir's tools for handling these issues are not very complete and thus the game does not really tend to run itself in the absence of an admin. As he has been gone for about a week or so, I do not see anything changing that fast. In the event he takes notes, I fully expect another forum post asking the community at large how to clean up the trash that has infested his mud; apparently thinking for himself is a bit to much to ask. I believe there are less complex (but better run) muds out there that will not require a masochistic attitude to play.