First off, my background. Ive played muds for maybee 15 years (since school days) and been a builder for 5 or so years. After seeing our own mud suffer the fate of many muds today (reduced player base) i decided to look for a new home and gave batmud a try

Ive now been playing a couple of months, enough to form an impression. First the good. The client is top rate, with a great realm map, some nice graphics, the ability to organise spells/ group commands via point and click etc. It is the best client ive used.

The player base is generally very friendly to new players, it is announced on a newbie channel when a new player starts, and newbie questions are quickly answered.

The newbie area (dortlewall) is excellent, one of the best newbie areas ive seen, and the newbie tutorial is also very good. It offers challenges that are neither frustrating or patronising

Players also donate equipment for newbies to use, it is not sellable and from what i saw players donated regularly

The main problem for a new player comes at the point when they leave the newbie area, the areas vastly differ in quality, with more than one area being simply a big square with all the mobs being identical and offering no cash at all. One area i visited had no descriptions for npcs at all and felt very odd.

There are some decent low level areas, but my experience has been that the high level players regularly sweep them for easy cash so there is rarely anything in the profitable low levels to kill.

While the playerbase is friendly, the mud has a problem all mature muds have to a certain extent. That there are very few 'new' players to group with. Doing a 'who' shows 135 players online right now

Yet doing a 'who mortal' shows only 40, and just about all of those at maximum level, so it can feel a lonely place at times.

There are a vast range of guilds to try, so far ive only tried two..so my opinion may not be informed, however so far they have been 'single skill' guilds with one big attack ability to spam. It may change at higher levels however

Despite all this, batmud has an awful lot going for it and is worth a try if looking for a mud home.