I searched long and hard for the mud of my dreams. I tried hundreds. This is by far the best one I have ever played, including pay to play muds. I don't play online games any more, but I'm writing a review to help steer people to the right mud, don't waste your time elsewhere.

Why? In a word or two: Realism and complexity. (ok it's a fantasy mud, but the code/engine/gameplay is what's realistic). To start with, you don't just get xp and level up. It's skill based, and titles are earned through questing.

There are lots of guilds/orders, which teach different skills/abilities/spells/psionics (and there's a lot of skills/spells in this game). Some can be combined, and you can have up to 5 guilds total - read multiclassing/customizable character. For example to learn spells you can join the summoners, enchanters, necromancers, augurs and elementalists - each with it's own casting skill. Beware, - some cannot combine and will not take you because you are, or were, in a hated enemy guild/order. Best to learn about them before making your actual long term character. Ninjas aren't widely liked.

Plenty of cool races and a bunch more available after gaining title of noble. A couple of them can fly, a couple have extra arms (read: extra weapons/attacks) one doesn't bleed. They're way more than different stat profiles, so choose carefully.

The world is fleshed out too. One down to earth example is you can mine for ore (in the mines), refine and forge with it, the higher your skill and better the metal type the higher the quality of the weapon/armor/object. You can disguise yourself, build a house, ride mounts, you can even search for herbs.

There are dozens and dozens of herbs; different ones grow in different spots, some rare. Different recipes for potions or you can try them by themselves in a pipe. You'll need to analyze them to avoid being poisoned, paralyzed or drugged.

Combat is complex, you can aim for different limbs. A good tactic is to break or sever an enemy's hands so they can't attack or if you want to get fancy, you can encumber their hands/arms with arrows or darts. Of course head and torso being disabled kills, and injured or broken/severed legs make it almost impossible (very very slow) to get away.

There's all the regular combat, you can disarm, bash, trip, blind (throw certain items at their head) throw vials of acid to destroy armor, poison crossbow bolts and arrows or any weapon. Then there's all the magic and psi powers. My battlemage would have up to ten spells active during a real serious fight.

The pvp is unrivaled in any mud. There is also an arena for deathless pvp.

The world has lots of unique weapons and items, plenty of original areas to explore. It's challenging, but balanced.

I logged 60 days (1440 hours!) on one character, and 20 days on another. Yeah, ok that's including roleplaying and chatting, but you get the idea.

My biggest piece of advice is: Aliases. Do you really want to type out 'draw longsword from sheath' when every second counts? No. You type 'dls' and the alias system does the rest. Some commands have a time delay, but others can be chained together so you only have to hit enter once for multiple commands if you separate them with a semicolon ; (a must for fast pvp).

And think outside the box. This mud has a lot of things interacting with each other, if you are imaginative you can be powerful. My character was never the strongest or the best caster, but I tricks up my sleeve and I'd use 'em all.

The only complaints I have are that a few of the quests are really hard unless you talk to older players, and sometimes there are only a couple of other players. I think that's because they don't market enough, but the gameplay is rad enough to make up for it.

In a nutshell, this is to muds what Zelda:Link to the Past was to console rpgs or what Vice City was to PC adventure games: It's the game you were looking for, you just didn't know how bad the other ones were.

This has to be one of the most original and well thought out muds on the internet. They have paid so much attention to detail and variety. It is far from the standard mud where you run around areas typing 'k mobname' over and over until you level.

OK, first of all, you don't just choose your job, you can join assorted guilds that are scattered throughout the land, and different requirements are needed to be filled before you can join. And you can join multiple ones at a time. You don't just learn skills as you level. You learn them from NPCs and can only learn them if you are also able to the prerequisite skills too.

Also, you don't just kill mobs and sacrifice them. You can dissect them to learn more about the anatomy of that particular animal so you can fight better against them in the future. You might skin them and sell their pelts or butcher them for food. Perhaps even make items out of their bones. So much to do.

The roleplay potential is very high here too. There are 30 races to choose from, along with many languages to learn. You don't see the person's name when you meet them, only a couple details about them. You have to memorize their name when they tell you. The cool thing about this is that you can lie about your name to people, and they'll remember that name (you have to type in the name you want to remember for that person).

OK, this mud has so much going for it! But it is not without its faults. One of the biggest faults is that the mud is far from Newbie Friendly. They just drop you in naked, and say 'go.' The other one being that the playerbase is really, really small. This could be changed by getting rid of two things. 1) When you first play, you can only play one of four races. You have to meet certain requirements before you're able to make a character out of one of the other races. THe defense is that this is for newbies to get accustomed to the mud, but what then again, if you don't play one of those 4 original races, you have to spend your first hours playing that while you learn the mud, then you have to start over again. It'd be more logical to let people get accustomed to the mud with a Race they want to play.

2) You are required to write a long character history. I like roleplaying a lot, but this just seemed to be a huge chore. The defense of this one is that when you write the history, you can put in the clothes you start out with. Only problem is that it takes forever for the Immortals to get you the starting equipment,so to pass the time you've either got to sit and wait naked for the imms to clothe you, or just clothe yourself, and then you don't really need the starting out clothes... Which defeats the purpose.

It would attract a lot more new players to get rid of the race limit, not require a historical novel about your character, and then make the beginning of the mud a lot more newbie friendly.

So in conclusion, this is a breathtaking mud, but it's such a huge chore to get started, most people will never get to see that... So the playerbase remains tiny.