Crimson was the first mud that I ever played, so has a special place in my heart. I was introduced to it by a friend of mine, who also played another game (which I do not like to anywhere near the same level). I played it fairly regularly from 1996-1998, and I have kept going back every so often since then. As at writing this, I last played in 2003.

When I first started playing Crimson they had dozens of races and dozens of classes, with some combos more powerful than others. You could buy stats with gold. Since then, they have cut back on the number of races and classes, and improved the balancing significantly. Meaning that you buy stats with experience, thus making it much fairer and less able to be abused.

Crimson has player killing which a player can turn on with a PK flag, and later on can turn it off if they are doing a quest or otherwise don't want to be disturbed. Of course, if you've just PKed someone else, then you can't turn it off straight away, and doing something like that can be grounds for you being labelled with a wanted flag. Once you have a wanted flag on you, anyone of any level can kill you, and there are no safe zones for you. Everyone on the whole mud can gang up to kill you. They can use any tactics that they like, loot your corpse, and get a reward for doing it. On top of that, in some cases you can be killed several times over. This method of punishment for people breaking the rules is very effective, and also quite amusing and fun for the whole mud.

Player killing also has player looting associated with it, but it is limited to 1 item per kill. Repeatedly player killing the same person can be considered harassment, and can also lead to punishment as above.

The mud itself has 40 levels only and then avatar level, and once at avatar level it is pretty easy to get skills and spells from all of the other classes. At avatar level it is like a whole other game.

Crimson is one of these wonderful muds that lets you train a certain amount in each skill or spell, but then after that you learn from using them, up to 100%. Practising used to be by using practises that you got each level, but now it is through using experience.

As this is my first mud, it will always have a special place in my heart. It might not be the best mud in the world, but it is old faithful, and is always a good place to keep going back to.