Alteraeon is fantastic, and what Oriol has done with the MushZ soundpack is
nothing short of brilliant. however, I have noticed far too many people who
believe the alteraeonand MushZ experience is representative of all muds,
and thus refuse to play even very good and unique muds like Clok, simply
because of the lack of a soundpack, or when a mud has the more normal kind
of soundpack Materiamagica does, ie, just the odd extra bit of atmospheric
sound to provide a little colour to the game, complain that "sounds aren't
as good as in Alteraeon" and stop playing.
I have even considered reclassifying Alteraeon in the audiogames.net
database from mud to streight up audio mmorpg just so people get the idea,
however usually people who make the complaints about other muds haven't read
the db entry (where it does state just how extensive the mushZ pack is), and
of course Alteraeon can be played successfully and enjoyably without the
MushZ soundpack on any other mud client or operating system.
I don't really know what the answer is, other than perhaps people make %100
clear to new mudders that the Alteraeon/mushZ is really not representative
of mudding, or whether people should suggest another mud as an intro, ----
although that also seems a shame given the awsomeness and very newbie
friendly quality of Alter.
As I said, I don't know if there is an answer to this one, but it is a
problem that slightly perturbs me sinse the "I won't play it if it is just
text" thing is such a common complaint people have about muds, despite the
fact that outputting text in real time to the user's clients is rather the
essence of muds, alteraeon included and so a person saying "I won't play a
mud if it is just text" is a bit like a person saying "I won't play an
interactive fiction game if it is just text"
As I said I don't know if there is an answer to this, and in fact it prooves
just how good a job oriol has done with the pack but I thought it was an
interesting issue to discuss.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
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