Sorressean's blog

Throughout the multiple muds I’ve played, GodwarsII seems to provide the most opportunities for strategy, player customization, and pk.

I found GodwarsII a while back, and it seemed to be an awesome mud. I like the design, and the fact that both it’s combat and movement system is unique. I also find the character customization appealing, though as you learn more about the game or age, being unique is less of a viable choice. As an avatar (a beginning player who hasn’t chosen a class yet), there are many weapons and many styles you can use to better fight your opponents. As you gain in levels, the choices of weapons is limited to just a few that most people use because those are the most affective. In this, GodwarsII lacks the balance to make more weapons and martial arts a viable choice for someone who would want to go down that road.

One other problem I’ve seen with this mud that seems to be the biggest so far is the enthusiasm for age 400 players (max age players), who like killing newbies. Besides repeated attempts to talk to the admin to make this work better, nothing is getting done about it. There are numerous maxxed players who go out of their way to kill newer players because they have nothing better to do. While you do not lose anything when you die, it can get rather frustrating when numerous players find it amusing to kill you. Besides the fact that the newer players do not stand a chance against these players, (most die in one shot), they don’t have the chance to run generally, either. I have seen many players become discouraged and quit the game after dying to someone who they can’t do anything against three or four times.
It has been argued that the players who kill the newbies lose primal, which is true. However, the primal that they lose doesn’t mean anything to them as they won’t be spending it due to the fact that they are at maximum age and can not age anymore. Characters like Xig in particular don’t care about the primal loss as much as they want a win to be recorded on the bot that keeps track of PK records. While this isn’t a part of the mud, it is a bot that one of the admins set up to keep track of player vs player scores, and currently counts for more than kills to deaths, which are based on age. While people can easily check someone’s pk record using the bot, the person’s kill-to-death ratio which is built into the mud is currently not viewable by other people.

Another point that has been noticed and is currently a hot topic is the use of bots. While killing things is fun for the first 50 or so trains, people soon resort to botting as a way to gain age. The benefit of 250 daily kills, (which is the maximum before the primal, or experience awarded is decreased) currently far outweigh the benefits of doing maps or using boost to level. While the admin has followed a no rules idea, he seems to be actively trying to stop bots by hard coding anti-bot mechanisms rather than finding a proactive solution to make bots less of an issue.

GodwarsII as a game has a lot of potential to grow and expand, but the expansion needs to be welcomed. Newer players need to be able to learn at least a bit about the game and have a chance to pk with someone around their own age before they are forced into a situation where they die in one shot and have no hope in retaliation to protect themselves.