BatMUD
You got hands?
BatMUD is a huge, fantasy oriented, text based game that has been running since 14th april 1990. There is constanly over 200 players online with whom you can share the world but if you prefer solitude, there is more than enough room for lonely wolf(man)s too.
New players might feel intimitated about the overwhelming freedom, ammount of choices and the lack of walktroughs to a game where knowledge is power, help is always close in form of various help files, pointed newbie helpers and ever present administration. While there are mages, tanks, healers, hybrids, merhcants and such rough generalizations running around you, they also represent races such humans, gnolls, barsoomians, sprites, leeches, catfolk, demons, trolls, even couple moomins can be seen, vampires and such from the total of 44 different known races. They also represent their guilds, such as rangers, mages, templars, sabres, beastmasters, bards, reavers, assasins, merchants and so on from the 44 different guilds that are recruiting new members.
While in other games you might be frustrated if you made bad decissions when you started playing about your role in combat, in BatMUD there is no such worry. You can start playing without reading any guides how to make the best tank or dps maker or need of deep analys of different equipment combos as you can reincarnate your character to a new race, background and guild combo without loosing of your gained power level. Players constantly sell equipment and sometimes even whole equipment sets so switching to mage after playing ages a barbarian, it only needs some selling and buying or plain trade, spell casted by a druid or a priest and you are ready to cast lava storms.
It does matter if you are a socialiser, achiver, explorer or killer, there is enough things to do for years. There are societys from motorbike fans to food to computer hardware and numerous guilds dedicated for making most of BatMUD, you name it and there is likely a society for it. Over 100 quests that will keep you busy for years as you need to figure them out yourself while numerous awards are waiting to be claimed. Plaques to players that have done most damage, most exp, most quests, most exploring, most powerful items, most top kills and fancy ways to boast what you have killed. NPCs that need hours and hours of work to be slain are waiting for you.
The game can be played using plain telnet connection but there is also a free, official client to play BatMUD, the batclient. It offers maps, option to divide the information streams from different channels, triggers and macros, party info, just about anything you could ask for plus anything you might create yourself. The bandwith need for the game is minimal and lag is more or less a ingame joke.
