Southlands, EOE?

Well, building a cabin or fortress sounds better than slaving over a simple curtain that never gets added. That said, even the perception of favoritism is a problem on every mud. Has a real shot been taken at the "in crowd" on EoE? It almost sounds like a challenge to me.

I gave it a shot and failed. There are posts in the log dump and posts in another EoE thread (or this one I can't remember) where I went into detail several months after my PCs demise. I had a good run at it but couldn't get over the fact that one "house" had all the money and power.

Thanks for sharing. I'll look up those logs!

It wasn't about them being "overpowered", it was the general lack of a fair playing field. On Arm they get this one thing right. Nobody is ever truly safe. I mean gone are the days of uber halaster sorcerers and immortal vampire elves in the rinth. Anyone can with the proper amount of skill, gear, and time played can killk anyone else. This didn't seem the case on Esos. I never saw true combative power in anyone. The combat system was strange. It just rattled my bones that even if I hired an assassin or something to take out my political enemies he'd probably fail due to code constraints.

I've played on this mud a fair bit, I'd like to add staff has been nothing but super nice and helpful to me. Dunno too much about the players, they all seem fine enough. My €0.02.
Edit: Just like to add I haven't interacted with staff very much here, their niceness towards me is -not- indicative of favouritism to me.

Glad to chime in where I can and to give people different perspective.  I'm looking forward to answering questions, but knowing how well AMA's break the internet with trolls and stupidity, I'll do my best to keep the discussion alive and progressive so maybe we can get misconceptions removed and ideas born.

#1>  We've always been more driven by personal and intimate stories, where we make every attempt to push the player into having an immersive storybook set around their own character.  This tends to increase our workload in the perspective of trying to cater npcs, props, "base of operations", and personal elements.  This tends to throw people for a MAJOR loop when it comes to trying to figure out how to play, because they come in expecting to find world story flashing dazzling strobe effects so they can try and leap on board some out of control train.  Instead, we're of the mindset that the most engaging stories are the ones where you feel like you're lost in your character.  This isn't to say we're not beyond making a world event just to provoke mudshakes in the player, but on the day-in/day-out grind, we want it to feel personal.  So if you're ignoring the npcs standing nearby while talking your plots and schemes, they will notice.  And probably reply.  That's one thing feedback seems to never miss "staff is good about animating the world around you".  It's the rest of it that I think causes confusion.

#2>  When we opened humans last August, we made it very clear that we were going to work the docs and gameworld around what was happening, with the background in place to provide a rough guideline.  Doing this, we allowed for rivalries and alliances and clans to develop "out of nowhere".  What I'd say to people who have tried and left or are unsure is that we, as a staff, are always willing to try to work with people who want to provide a story or engage in one.  We've been around a long time, long enough to see some of the good and bad in RPI offerings, and yes, we're still people and we are flawed, but we will always work with people to try to give them not only the situation they want to play in, but the tools to accomplish their goals.

#3>  Esos is run by a whopping staff of three people.  Our staffing philosophy is to keep things smaller scale and intimate so that ideas are not bogged down, so that there entire and full accountability on those people and so that the direction is consistent.  While some people might not agree with how we do aspects of the game, I would defy them to find fault not only in maintaining over 15 years of passion and progress on keeping a game running, but with the enthusiasm of trying to always keep the ideas fresh.  When we started to see that things were in a state of growing stagnant, we went ahead and reopened humans in the game world after almost a decade of being closed.  We did this to try and spark different interest and a different flavor of high/low fantasy values.  And like everything else, when trying to put in something new, there was a learning curve and growing pains.  Docs don't just grow on trees, building doesn't just happen overnight, but I did and still feel confident that the framework for good roleplay is present in Esos, for all different player types.

I will add that times have changed a huge deal over the last several years.  When we first started out, Armageddon was still having Saturday downtimes.  During those few hours our who list would spike, but it would be filled with people who were logging in to grief and troll, to rampantly pkill, destroy shopkeepers and disrupt all gameplay.  That eventually tapered out to where we were getting players who would show up and demand special roles based on their Armageddon karma values.  "I play defilers on Armageddon, you can trust me with ....(insert)."  These are the things that are hard to really police, because denying these people in any fashion tends to cause them to come down extra hard for not respecting their ability.