Shadows of Isildur: Laketown RPI

SOI is classless if I remember correctly.

Also I don't really have high hopes for the place even with Kite/Japheth/Case/and many more toxic staffers gone. Once a mud has been offline for like 2 years or whatever it was it tends to be a last ditch effort to rekindle it by the pure die hard fanatics of the genre but SOI just isn't going to muster the players they had in the past. Unless the goal is to just have an open place with few players then whatever but of course I think they will want as many players as possible and I don't see them going over 20 as a high.

probably zero because I have to manually approve every single person and if they have a disposable email address (sharklasers, etc) I reject. doubles, sure, but bots I suspect is at 0.

May 14, 2014 10:05:57 GMT -7 jcarter said:


^ Pretty much this but to SoI. A large portion of ARMs playerbase is likely former SoI players, I know of several myself. For a long time SoI was the premier RPI mud and rival to ARM for that slice of the mud playing population. If they actually manage to re-open and the code is viable, it's a great opportunity for another real competitor to ARM to come back and give an alternative choice.

I thought I might offer a quick response (perhaps a dangerous thought) to being lumped in as a Toxic admin and just give you a bit of context and perhaps insight as to why things in SOI were the way they were back then.

First off, to you personally I must apologise because I did treat you awfully - you were kind of like a "Boogeyman" to SOI staff since long before I ever joined (something that is amusing in hindsight). By the time I came around, "Delerak" was basically synonymous with the devil - if just about anything bad happened from a mostly-unknown or new player, it must be Delerak! It was pretty much drilled into us that you were a bad guy. You committed the heinous crime of wanting to play Shadows of Isildur despite being banned numerous times, and so were persecuted. For my part in perpetuating that by basically participating in the group-think staff side, I am sorry - I've come to realise you've had a pretty bad treatment by the RPI community and you're not a bad guy. For what it's worth, these days you're the kind of player that I would hope to attract if I ever ran a MUD again.

Secondly, my rise to ownership of SOI had a lot to do with how I acted once I got there. I had never really been involved in the OOC community on SOI before that point really, and I was mostly a Mordor admin. I was an outsider really, and the only real reason I was the one who took over was that I was the only relatively-senior admin who could afford to pay for the server costs after Traithe walked away from it. I immediately clashed with the "Old Guard" there, the many admins who'd been around forever but hadn't done anything for years (except perhaps use their admin powers to cheat for their overpowered staff PCs). I wasn't a Gondor admin and I wasn't a part of their cliques, so I told them I didn't really give a fuck about their opinion (in very undiplomatic ways). I called a few of them out on cheating and even fired a few (making myself very unpopular) and then in probably my most unpopular move, made Wolfsong a staff member. This was of course controversial because she had a reputation in the staff community only slightly better than your own (equally undeserved, in my opinion) and of course I was dating her (she is now my wife). I make no apologies for this because she was actually a pretty good admin, and most of the people who objected to it were just upset that their little cliques were being ruined.

However the negative blowback of this probably with hindsight was what sent me a little off the rails. I really had the open (and not so open) enmity of a lot of the Gondor staff by that point and as a younger man, probably tolerated a lot more cheating and crap from those who supported me. With the ability to look back coolly and self-reflectingly at it many years later, I can say I was wrong. Shadow in particular I let get away with a lot when I really shouldn't have, because she was "on my side" as such. If anything positive can be taken away from it all, it's that I've more or less ended with the same mindset as you guys on the forums regarding admin cheating and favouritism, though I got there through a different path.

It's been over 5 years since that time and I must say I am a more mature individual now. I'd like to think that if I was toxic, "I got better". But for anybody who was undeservedly on the wrong side of it at the time, I am sorry (though I'm not sorry for trying to put a stop to the cliques and cheating I observed, only for that which I tolerated).

Over 100 character apps submitted for SoI. I'm thinking this joint is going to launch this weekend.

We all wish we could be as antiestablishment as delerak