Shattered Kingdoms

I used to play this MUD roughly 7+ years ago, and I REALLY enjoyed it, and played for a long time. After my long break, I am now looking for a game to take my attention, so I thought I might play some SK again. So I log in... and see 3 players online. So I check it over the next week, and I do see some great membership in the evening, but overall it is a low playerbase. This turns me off, so I try out Abandoned Realms, Dark and Shattered Lands, WoT, etc. NONE of them fit- they were all missing something that SK has, which is my definition for a MUD and the only MUD I have ever played.

With that said, what can I do? I WANT to play SK, but I have some problems:

1. I play a lot during the day, in EST. I work in IT and downtime can be spent in MUD.
2. I like to adventure- Outlands, Temple, Necropolis, Etc. Death, it is inevitable.

So while I can still play in the evenings, daytime will be when I am most active looking around for things, solving riddles, hunting EQ, etc. When I die, I will have no resurrection unless I wait till one logs on- possibly 5-6 hours after I die. This of course gives people the opportunity to locate my corpse and go find it, etc.

What can I do? Besides the obvious answers of "Dont die" and "Dont play during the day", anyone have advice? Anyone play another MUD that they enjoy with a higher active playerbase during the day?

DSL seems nice, but I leveled up really quick and easy, and there are very few "unique" items like there are in SK. SK to me is like a MMORPG- I am very invested in my character, bwcause it takes a LOT of work to get good. in DSL, I could max level quickly, and it just feels... cheaper.

Any advice is welcomed, and thanks.

I wish I could help but I am an eternal newbie and just coming back. I will say that you can use the Oracle without penalty during the Happy Hour event for resurrection.

Unfortunately I don't have much advice for how to get around the whole "dying with no people online" sort of thing, except for trying to IRL bribe the people who play GM priests. Happy hour at least allows you to death-quest freely every day, but that's obviously not ideal. If your primary concern is not losing loot, you could just stick to not making enemies or carrying around really elite loot until you know where you're going, or otherwise playing a class that's less likely to instantly die in the case of encountering problems while solo.

There's two kinds of areas people generally want to adventure to. Places that -can- get you killed if you aren't careful while solo, and places that you -have- to bring more than one person to in order to truly explore. I've found that for the first category, as long as you aren't playing a class that dies easily you can typically escape with a quaff recall except in rare circumstances.

For the second category, there's not going to be any getting around the fact that without at least 2-4 other people, there's no way you're going to explore them without taking forever and risking a lot regardless. Not sure if that advice helps a lot or not.

@Edoras Makes sense, thanks. Typically I like to play a Mage, and in the past I was able to solo a lot of group content through correct setup of charms, pets, gear, and staves/wands. I guess what you say is true, a recall vial is always an option.

Still, playing in a MUD with 0-3 active players doesn't sound like fun, and finding groups during the day would be basically impossible.

Yeah it was less than a year ago that I was able to find some decent groups during the day. -Most- content you can 2-3 man nowadays if you have the right composition, but you definitely need a good size for things like the nightmares temple/IC.

By the way, mages have been nerfed notably with regard to soloing otherwise difficult content. Some charms in particular are less potent and you can't use magical devices without the concentration to cast the spell itself.

Well, that is disappointing. I did see some of the enchantment stuff has changed as well.

The split right now seems to be mostly lighties on during the day EST and darkies on late at night EST. If you're looking to do adventuring then priest/merc are the best choices.

Doesn't that defeat the purpose of having opposite alignments in the game? When does pvp/pk happen? When I used to play I remember large raiding parties of 6-8 cabalers raiding HQ and cities, etc. Does that still go on?

Unfortunately no. PK has definitely shrunk to all but a standstill at the current moment. On my last character the majority of fights I was involved in consisted of my PC getting into fights 1v4 or 2v5, most of the chances I had involved people taking 4-5 PCs to attack Exile when I was the only person defending.

There were battles that were somewhat "even" numbers-wise on the PC front, but they were extremely few and far between.

On my current character, I've been involved in less than 10 PvP interactions in the last half year, I think.

Most of the killers have stopped playing, most would say due to rules changes making this mud a difficult one to enjoy for a killer type. Also due to this being 2016 instead of 1996. This has left "PK" to the socializers and achievers who prefer to fight less and talk about how good they would be at fighting with all their shiny things more.