Kinux has been wonderful at supporting this series of blog post and he contributed the following for your enjoyment.  Note that this wasn’t written specifically for the 20th anniversary but it ties in well enough that I think you will enjoy it.  It comes from a note board where Gorog posted it for a different reason some time ago.  So even this note has history attached to it :->

Reading it now I appreciate more deeply some of the things people have been through with the administration of this game.  One of the best reasons to remember history is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

I hope you enjoy: HAUS!

Nostalgia. This may be a bit self-indulgent, but some folks might find it interesting… My first imm was on ROM in May 1992. Alander, ROM’s imp, did a pfile wipe (yes, I said pfile wipe! gah!) that August for the port to RoM2.0. Dozens of ROM imms jumped ship, and a chunk of us went to a mud called Farside, now known as Avatar. I got Hausdorff to level 35 over Christmas and Spring breaks, and was determined to avatar him by June.

On May 15th, Farside was down for what would be 3 days. I started digging through the Diku usenet group for something to do, saw a post from some dude in Toronto ( 🙂 ), that mentioned a Merc-derivative with a Vampire class… Sounded interesting.

When I logged on, there were 2 other players Pandora, a level 16 mage, and Simple, a level 10 warrior. There was, much to my amusement, a single imm listed on the WizList: Thoric. I avatared in 3 days, in a flat out race with someone whose name I can’t remember. The Vampire was way, way over-powered, but there were no level35+ mobs, so levelling past 35 sucked. The
only thing to do was sit around recall and whack away at “The Executioner,” predecessor of Hakiem/Harakiem. The race to avatar was very close, I only beat the other guy by a couple of levels in the end.

I was an avatar for, like, a day. Then, Thoric advanced me to 51. For a week or two or three, I enjoyed being the only imm. Then, unbeknownst to me, a ‘Someone’ busted me for sancting healing Pandora. That was the beginning of the always vigorous/interesting relationship between myself and Caine/Dominus.

I built, offline, a little area called ‘Calvin’s House’ based on the now-defunct comic strip ‘Calvin Hobbes.’ A bit later, ‘Seth’s
Fortress’ was added to the game, and good old Calvin.are was a memory: “Please pick a more medieval theme.” 🙂

By August/September 1993 we were averaging 20-30 players at peak time. By December 1993 (help me out oldies, if I’m leaving anything significant) names like Grishnakh, Tricops, Strahd, Sin (=Damian) were becoming known. I spent the next year primarily as a coder and fruiting around on immtalk (avtalk) while I coded. I think I got Lesser around December 1994: if I recall correctly it was for implementing version 0.9 of “deadly clans.”

Around May 1995 we went on a huge immortal-a-thon which netted us imms like Narn Blodkai. It was that summer that we finally put to rest the “DIKU Credits” issue that had hindered our acceptance in the mud community. About August/September 1995, Selic was promoted to 57 (?) as an overseer of Mortal Affairs. By November (during some really bloody wars in the higher immortal community), Dominus started picking other immortals to advance to 58 to act as a new revision of Fauvre’s “Council of Elders.”

That group consisted of Selic, Myself, Damian, Circe, Grishnakh. Soon after Selic resigned and Narn was added.

By May 1996, the CoE was in trouble. Due to political differences of opinion and extremely chronic frustration due to having the same arguments with the same people over a period of years, our influence and morale was at a low ebb. There was considerable unrest in the immortal community.

Personally, I was trying to get a multimedia business off the ground and had very little morale to be spent at RoD. I resigned my position and set my level to 50. ***Whew***

Within 24 hours, I’d recieved a dozen e-mails from mostly higher-level immortals to come back and help to straighten things up. Gorog arranged a meeting at 5500 between the CoE (Narn, Damian, Blodkai, and myself), Thoric, and about a dozen immortals who strongly supported the concept of the CoE. The upshot is that we were reinstated with full executive control of the Mud — we’d gotten a mandate to run the way we collectively felt was right. Another war followed, we had to clean house and get a foundation for a healthy immortal community. It was kind of like being Stalin in 1917… we had to be bad guys to do what was right. We agreed to promote Gorog to 57 as a ‘Junior Member’ of the CoE for his abilities as an administrator as much as adding new blood to a group still suffering from chronic, deep frustration.

By July, we’d gotten most of the kinks out of the system and made the immortal community a very close approximation of what we, as a group, wanted it to be. It made us all happy to see the mud growing from an average of 75 players to 100 players to 200+ players over the following months.

There are still problems: some old wars that are more asleep than dead. The inability of high imms to socialize and interact with
immortals and mortals due to the fact that we’re still voting on 20-40 issues in a given week. Specific things, like warning everybody about code changes, and never ending debates about “appropriate behaviour.”

We’re chipping away at these problems in, probably, unobservable ways. All of our decisions are rendered on a board other immortals can’t read, or, in particularly sensitive issues via e-ml/phones/etc. The reason is so we can feel free to argue viewpoints that would be unpopular or hurt the feelings of others, but the price we pay is in being “mysterious” and “unapproachable.”

Anyway, this has gone on longer than I’d planned. The points I wished to make are that gee, it is fun for us old fogies to wax on about the old days.

Kill Well, Kill Often!

Haus
The Old One