What do you think of the other IRE games, and the community that has formed around them?

I'm sorry, I'm just leafing through the Aetolian and Imperian forums and cackling. You could bottle the venom they drip. Well, the Aetolians. Imperian isn't quite so bad. Serves me right for playing them both on and off, though. I'm afraid to visit Achaea.

Years ago... like... years ago, I played Achaea. I was actually there when the very first Dragon became the very first Dragon, and Sarapis was there and it was this big thing... Occultists were Necromancers and Cyrene didn't exist and the subdivision thing hadn't happened... Aetolia didn't even exist yet.

It was fun! People actually bothered to be IC on city channels and people acted like they were in communites.

Recently I made a character there to see how different it was... and my brain exploded. Everything I enjoyed about Achaea has vanished! Lusternia is my home and maybe I'll visit Achaea just for kicks, but nothing I saw would ever make me want to play it as much as I love playing Lusternia.

I don't really visit any other message boards though.

The Imperian forums make me laugh.

And they suck at taking care of novices.

I occasionally search for the term Lusternia in the Aetolian forums and read what they post. It's kind of interesting. Also, someone please enlighten me; what is Imperian even about?

I've always enjoyed Imperian, for the most part. I sort of hate how few active gods we have and how the recent spate of forced allegiance re-organizing has messed things up. The forums never bothered me and most of the leaders do good things. I love how much variety we have class-wise and all of the different niches available. I've never had a problem as a novice over there, and there's usually someone around to help, even in the smaller guilds. Some of the guilds are re-vamping their advancement stuff which is inconvenient at times, but I do enjoy Imperian. Also there are a good amount of bashing areas and a lot of quests. To be honest, if it weren't for the Lusternia Library system, Arel and Elostian, I'd still be over there (and I still play quite a bit.)

I've never been able to get into Aetolia, mostly I think because of the code-base being so outdated. I went to play once, did WARES to buy things as a newbie, and promptly stopped playing. I've heard a few other things from friends about the world ending (advancement tasks stopping) during elections that annoy me.

Achaea is a steaming cesspool with a lot of cool people swimming in it.

I liked the cool people, I was just sick and tired of all the crap.

I used to love Imperian. They move from being heavy RP to being heavy PvE, and then they tried to fix the RP and PvP with forced allegances which makes it the same as the lusternia dynamic, without hte history to bind it all together.

Imperian is about good magick, vs bad magick vs anti-magick.

I used to play Achaea, way back in the day, though not as long ago as Noola, but still. The main map of the entire continent was actually ACCURATE! You can't find an accurate one nowadays! I was a Paladin in Shallam for a LONG LONG time. Then I found out about Lusternia through a friend, and fell in love!

I didn't play Aetolia, and grew bored 15 minutes after playing Imperian, so I will only comment on Achaea.

The good:
Many people, which (although it means there's so many stupid ones) makes it easy to find fun ones to hang out or maybe even argh-pee with.
Geography. I really, really, REALLY like Achaea's geography. Maybe because I was a total noob when playing it for the first time, and I was overwhelmed by the MUD at that time. Nevertheless, Achaea's locations are diversified, and even exploring them is fun for me. As an opposing example, the Undervault (don't hit me!), even though it has many beautiful descriptions, once you strap it off them you get a lot of boring underground rooms populated by 4-5 types of native monsters (+2 at the sea) and 2-3 types each for Kephera and Illithoids who don't offer you any quests aside from the major kill queen/cenobite ones, even though they occupy vast amounts of space. Also, Achaea's newbie area is so much better than Newton.

The bad:
RP seems to be hard to come by. Even those who keep OOC out of their says more often than not roleplay in a silly/snugglybunny manner, and I can barely stand that. Finding serious (or diversed for non-serious) RP in Lusternia is much easier, even in Serenwilde which is widely, if inaccurately, considered the snugglebunny pit.
Classes do not seem to be very balanced, there are insta-win class/race combos which make you very powerful in PvP and PvE. Refugee mentions it every other post, so I don't have to. Also, warriors in Achaea are boring, their PvP being a venom slugfest. Same for serpents.

The ugly:
Expensive credits, and gold is harder to come by than in Lusternia.
Guilds/houses. Some are alright, others are cesspools of cliques that think every newbie is an alt who came for their skills and therefore the mentioned noob HAS to jump through so many difficult loops (including major propaganda bullcrap and trick questions) that it's impossible for an actual newbie to pass. One slip-up? Sorry, you're out - kick! One may think the situation would change after the houses were released - bogus! The idiotically high requirements (including skill requirements, and I'm not talking about Skilled rank - more like Transcendent!) are still there.
Damn Oakstone or how you call them, the monopolistic druids who hold herb/potion production in an iron fist, enforcing ridiculously overpriced prices (especially since, as I mentioned above, gold is harder to get) and punishing those who do not even break, but even mention about breaking their policies. At the same time, they are paranoid about newbs being alts and coming in only to "steal" their herbalism skills. Same used to apply to other tradeskill - enchantment for example, but houses screwed this over. Good!
Number of idiots. Urgh. Sometimes I think WoW has a smarter playerbase.

Also, each time I remember about people telling newbs (or even higher-leveled players!) to go fight rats for gold and experience, I die a little on the inside.

Here here!

I remember having an Occultist alt, one of the things to get out of novicehood was to read three posts detailing what some goddess thought chaos was, and then reciting that, while giving your input. Easy enough, right? WRONG!! The posts were a load of crap detailing how the goddess came to be, and whenever you gave your answer for chaos, "Sorry! You failed! You must leave now!"

It was infuriating...

And also, I'm gonna have to say that I like Lusternia's novice area compared to Achaea's. Achaea's was overly bashed. Minia, or whatever, was full of noobs, all killing eachother over a pixie. And, to top that, there weren't any huge quests for the novice areas in Achaea. Just, "Kill this, gimme the corpse, and I give you moneys.", that's it. At least Lusternia has two relatively easy Honors quests to do!

I disagree with that statement.

For the Novices, I meant.

I think that's what he meant... Those quests are awesome... but I wouldn't call them easy by any means.

Of course, a lot of folks call them easy besides you, so they're obviously easier for some than others!

But yeah... I Minia made me sad in my recent Achaea excursion. Not only did there seem to be nothing much more to do than kill things to give to mobs for gold... but those mobs were almost always killed themselves.

Catching butterflies was still fun though! A fond memory from when I played Achaea before that remained exactly the same.

By strange coincidence I had my first proper foray into Achaea again the other day after quite some time inactive...

Apart from one person remembering me and reminiscing about the old days... wow... what a change. I haven't played it since pre-house days and everything seems so different and strange! Also I noticed the RP (lack of/far less of) difference straight away just from the chat going on in the city channel. Seems much more like a game, than a world.

Never tried Aetolia, and wasn't impressed with Imperian when I tried it.

I shall stay with Lusternia I think.

I would switch to Imperian if it weren't for the huge gap between the high-tier and everyone else, and the lack of updated systems available.

Very nice game, has an excellent combination of PvE, RP, and PvP (not GvG, as Lusternia usually ends up being). I think the only reason that the other IRE games would appeal to me more than Lusternia is the greater variety in class - even with monks, we'll just have 4 monk guilds (as in, give Glom/Mag assassins instead).

Never bothered with Achaea, and my experiences with Aetolia were minimal.

Imperian is okay if you just want to PK, but once you get tired of that there isn't much else to do.

Achaea did't seem nearly as bad when I started playing it a couple years back. 'Course I didn't know any better than. I've tried all the IRE games. I didn't really like 'em too much.

As for the communities, can't say much. I'm leafing through Aetolia's and they seem rather jealous of us.

I dislike Achaea. A lot. Stat boosting artifacts, wtf? Probably one of the most expensive games I've played. I'd rather use 3 power I can get in ~15 seconds to get an extra CON than spend 300 credits on an artifact.

Half the people suck or belong to stupid cliques (Cowbell, Clan Sex, etc.) or tend to be reeking pools of -99 IQ that plague the land. Why do I still play? I act like the old, wise Priest that gives advice to the half decent people in Hashan. That, and I try and steer the city away from the disaster it approaches every other year.

Lots of griefers, gankers, etc. Little sportsmanship, decency, etc. from the PK community. Lot of combat revolves around buying some $5,000 worth of artifacts and smashing a macro or two.

I hated Imperian 'cause the Wardancers wouldn't gimme a second sword. Wtf? You purposely want to slow down my hunting by allowing me a second sword only after I'm done with novicehood?

I agree that Minia is full of stupid noobs (I'm not saying about normal/smart noobs), but it does have quests that do not involve killing mobs. Freeing enslaved kobolds from the pygmies and getting books for pixies, for example. Then there's also Lodi.

In short, Achaea is a good MUD (not perfect - class balance, artifacts, blah blah I explained it already), but people who play it mostly suck bigtime. If these MUDs were made into single-player games though, I'd be most happy to play Achaea.

The crazy thing is, despite the hordes of people running around and all the chatter on the channels... I honestly felt like I was almost completely alone the entire time I played.

I mean... I dunno. In Lusternia, I just have always felt like I was a part of whatever group I was in. I never got that feeling in my visit back to Achaea.