Saboteurs were basically Serpents from Achaea, if I remember correctly. Major source of griefer thieves.

kill method's were both through poison but still way different. I'n imp it wasn't till they became stavenns sex toy that they really got any form of rap for stealing.

<3 Lusternia. Aetolia and Achaea don't even compare for sheer complexity and coolness. Imperian's OK, but it never came close to really grabbing me.

I agree with this 100%

Estarra, you roxxorz our boxxorz

Thanks for the replies all, I'll def give Lusty a try. I find myself bored in the other realms.

I've played all four. A lot. Four years ago I started playing achaea. Kept that up for about a year, flirted with imperian. Thought it was cool but too hard to get involved with the other players, so I dropped it. Shortly after Lusty came into open beta, I joined, and then got hooked, albiet with a brief period of dormancy. I also have been to aetolia, which I loved (I was playing a werebear, and <3 the mechanics of how they work), but again, found the people hard to mesh with. So now I just play lusty and achaea, really.

I've tried the other IRE MUDs, and I'd say Lusty is the best by far. Aetolia had too many guilds, plus, with one, I never saw more than two, maaaybe three around at once. A cookie to whoever can guess which one! Plus, the city roleplay, at least the evil city role play, made absolutely no sense to me. Plus, vampire houses were really annoying. Were-creatures were fun, sorta, but it didn't make up for the general lack elsewhere. Oh, and navigating was annoying, as was bashing. Lack of areas, at least that I could find.

My main gripe with Achaea is just that it's too big, and from what I recall, dealing with PK rules were nearly as bad as doing taxes in real life. Not fun.

Some of Imperian was fun, but it just seemed, well, rougher around the edges. And again, harder to navigate around. I prefer multiplanar to a big prime area, personally. Easier to know where you are and how to get elsewhere. I think people are more helpful in Lusternia as well, at least to newbies.

The last thing, of course, is the crafting skill availability. In non-lusty, you had to pay, what, 100 credits to use a trade skill? Crazyness.

I can tell you one thing for sure. Lusternia wins versus Imperian, hands down.

Imperian's dead in the water. It was interesting, but it is now the same as it was then, and the only changes have been to make PK nearly impossible to succeed at for over half the classes.

More importantly, there's hardly anyone left there. I'm GM of a guild there, and have remained so for a long time for no other reason than that there is not one single person in the guild besides myself that bashes enough to pay for the 10,000 gold contention fee. Or if there are, they haven't said anything on GT, so I've never heard of them. When I first took over, I was all fire and brimstone about getting the guild reborn. No one cared.

However, in an attempt to see how other people were getting and keeping members, I joined a random guild on a random IRE game, and got stuck.

<3 Tahtetso.

Glad to hear the success stories.

Came over from Aetolia after playing for years there as one of the oldest players. I mean, we basically got Achaea-lite with vampires, which were interesting in theory, but.. Eh, anyways, wasn't doing it for me. After leaving and coming back to muds for awhile I finally found Lusternia ((Did some early play here, but didn't really stick with it)) and tried out the Tahtetso since it was a new guild and new guilds generally mean more opportunities for success.

First impressions were really positive. The world is massive, the combat engaging, and most importantly, has an effect or point! Nothing bothered me more than doing XYZ and getting a "Good job!" out of it. Myriad quests, various ideas or beliefs to help create a more engaging world, and even more important is the engaging and active creative force that keeps the game going. If you were playing Aetolia four years ago, you would know what I mean since we had a lack of updates.

People in the guild were helpful, engaging, and creative themselves, helping me decide to stick around. And for all the various compliants, the various fighting systems do make for a more interesting game than "Dsl , repeat, repeat, repeat, impale, disembowel". I'd like to see it better balanced so that certain things just don't dominate, but I don't want everyone to be equal. That just gets boring.

Anyways, thanks to all of you who've made Lusternia an engaging and fascinating place to participate in. Enemy, ally, all alike, you've helped make the game something I want to be involved with. So, thank you.

I've been playing IRE for too long (your guild was the Indorani or Teradrim I bet).

I played Achaea back when it had reasonable amount of people on (like 150 tops) and didn't lag. It was fun (before Dragons).

I played Aetolia since the beginning, and stopped when Reanimation came out (I'm just lazy). It was loads of fun but there's only so much you can do in Achaea pt. 2 (plus, taking out the war system was just arg! That's where my fun was). (And Bloodloch's city RP is one filled with dictators so you can imagine where it's gone).

I played Imperian when it came out too, had fun with some of the new classes (what's those skill flippy guys?).

Lusternia is by far the most dynamic. There are not many rogues like the other IRE games because you need a place to live with Power. It makes a big difference when you actually have citizens around helping each other.

I didn't find out about Lusternia till like a week before it opened, and read the Histories and that's what brought me here. If Lusternia was a book(s) filled with the histories, I'd own the whole set. It is really what brought my attention.

Aetolia was the first shard ever off an IRE mud. We had no budget, no paid coders, and very little time in which to make a massive amount of changes. Basically, IRE learned from the mistakes of Aetolia when they did Imperian. From the very beginning Imperian was better supported, while Aetolia had to limp along (I haven't worked in Aetolia for years, since just before the first Varian ... left, so I can't comment on its current support level, but I assume it's more than it was the first four years I was there). Again, they learned more and did Lusternia. Lusternia is IRE v3 and benefits from all the mistakes that went before. It's a much more rich world, has much more diverse game play, and has a broader appeal to more types of players.

I think you can tell which I prefer.

I was pretty into Imperian for a long time. It was a good game, it had some bugs and some glaring flaws, but the general understanding was that the admin were working to fix those. Then Avasyu left and Big D took over. Game just went downhill from there. Broken release promises, sliding release dates, some things that just seemed like outright lies, ANCIENT bugs popping back up again... Classleads (essentially Envoy stuff) took a year when they'd previously taken months. It seems like the guy doesn't know how to delegate and maybe not even how to work at all. Then issue responses became retarded, most of the new divine that got taken on got ran into the ground by his paranoia, and one of the two elder divine that was really active and helped keep the game afloat unfortunately passed away. So I left. I'm around here for break time from coding my own deal. Lusternia's a solid game that's fun, dynamic, and has an active administration. Wish I hadn't been so attached to Imperian due to monetary and time investments so I would have made the switch sooner.

I've played Achae for a bit, but the set-up of everything was too complex for me. I tried playing Imperian, but never registered the account and never actually played fully. I prefer Lusternia due to the way skills are ordered compared to the others. I do wish Lusternia supported rogues though, but I'll keep playing for quite awhile.

Huh. Isn't Achaea's setup LESS complex than here? It used to be, anyway.

Imperian has some awesome ideas. Problem is, when your main newbie bashing ability requires triggers and a knowledge of coding to make work (Curse you, immensely badass-sounding but less than marginally practical Knifeplay attacks!) I have to run away. It makes me sad, because Wardens and Idrasi both are pretty BA.

hehe...Achaea is WAY less complex than Lusternia. Way, way less. If anyone thinks Lusternia isn't complex, they are not trying hard enough. Between combat, PvP, travels and planar movement, to the history and quests, we have Achaea beat hands down.

Lusternia's complexity is like an entrance exam. It keeps the playerbase a little smaller than the other games, but most of the less diligent and/or intelligent players are weeded out early. I quit playing Achaea shortly after I started playing Lusternia because Achaea had become a playground for too many rude, arrogant fools who made the game completely unfun for me.

It's probably changed now, but I hated having to do 3 hour interviews in Achaea in order to pass novicehood. Waiting for somebody bored enough to even interview me usually took a couple of weeks as well. Bleh. Lusty's more laid back with that stuff thankfully.

Ooh my friend's first impression of Lusternia back when we started playing.


It's still true

My first experience in Achaea included being cast out of the Sentinels after one such three hour interview in which I wasn't able to say I would kill family members (a strange concept in a world where death is fairly meaningless, which I already realized, but when I said "sure, they'll just come back and not do it again" my interviewer insisted that it would have to be permanent death.) for lighting a tree on fire. Also got in trouble for not promising to put Nature ahead of Divinity.