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Treyvan
D&D 3 MU* in an original setting. Wonderful coding, wide range of class and race options, but tarnished by an inner circle of players who always seemed to have the most outlandish stuff (like a Celestial Dire Lion as one Paladin's mount), be solely responsible for saving the world time and again, and many/most of them, for reasons unknown, sprouted wings. Treyvan's original plan was to be a game carried out in various 'acts' where at the end of one act, the game would be wiped, the game location shifted elsewhere, and the story allowed to continue anew. What actually happened, however, has served as a powerful lesson to game administrators. Treyvan is noteworthy (some would say infamous) for its peculiar deathspiral. So much so, in fact, that the game's name has become a verb to many (e.g. Let's try not to Treyvan the game, okay?). After the initial head administrator (Asmodeus, aka Xandar) resigned, the new head administrator (Nemesis) finalized the implementation to Arc 2, which never materialized. At some point, staff decided it was time for act 2, so they infamously declared as much on their game, warning people that in a month or two, all their characters would be gone and the place would re-emerge in a different place, at a different time, but great fun would be had before then... a sort of exciting climax, yada yada yada. They made several mind numbingly obvious errors: 1) They somehow managed to tell the entire playerbase, with a straight face, that act one (and every character) was to END in 1-2 months, and expected play to proceed smoothly as if they'd said no such thing. 2) They made this announcement before the new database was done. 3) In their arrogance, they decided to scrap the database and start over with a new codebase written from scratch. Here, they fell upon the classic problem of 'Plenty of ideas, nobody to code them.'. Treyvan did not reach act 2 in 1-2 months. In fact, they never reached it at all. The game limped along for OVER A YEAR with the constant threat of a database wipe hanging over its head, ensuring that new players -knew- there was no hope of ever being as cool as the leet kiddies with the magical glowing ultracodpieces and the enchanted mystiboobies or whatnot.
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