Just curious

[12345]

[quote="Avatar":hjo1q3nx]Hey 12345, ender, whatever. Did you used to scuba dive? I think I talked to you on Sloth way back when.[/quote:hjo1q3nx]
I do not dive, sorry. You are probably thinking of Duncan, 40 mage type that went to University of Missouri I think.

We both travelled similar circles for a while because of Princess. Duncan is another of the old Slothers that's closer than you think

[Calim]

Ok, one of the original slothers in schneider. I think back when you were there, there were some high school kids who snuck into the lab to play sloth. One of them was later a classmate of mine in the CS program. He got me started in spring 97, and the following summer, SII died and SIII was born. Desade cost me at least a letter grade in all my classes That fall, 3 of us would all play in the CS lab in phillips, less restrictions from CNS people. 1.5 years later, i was using sloth to keep in touch with those people cuz they hadn't graduated.

Almost 8 years later, Malachi (original), Ajax where are u guys?

I still log into ajax to raise ppl if there are no other raisers, my 14 wis is a bit low.

I am sure there is a tree of ppl off of malachi that still plays, I just won't mention their names cuz im not 100% sure.

[**Jake**]

Back in 1992, I was bored on a VAX/VMS system and did a 'who' to find out who was on-line. I needed help with something (I don't recall the question). I saw someone with the name "slacker". He answered my question and then told me I should try out this really addictive game.

I logged into Sloth at utexas and he did the obligatory few levels and newbie equipment, (This was way back when it was cool to "bow" as a greeting instead of this silly "lick" stuff) I got up to about level 32 and they had a player wipe. After a few days, I started a new character and got up to like 40, 30 when the original Sloth went down forever. Yes, it was the end of the world.

With all this new-found free time, I started playing around with other mud code bases but it just wasn't the same. Then I ran into Niandra from the original Sloth who had a contact who had a very old version of the original sloth.

With the help of Krom and Niandra, Sloth 2 was born. It started out running on a DEC Ultrix machine. Player files were stored in a place called "scratch" on the system, which was shared amongst all users of that machine. Scratch wasn't guaranteed to be persistent, but I guess the admins were lazy about cleaning it out. Using Sloth to learn C programming, I ran the shared system out of memory twice. I thought it would end then and there, but instead of getting Sloth canned, the System Administrator suggested using the limit command and moving sloth to another machine. After losing scratch (it was great because they gave us enough warning) Goose provided an old Sparc IPX with 32 megs of ram where it ran for the longest time.

There's more to the story than this...but it's too long already... Too many great players and great immortals to mention them all.

--
Jake

[*Splork*]

I'd actually like the to hear Kjartan's story on how sloth began and why it ended up getting closed....


Calling out KJ!

Splork

[kjartan]

Yeah, OK.

While I was an undergrad in California another guy at the school, Miikka something-or-other, was running a diku called Eltanin. I played this for about 6 months with a friend back in Texas (we had gone to high school together), and then while poking around on the internet I found the diku gamma 0.0 source was available. So, we decided we'd rather run a mud than play one. Neither one of us knew how to program very well, and only a little unix, and Sloth is where we learned.

I was stuck in Colonial Williamsburg over Christmas vacation with nothing much to do, and I wrote a whole bunch of areas. I think they were: BH, gnolls, BH sewer, jungle, garden, and sahaguin (which actually should be spelled "sahuagin" but I didn't know that then). While I was doing that Geddy coded the multiclass system and some other changes from stock, I don't remember what else now. Coding was fun, the comments were few and Danish. At one spot there was the comment "HVORFOR DET!?!", it was many years before I figured out what that meant.

Sloth took off pretty quickly because we had original areas, and because there weren't so many muds back then (this was early 1991, I think); I think within a year we had something like 30 players on regularly. A lot of these were people from our two schools.

We ran it until maybe 1995 when I was in grad school in Houston and Geddy was still in Austin. We had done piles of coding on it over the four years and also we and others had generated many areas. The player base was getting younger as more high-school kids got internet access. Also whinier. At some point we tweaked the backstab damage modifiers a bit, it set off an unbelievable storm of bitching on the board at the West Gate (there wasn't a web site back then), and we said "screw this" and shut the mud down.

And that is Sloth I's history. There's a fictionalized version in the backstory accessible through this web page.

[12345]

Heh, those were fun days. I remember there was a 4th creator, Lyrra, I think who left early. Geddy and Vom seemed to disagree regularly and if you think the gods are fickle now.. you should have known the original Vom (KJ is a bit calmer). Specficly, I think it was Ultimus or Blush who got the idea to kill the Bront. Apparently, the bront was never meant to be killed. When the 7 biggest players in the game managed to drag it down and make it a regular cycle, Vom got a little upset, changed the bront and pretty much dared them to kill it.

Everyone in the game level 20 and up grouped up to kill the 'new' bronto. I think the first round we lost the top 4-6 tanks and found out that the bront had become a spellcaster who liked to throw around meteor swarm like candy. The pluthera of corpses and the crash shortly after convinced us not to try that again.

Say what you will about Splork, I haven't seen him kill half the mud yet.

[impz]

just been a total newbie (since i only started mudding late slothmud 3. How did slothmud 2 transist to slothmud 3. Any oldbies keen to tell this newbie about it ?

[Akasha2]

I got addicted to Sloth at the middle of Sloth 2. I remember my friends and I had a RPG group that played D&D and Cthulu, and one of them gave me my first computer, and Amiga with no hard drive and an 800 baud modem. This was way back in 1993 I believe. He knew a BBS that cattered to MUDS and introduced me to the concept, and he had played SlothMUD once before that night. So he showed me how to log on and gave me the PC, which I played on a little 13" B&W TV in my bedroom.
I remember such triumphent events such as when Strider hit 4x40 (way back before Avatar was a glimmer in anyone's mind), and when Dawnfire finally did it. Back when it was a major event to do so.
Ahh, how fun it was to have to type group every round when you were in the Heal Order... clients? HA.. no such thing, telnet was the only way to play. I remember no website to get information off of. My cousin managed to get someone (I think Elsol or Remus) to email him a copy of an eqlist that the players passed around, which I still have a copy of buried somewhere in my Sloth binder.
I saw the sun set and rise many a day from over the top of my TV. I can say this MUD has come a long way since days of old, and I am proud to be a member of the current team of Admins (it only took me 12 years to get here, yay for me! ).
So from an old timer, and one of the newest members of the current Admin, I'd like to tip my hat to everyone who has come and gone that has kept this MUD going and made it one of the best MUDs on the web. To current immortals, and players aspiring to be immortals, let's keep SlothMUD around for another 12 years I'll try to get my kids addicted to it as soon as I get some

Sloth 2: Riverwind, 1/2 of Spawn, and 1/2 of Asreil
Sloth 3: Myst/Lestat/Xandora and Ode

And of course: Akasha

[impz]

haha, in a way, akasha made me feel weird.

Asryal immortalized in less than 2 years of mud experience. But i will try to learn as much as possible..any others with sloth 1/sloth2 experience (these groups of pple tend to earn my respect )

[Deju]

Its honestly too long ago for me to remember how i got hooked up with sloth. I came in the middle of Sloth II, and quickly set up my mudbookie business . Once sloth II closed, and sloth III opened up, i took a long break, and have been playing off an on (mostly on) ever since.

[Mustang]

hmm where should i start?

Impz bugged me to post my experience so here goes...
I started mudding when I moved to the US for college....was at Peabody in baltimore, and Endor (aka Mosaix) showed me the game. Basically spent my nights mudding in the comp room (4 computers hardly makes a lab...) with Endor, and old-timers like Gimlet, adjutor and flushnut. At first I couldn't grasp the concept of a text-based game so I didn't really put much effort into really playing the game. Turned to pthievery, which I admit I got a great kick from. Ppl started kicking my ass whenever they saw me online.
Well, as for why I turned out to be such an asshole with total disregard for rules, here's a story.

Once upon a time, there were 2 butt buddy immorts Smokin and Val (aka Fmh and...krusty?) For reasons unknown to almost everyone, they were thoroughly protected by Nia, and almost never got punished for anything they did that were against rules or protocol. One fine day, I was in a group led by Zarf and we pop me a nifty unholy reaver. Being the happy silly newbie that I was, I gossiped about it. So along comes Fmh who proceeds to charm me and take it away from me. Nia tells me tough luck coz charm is an in-game spell. About a week later, I charm a fellow mortal character and take his eq (silly me, choosing goose's mortal to charm ) and got wiped by nia. How's that for double standards? From then on, I decide that the rules were a bunch of BS that didn't apply to certain ppl who broke rules left right center and got applauded for it.
Seriously tho, I hated Nia, and still do.

I remember turning to soultraders for a while after sloth went down, coz it was basically sloth2, until some moron took the code and destroyed the game, turning it into a player-less mud. Came back to sloth, bitched initially about spellbooks and rent...played nonethless on and off, finally on now hoping i can keep my current streak of going 5 mths w/o getting wiped longer

Mustang/Al

[Driven]

Started playing in Fall of 95 as Erasia on SlothMUD II at the suggestion of a friend in college. At the time I was the head justice God on FieryMUD, but used Sloth as a home away from home to screw around. Grouped often with AQUAMAN, Midnight, and Froggy. Erasia's stats sucked, but I was able to amass a decent amount of gold... when someone auctioned off a character named Maniac who had nice stats. I bought Maniac, and played Maniac until the end of Slothmud II grouping with Karma, Chaffee, Turbo, Dariel, Kirimasa, among others.

About the time FieryMUD lost all their playerfiles in some hard-drive crash of biblical proportions, SlothMUD III started, so I started Maniac again, same classorder, got real playable stats on first reroll, decided to stick around. Grouped every night for months and months with original Ghost who lead DWeb groups with Gara, Enea, Calibar, among others. Played addictively for years and got him to level 32 avatar.

I convinced myself that I wanted to stop playing mortal, so I immorted Maniac to build since I had always wanted to give back to the mud. I eventually got my hands on Agox through Jake's brother Chris. Been playing Agox for a couple years now, and have just recently started Driven. I just can't seem to be able to break the addiction.

[Alberich]

wow, I shouldn't have started this, make me feel like complete newbie

interesting stories though, I've never really heard so many about the early days of sloth

sorry russians, I cannot figure out how to add options to existing polls, if you can at all, someone pm me or something :p

[Mirax]

Looks like "TMC/Mudconnect" have same effectiveness as "Happened across the website and got hooked".. Do we still need voting though?

p.s. yes, Jake, i've voted yet. do it every day and a little more, so dont wipe me, plz

[Akasha2]

Going back down to Impz asking about the transition from Sloth2 to Sloth3, at the time it happened I was without internest access so I missed it. But it was truly dishearting at the time to finally get access returned and try to log onto Sloth and it wasn't there. I can't remember if there was anything at all there. I seem to remember the title screen coming up with a message of some sort saying Sloth would return shortly (but this may be a figment of my imagination, I can't recall exactly). It was a year or or so before I actually logged back in again.
I've heard many stories about the final day of Sloth 2, and the Armagedon quest that took place. I'm also curious to hear a good story about that fateful night myself. Anyone who can entertain us with a summary of that night?

Akasha