News Archive for 1999

December 28, 1999: WE DON'T REALLY NEED Y2K here at MUD2.COM; we can have our own computer problems regardless of the year! Today, we had not one, but two unrelated problems. First, the MUD machine's hard drive began to sound like a lawnmower (so what's this with MUD2 and hard disks anyway?) so following my own advice, I replaced it before it got any worse. Second, I seem to be experiencing a mysterious performance problem on the LAN that the MUD machine is on. In fact, as I try to troubleshoot the problem over the course of the next few days, it may be necessarily to temporarily interrupt access to the game again. My apologies for any inconvenience this may cause. Thank you all for your understanding and patience!

December 17, 1999: THE PLAYER OF THE MONTH for November is Clare. Congratulations! The contest for the Death Of The Month title ended in a tie between Kerriann and Xanthe. Condolences...

December 13, 1999: BEWARE: New monsters have been spotted in the Land!

December 4, 1999: NOW THIS IS WHAT I CALL AN OUTAGE: Not only is UUNet's Ottawa connection dead, so are their 1-800 support numbers in Toronto! Anyway, as a call to their toll number revealed, they're aware of the problem and working on it. Hopefully, the network will be restored in no time, and you'll all have a chance to read my apology here for this unexpected Saturday afternoon outage.

November 24, 1999: AS SOME OF YOU probably know already, it appears CompuServe finally axed the last remaining copy of MUD1 there, British Legends. And, unless this turns out to be just a technical glitch after all, they did so without warning; suddenly, attempts to enter BL result in a terse message: That page is empty!
With a certain degree of reservation (after all, the last thing I want is to be seen as a vulture over there) I decided to post a message there, inviting all players to visit MUD2.COM. Some of them may decide to come over, pop in as a guest or open an account on a trial basis.
I am sure many of you know what it's like: the game you love, an on-line place that's almost like a second home, disappears with little or no warning. So please, treat any "refugees" with patience and understanding. As I'm a former BL player myself, you'll also have my thanks.

November 22, 1999: ONCE AGAIN, A TIE: October's POTM title is shared by Ginzu and Tingle. The DOTM vote, on the other hand, was unanimous: condolences to Sassenach!

November 22, 1999: OCTOBER was the worst month to date in the history of MUD2.COM with respect to timely payment of accounts. Several accounts have been unpaid since October 1. Because of this, I found it necessary to immediately change the status of these accounts; if you are one of those affected, you may find that you're unable to play the game without purchasing additional playing time. This does not, however, mean that you must pay by the hour from now; just quickly pop that cheque or money order in the mail, or send me up-to-date AMEX or VISA (sorry, no MasterCard) information, and your account will be reinstated to its former status right away. And if by any chance, I changed your account status by mistake (hey, I may be an expert programmer, but I'm a novice accountant) please don't hesitate to write to me immediately!

October 25, 1999: TOBIAS THE WIZARD is hosting a special Halloween Sorcerers' Bash this coming Sunday at 15:00 hrs game time (3 PM). Since it is going to be Halloween and The Land is a special place of magic and mystery, expect some surprises! I've been told there are fabulous prizes at stake and all manner of mischief will be afoot.
I encourage you all to come out and participate. A Sorcerers' Bash is a great opportunity to practice your fighting skills without the pesky problem of losing your persona. If you have no empty slots, show up a little early and I'll be able to set you up for a restore after the event.
Even if you don't plan on playing the Sorcerers' Bash, do try to drop in, I promise there will be Tricks and Treats aplenty. - Tethys

October 24, 1999: CONGRATULATIONS to Jake and Kerriann: our new Players Of The Month! And the usual condolences to Antman, the newest winner of the Death Of The Month title!

September 20, 1999: YOU WERE WONDERING, perhaps, when your favourite arch-wizzes will get off their fat hind parts and do their monthly duties... well, the wait is over: the votes have been cast and tallied, and August's Player Of The Month turns out to be the mighty Shalimar. Congratulations! We also have a new Death Of The Month: may Circe (well, one of her previous incarnations anyway) rest in pieces, er, I mean, peace!

September 16, 1999: UUNET CANADA surprised me with yet another so-called "scheduled" outage tonight; needless to say, as far as I am concerned, there was nothing scheduled about it, as they failed to notify me. My apologies for the temporary unavailability of the game and the MUD2.COM Web site during this outage. If they continue doing this, I'll eventually move MUD2.COM to another Internet provider, but as you can imagine, that's not a simple undertaking and besides, UUNet is supposed to be, if not the best, then one of the best anyway <sigh>

August 17, 1999: THE VOTE FOR PLAYER OF THE MONTH would be a tie, were it not for the fact that poor Shaime was also a candidate for Death Of The Month. That leaves Clare as our sole surviving Player Of The Month for July. Shaime, unfortunately, also failed to earn that less coveted title; our July Death Of The Month is, actually, a tie between Caoilhion and Talyn.

July 31, 1999: NETWORK DOWNTIME: UUNet Canada sent a note about scheduled network maintenance that will take place between 4:00 and 6:00 AM on August 3, 1999 here in Ottawa. During this period, all connections in Ottawa will experience an interruption of service; in other words, MUD2.COM will likely be unavailable.
UUNet Canada is also informing us of planned maintenance activity in Toronto between 4:00 and 5:00 AM on August 5. Although this does not specifically affect Ottawa connections, past experience suggests that it may interfere with our connectivity to destinations outside of Canada.
Well, at least this time around we were warned in advance!

July 19, 1999: INCOMPETENCE KNOWS NO LIMITS. At least this was my conclusion today after a gentleman, here to install a new air conditioner, assured me that his work will not affect our power in any way, only to accidentally (?) shut down all our power a few minutes later. Had he told me in advance that he's working on the fuse box, I could have shut down all the systems here in two minutes... instead, I ended up wasting an hour or more, recovering from the consequences of this unplanned power outage. The worst thing is, I am actually paying these people a bonus for priority service! Well, whatever my excuse, sorry for the unexpected outage. I would promise that it won't happen again but I can't; they're still here, working (although they say they're done with the electrical work now.)

July 9, 1999: THE VOTES ARE IN: June's Player Of The Month is Morgaine. Congratulations! As for the Death Of The Month, this title is shared by three players: Hawumph, Malaise, and Sonsie all received the same number of votes from our esteemed wizzes. I suspect these hapless mortals would all have preferred to live on without this dubious honour...

June 27, 1999: WELCOME BACK CRAB THE WIZARD. Err, well, welcome Ender the wizard. A little naming conflict with a certain crustaceon mobile means that Crab is now known as Ender. Mind you, I don't fancy the fate of said mobile when Ender is about. - Tethys

June 19, 1999: CONGRATULATIONS TO KHAN, May Player of the Month. Oh, and condolences Hawumph, but Death of the Month has to go to somebody! - Tethys

June 11, 1999: A NEW VERSION OF MUD has just been installed. As usual, please report any unusual behavior or bugs that you might encounter. Thanks!

May 24, 1999: ADMIRAL BOMBOW'S CHRONICLES is back! This is the third year of our newsletter, so it was only appropriate for it to acquire its third editor as well: please welcome Tobias as the new editor-in-chief of the ABC! The newsletter also has a new look and richer content than ever; go see for yourself at http://www.mud2.com/bombow/. Thanks to Tobias and all ABC contributors!

May 16, 1999: A CURIOUS RESULT: Rogaine is the winner of both the Player Of The Month and the Death Of The Month titles for the month of April. Goes to show that in the magical Land of MUD, just because you're dead doesn't mean you can't live on successfully! Or is it the other way around? Success doesn't guarantee that you will manage to stay alive?

April 21, 1999: PASSWORD PROBLEMS? Some of you reported a problem logging on to the game even though you're using the correct account number and password combination. As it turns out, this is not a case of the forgetful user: we indeed seem to be having a software problem that occasionally causes passwords to become corrupted. Until a fix is found, the only solution is to send me Internet mail (sysop@mud2.com) if you cannot log on; I'll fix your account right away. If this problem has affected you, my apologies for the inconvenience!

April 19, 1999: ANNOUNCING THE DUBLIN MUD MEET: If you plan to visit Ireland on July 24, 1999 to meet your fellow players there, please take a look at Grumpy's Web page at http://homepage.tinet.ie/~osweeney/mudmeet.html for more information!

April 15, 1999: THE VOTES ARE IN (better late than never): March's Player of the Month, by unanimous vote, is Flick. Congratulations! As for the Death of the Month, this time Caoilfhion earned this not so coveted title.

March 14, 1999: FEBRUARY'S PLAYER OF THE MONTH is Oberon. Congratulations! This month's Death Of The Month vote was a tie: Aoibheann and Azrael share this somewhat more dubious title.

February 18, 1999: THINGS APPEAR TO BE SLOWLY COMING BACK to normal... According to UUNet Canada, they had a major router breakdown here in Ottawa Thursday morning, which affected many of their customers, including Web-sites like the Government of Canada's main site at http://www.gc.ca/. Mud2.com wasn't spared either. As of this time, I see routing is finally coming back to normal; I am crossing my fingers and hope that this is for real, and that the problem has been resolved.
Thank you all for the concerned e-mail (some of which actually managed to get through to me when the network came to life intermittently) and I appreciate your understanding!

February 18, 1999: UUNET CANADA informs me of a major router problem here in Ottawa, which is why many of you are unable to connect (or connect reliably) to MUD2.COM at this time. They do not yet have an ETA, but they expect to fix the problem hopefully within the next hour or two. Until then, MUD2.COM is more or less dead in the water, along with countless other businesses and even several ISPs that rely on the same backbone service... Isn't the Internet fun?

February 9, 1999: A REMINDER to those who pay by the hour: when you use the K command to buy additional time, charges are being made in CANADIAN DOLLARS. At current exchange rates, one US dollar is worth approximately 1.50 Canadian. One hour of play time costs $1.50 Canadian, with a minimum order of 10 hours.
Some of you apparently thought that the charges are made in US dollars and were surprised when you didn't receive the amount of play time you expected. Sorry for the confusion!

February 6, 1999: THE NEW YEAR'S first Player Of The Month is Crazybobo. Congratulations!
January's Death Of The Month title was won by Nasti. Condolences...

January 30, 1999: IT TOOK AN EFFORT but we're back among the living. MUD2.COM's server now has a new hard disk. The old one suddenly began to report read errors, something that no operating system takes kindly; Linux is no exception.
The new hard disk is not only bigger, it should also provide better performance, as it is a SCSI drive. It is also brand new (I just received it as a warranty replacement for an older unit) so it should give us a few years of trouble-free service (crossing fingers.) And now it's time for me to go and find a SCSI controller for the the machine I just cannibalised to get MUD2.COM back up and running...
Please accept my apologies for this unexpected downtime (it HAD to happen just when the weekend starts, right?) Thank you all for your patience and understanding.

January 29, 1999: MUD2.COM was down due to a system crash that happened in the middle of the night. This affected the game proper as well as the Web page. The cause is unknown although I suspect that the server's hard drive is no longer 100% reliable; I'll do further tests and replace the drive if necessary.
Thank you all who sent me mail about the problem. Hopefully I won't appear ungrateful when I ask that in the future, please do NOT send me multiple messages every hour. One message will do just fine, unless you actually have new information you think I ought to know about. I am not going to work any faster just because my mailbox is overflowing, it merely adds to my headaches!
As usual, thank you for your patience and understanding.

January 28, 1999: MUD2.COM IS FEATURED in this week's Online section (published every Thursday) of The Guardian! The section's cover story is a lengthy article by Jim McClellan that talks about MUDs in general, and MUD2 in particular; even our Web address is in there, except that for some reason, all links are broken in the on-line version. Oh well, you can't have it all!
The Guardian's Web address is http://www.guardian.co.uk/.

January 25, 1999: UUNET SERVICE OUTAGE: On January 28, between 2:30 and 3:00 in the morning Eastern time, UUNET will be upgrading hardware and software in their core router in Ottawa, in order to prepare for new high-speed customer connections in the Ottawa area. All connections in Ottawa will be affected. They anticipate an outage not to exceed 15 minutes during this maintenance.

January 15, 1999: AT LAST: It is now possible to sign on for a trial account over the Web. Please direct your friends and relatives to http://www.mud2.com/cgi-bin/welcome.cgi. Needless to say, any errors or problems should be reported immediately (thanks!)
It is now also possible to have subscriptions that are paid for by the hour. Please send me e-mail or MUDmail if you wish to convert your existing subscription into an hourly one.
For more information on hourly subscriptions, please visit the updated FAQ at http://www.mud2.com/faq.htm. The Prices (http://www.mud2.com/prices.htm) and Terms (http://www.mud2.com/terms.htm) pages have also been updated to reflect the availability of hourly pricing.
Please note that in a sense, this remains an experiment; if the Web-based signup or hourly pricing turn out to give us nothing but trouble, we reserve the right to discontinue these options at any time. Hopefully, that won't be necessary.

January 11, 1999: CONGRATULATIONS to Florence, the Land's newest witch!

January 11, 1999: AS YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED, we are one step further towards the goal of being able to offer subscriptions that are charged by the hour. (What you may have noticed is that the game now states that you're using a flat-rate of free account.)
The point is, we need a few brave volunteers. A few of you have indicated in the past that you'd be interested in converting your account: now is the time. If you are playing less than 20 hours a month on average, this subscription is for you; otherwise you're better off remaining on the flat-rate monthly (or annual) plan.
If you are interested, please send me mail!

January 7, 1999: DECEMBER'S PLAYER OF THE MONTH is Dustbunny, elected by unanimous vote. Congratulations! The Death Of The Month title was earned this time by Sonsie.

January 1, 1999: THE VOTES ARE IN: the mortals' most favourite wiz is none other but Tabitha the fair witch! As for the evilest, perhaps the result is not that surprising: it's our sinister wizard from the Highlands, Macleod!