10 years of SlothMUD III

This week marks the 10th anniversary of SlothMUD III. This means 10 years of a continuous playerbase and the same administration (roughly). While many players and builders have come and gone and many changes have taken place, if you rented your character in late 1997 with any reasonable levels, you can still log it in.

The one constant over the past 10 years has been change. It's pace has varied widely, from "Slothy" with incremental areas and skills to dramatic, with new continents and a doubling of classes.

I don't have a "who" list handy from that first few weeks, but would appreciate anyone who could post or send one.

I also don't have a comprehensive list of all of the people who have contributed to building various parts of SlothMUD. This list would indeed be long and we all hope it continues to grow.

Among all of the changes on the mud and the pace of real life, it is often easy to miss this kind of anniversary and mark it. However, I believe it is noteworthy and it's kind of easy for me to remember Sloth's anniversary since it's only a few days before my wedding anniversary. For the record, I got married before I ever started playing Sloth II.

Dora the Explorer?

I've been less than active lately on SlothMud, but do keep up with the progress made. Among the game play changes (some of which were less than well received) was the addition of the exploration tracking. Roughly every room visited is tracked on an individual player basis, in order to calculate the percentage of the world visited.

It is a relatively superfluous statistic to track but it is a badge that can people can compete for. I don't think we have implemented any in game effects based on the level of exploration. However, I was surprised to see that Splork (I think) made an explorer leader board available on the website.

I know there were some bumps when it was originally coded, but it seems as if it is pretty good now. I'd be interested to see how the actual statistic is tracked as I don't think it was trivial coding to:

• efficiently track each room number that every player visits
• uniquely identify every room which is able to be reached by mortals

At any rate, I'm waiting for the character Dora to be at the top of that list.