User blog:Winterwolf7/Why I Restarted Redemption in December 2014

I supposed before I can answer that question, I should try and answer why I agreed to shut it down in the first place.

Freenet and MHS

I have been playing or an immortal on MUDs since I was 16 years old. The person who first introduced me to them was my friend Liz, who you may know as Litazia. At that time the Internet for most purposes did not even exist yet... it was around 1994.

There was a free community service called the Ottawa Capital Freenet that you could dial into, run at Carleton University. It had about 30 phone connections and you could connect for a fixed amount of minutes per day, leave messages for other users, participate in discussion groups and there was access to both Gopher and a very primitive text-only version of the world wide web through something called Lynx. It was still light years ahead of BBSs of the time.

Freenet had a section for games, and among these was the Moosehead SLED, a MUD run by an imp named Rusty. Because it was hosted locally, most of the players were from Ottawa. We had a very active social community in real life. There was even a couple of conferences at hotels. As a socially awkward teenager with few friends, it was an amazing experience to be part of such a close knit awesome group. We met at the Burger King on Dalhousie in downtown Ottawa nearly every month. It was a large group, up to 30 people of all ages regularly attended.

After a  few years, annoyed with cheating and preferential treatment at the hands of the game administrators, a small group including Daisy, Delstar and Samantha decided to start their own MUD. Litazia also went with them and was soon promoted to an immortal herself, and eventually a coder for the new MUD. I followed her because I didn't see much of a future for myself at MHS. Among other things, gargoyles were her brain child. After about a year in development, the game was officially opened in 1995 and was renamed Redemption MUD. Players had designed the login screen, the clans and the game story, all essentially done as contests by the game administrators.

Redemption MUD

I played as a mortal for many years, enjoying the game a lot. Delstar became super focused on his career and less and less involved; however Daisy took over as the main implementor for the game. She did an excellent job. The storyline progressed and Dominia was added and Daisy ran another contest to create a new clan because the game had been successful and there was enough players to justify adding another. My entry was Venari, which was selected by the administrators as the winner. I was super excited and then struggled in the role of being a clan leader for several years.

Daisy's coders had been Litazia, Maclav and Mierauch. Recruitment for new immortals was once a year and I decided to apply. I had levelled up nearly every class in the game and was very experienced and seemed to have a knack for spotting game balance issues. I was selected and then had my first glimpse of life as an imm on the MUD. I did my duty well, building Death Bloom as my first area, and eventually got promoted. There was an opening for a part-time coder and I worked under each of her coders on a VERY short leash. Eventually one by one they moved on and I became the head coder and eventually added a few others to help me, such as Acehilm and Aql.

Daisy came to me late one night in game and gave me some very bad news. She and Delstar were divorcing. She didn't want to hang onto the MUD any more and risk bumping into him, and didn't have the time or energy to continue as imp any more in any case. She offered it to me with the implication that if I didn't accept, she would have to shut it down. Becoming the owner and implementor of Redemption was never something I strove for or necessarily even wanted. I didn't want to see the community and all the work everyone had put into it to fade away for such a sad reason, so I accepted.

I was actively involved with the game for a couple more years, coding tons of new things and doing a pretty fair job of running it. I was still living at home, finishing University, and I had enough time and freedom to do it well.

Personal Life

I didn't date all that much... my first two girlfriends were Chibiusa and Lufia both of whom I met through the MUD. Surprisingly I got married when I was 25 to someone who was not a gamer and finally moved out. School was finished and I got a job in Software Development. Pretty quickly I started to feel like the last thing I wanted to do after programming all day at work was to come home and program some more.. MUD coding is generally thankless work and people are more likely to complain than thank you for the effort. Eventually I bought a house, and later my son was born. I was exhausted and my life was now very full. I preferred to spend my limited free time playing games (especially Final Fantasy 11 Online) rather than the second job of being an administrator for a MUD. Still, I let other immortals pick up the slack and although I was present I wasn't really doing very much any more.

Finally in 2010 my marriage was over. I won't get into the details but it was a disaster. I was essentially homeless and completely broke. I lost everything. It was a real life reset button, much of my life style reverting back to what it was like in high school even through I was now in my 30s. I barely ever visited the MUD anymore, although I did maintain the server and pay for the continued service for as long as I could.

Reach.Net in Trenton

As our ancient pentium 75 server slowly started to fail, Reach.Net in Trenton became less and less helpful; although they did stop charging me, they made no promises about future service. Finally in 2013 they contacted me and told they were retiring our old server and no longer offered Linux hosting so we were on our own. After discussions among myself, Avacar and Cauthon, we decided to shut down. We were all pretty busy, the player population was low, none of us wanted to pay for the hosting or domain or web site any more.

I tried to make back ups of what I could but the system was so old and my knowledge of the tools so poor by then that I didn't even succeed in making a recent back up by the time the service was shut down. Honestly I didn't feel very bad about it, I had stopped caring about Redemption several years before. Although it had been such a huge and integral part of my life as a teenager and young adult, I closed that chapter of my life and moved on.