News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ask HN: Best “I brought down production” story? by nullc on Saturday June 26, 2021 @11:09PM (#27648194)
A friend of mine ran a large and relatively popular (as in at least 30 users online at any given time ...) PvP MUD on a server of mine back in the (late?) 90s.

I didn't play muds and my experience was mostly limited to helping him fix C programming bugs from time to time and fielding an occasional irate phone call from users who got my number off the whois data. But because of the programming help I had some kind of god-access to the mud.

One afternoon I had a ladyfriend over that I was presumably trying to impress and she'd asked about the mud. We hopped on and I summoned into existence a harmless raggedy-ann doll. That was kind of boring so I thought it would be fun to attach an NPC script to it, -- I went through the list and saw something called a "Zombie Lord" which sounded promising. I applied it, and suddenly the doll started nattering on about the apocalypse and ran off. Turned out that it killed everyone it encountered, turned them all into zombie lords, creating an exponential wave of destruction that rapidly took over the over the whole game.

I found the mental image of some little doll running around bringing on the apocalypse to be just too funny-- until my phone started ringing. Ultimately the game state had to be reported to a backup from a day or two prior.

[I've posted a couple examples, -- I dunno which one is best, but people can vote. :)]

Re:Ask HN: Best “I brought down production” story? by sneak on Saturday June 26, 2021 @11:13PM (#27648216)
Re:Ask HN: Best “I brought down production” story? by RHSeeger on Sunday June 27, 2021 @12:35AM (#27648624)
That was an annoying time in the game. Not horrible, but you pretty much had to avoid town because people were purposefully trying to spread the plague. Certainly memorable though.
Re:Ask HN: Best “I brought down production” story? by ratcline on Sunday June 27, 2021 @01:06AM (#27648767)
Little did we know how realistic that would end up being.
Re:Ask HN: Best “I brought down production” story? by arminiusreturns on Sunday June 27, 2021 @03:47AM (#27649499)
I was there for it, but I literally walked into Ironforge right after the first wave hit, and it was just corpses everywhere. I had no idea what was going on at the time!
Re:Ask HN: Best “I brought down production” story? by ShakataGaNai on Sunday June 27, 2021 @12:30AM (#27648604)
Oh man. MUD's in the late 90s. Just randomly reminded me of all the time I spent in Medivia (I'm fairly sure that was the one). Those were good times. Surprised the name even came to me since I haven't thought about those in... 20ish years.
Re:Ask HN: Best “I brought down production” story? by sjaak on Sunday June 27, 2021 @01:33AM (#27648874)
Medivia? Judging from screenshots that looks a lot like Tibia (https://www.tibia.com)
Re:Ask HN: Best “I brought down production” story? by Izkata on Sunday June 27, 2021 @05:02AM (#27649865)
Never heard of Medivia before, but looking at screenshots and their site, that is absolutely some sort of fork/copy of Tibia. Even the world map is basically same shape, with locations shifted slightly and renamed, and the game interface is the same. I think they may even be using the old sprites from before a UI revamp a bit over a decade ago, from when I played Tibia.

Edit: Found this [0] which states Medivia originally started as a private Tibia server that eventually evolved into its own game. People were only just starting to make private Tibia servers when I left (or maybe they were only just starting to become popular, not sure anymore), which explains why I hadn't heard of this.

Tibia was created in 1997, I played roughly 2002 - 2006. Looks like Medivia was first created in 2009 [1], I would guess probably still just a private server at the time.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/i480jd/medivia_4_ol...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MediviaMMO/ (right sidebar)

Re:Ask HN: Best “I brought down production” story? by jorams on Sunday June 27, 2021 @05:48AM (#27650086)
Since they mentioned the late 90s, I think it's more likely they meant Medievia[1], which has been online since 1992.

[1]: http://www.medievia.com/