SmartMonsters' Bulletin Boards
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This is SmartMonsters' Occasional Newsletter
Volume 20 Number 1
[September 28, 2019]

Here's MUD in yer eye! TriadCity is compatible with traditional MUD clients, including VipMud, TinTin++, Mudlet, MUDRammer, and others. Point your secure client to triadcity.smartmonsters.com port 9095, or port 9094 for insecure connections. Enjoy! Read the MOTD for details.

It was a lot of work. Thousands of in-game popup signs and other messages had to be converted to display as text on MUD clients while continuing to open new windows in our GUIs. The Help robot has been entirely reprogrammed with the ability to make the same distinction. World-logic which until now has been implemented in our GUI clients has had to be replicated server-side. We've invested the work to better serve blind and vision-impaired players who are comfortable with their clients. Have at 'em!

MILESTONES

Pushing 6,000 Likes for the TriadCity Facebook page. Holy moly! Our little page, all grown up!

And: nearly 1,000 Followers on Twitter. Nice!

NEWS OF THE WORLD

Vampires are very nice people. Also they're extremely good-looking, and many are quite wealthy. TriadCity's entirely benign Vampire Theme Park is open for your amusement. What's inside? A roller-coaster ride! Miniature golf! Blood sausage! A game where you dunk Sarah Michelle Gellar in a big vat of blood! Free movies! Uncle Vlad's world-renowned restaurant. A bar specializing in... tell us you're not surprised... all the esoteric varieties of Bloody Mary you can possibly imagine, or we could anyway. Lots and lots of highly educational exhibitions about the good things Vampires do for society and the naturalness of predation. And some extremely attractive nurses. All for the straightforward communication of one simple reality: Vampires are just like the rest of us, only better. MOTD.

Elves in TriadCity are not Tolkien's Aryan supermen, with minds like Einstein and bodies like Orlando Bloom. Not unlike the blankets many favor as outerwear, they're threadbare, wearworn, and all but exhausted. TC's Elves are a displaced population, driven into ghettos in NorthEast, favelas in the South, refugee tent-shtetls in NorthWest. Increasingly forced from the other Thirds, they stream into the Barmalindar urban forest in NorthWest in daily larger numbers. The people of NorthWest assist as they can, but the problem of mass asylum threatens to overwhelm civic resources. There is no clear plan and no evident direction. What you do with this information is up to you. There's more in this MOTD.

Oscar Wilde is alive and living in TriadCity. We've added many thousands of epigrams, aphorisms and opinions on topics as diverse as art, literature, religion, masks, secrets, friendship, acting, absinthe, America, furniture, excess, meals, history, crime and punishment, the public, men and women, martyrdom, prison, journalism, marriage, government, wallpaper, and of course, the meaning of life. More than merely a machine for firing off witty epigrams, our Oscar is now a comprehensive repository of Wilde's wit, wisdom, and opinions. Naturally he's still hilarious. MOTD.

Up against the wall, media mothers! Kommune 1 has come for your children.

A new section of The Adventurer's front page displays the current overall average experience points at which characters have reached their levels. These data are provided so that players interested in extreme optimization may compare their results to the mean. More details in the MOTD.

How many tertiary descriptions in TriadCity? 2,940,154. So far.

Help and Marvin have been majorly upgraded.

NEWS OF THE UNIVERSE

Guest logins! W00t! We've enabled restricted, anonymous logins for folks who want to check out the world without making the commitment of registering for an account. Guests are restricted to the tutorial and Sanctuary Island, with only the most basic commands available. Still, you can encourage your commitment-phobic friends to dip a toe into our waters - then shove them in forcibly, we hope! Anyway that's what we'd do. Here's the MOTD.

The Recycler Role allows adventurers to earn game bucks by cleaning up the sidewalks. Take those empty whiskey bottles to the Recycling Center in NorthWest for spiffage in both Dinars and experience. Free clue: start with Barmalindar. MOTD.

The Rat Hunter Role does something similar, only for... wait for it... rats. They're spilling out of the sewage plant and taking over the world. Your job: waste 'em! And sell their corpses to the meat processing plant, handily located just across the streets. Similarly PigeonHunter and FidoHunter. MOTD

Work in progress: we’re adding potential structure to player experiences in ways we’ve not attempted before. Where “structure” is always voluntary, of course. The thought is to provide automated guidance to players who are uncomfortable with the wide-open sense of “do whatever you like” which has prevailed in TriadCity until now. For example we're expanding the notion of Treasure Hunts to include requests which NPCs will make of you to find Items for them in places they don’t want to go. These are akin to quests in the MUD tradition, and they may require a good deal of adventuring to fulfill. The idea is to provide a repertoire of structured options. If you want.

Thank you for following us on social media:

TriadCity on Facebook

TriadCity on Twitter

TriadCity on Wikipedia

Experience is 25% higher all day Saturday Pacific time. Health and energy regeneration is also faster. Come join us then and rack up those levels.

We'll spiff you if you refer a friend. Click for details.

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Thanks! Meet you in The City!

-- Gary and Mark

SmartMonsters' Bulletin Boards Post early, post often.

SmartMonsters' Bulletin Boards
Post early, post often.