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Both sets of players lose massive amounts of gold. And new players lose far more experience than they'll gain if they hunt alone because they can't tank a hit because they're broke as a mofo and can't afford the hugely expensive curatives hunting will cost. You know... unless they decide to hunt the Teshen Caldera for the rest of their days and just never cure anything. So Unless the newbie is able to find someone to powerlevel them, they're gonna spend a fair bit of time hunting. Hell, Aereasentesh (I could be mispelling her name) died like 6-7 times I the Vortex last night and when we chart had mentioned she was getting superbly irritated with the xp loss she was accruing.
So for BOTH sets of players (New and old) losing hours of work is incredibly frustrating, upsetting, disturbing, and heartwrenching. And then you get more upset because you lost all that time of work AND STILL need to refill your curatives even more as you attempt to regain what you just lost, accruing even more debt in a realm that provides you nothing but loss.
Imperian bashing currently has no stakes anymore. I am pretty sure they turned off XP loss. Reasons to bash? Aspect. Kinda like our endgame, except moon-focused and.. Imperian-y. My chars only ever got to 80 because it was my first mud and bashing was pain for me, when I was younger.
Lusternia, you can do influence stuff as an alternative to bashing, but you can still lose either way. XP loss in the form of being embarrassed for fumbling your words. They also had Aethership stuff, which was one of the quick ways to drag newbies around for high xp gain, and Astral bashing. Goals: Demigod? Or was it Ascended? Yeah, it was something ridiculous like that. Starting your own cult and whatnot. To you. Tomi would dig that. Also, I think bashing is helpful for accruing your 'divine power' and such.
Midkemia had no real curatives to speak of. Not really. Most of their curing were skills, so the only loss to bashing was the potential of death. I honestly don't think there was anything in the way of reward for bashing beyond like.. health and lessons. They had a lot of cool stuff, though.
Achaea is very much like Aetolia, when it comes to bashing. They have higher gold yield for bashing, but there is a gold cap that limits the amount you can gain. (Mobs that yield 150-300 gold per kill start to only give like.. 15-30 gold.. or something like that. I have never ever reached the gold cap.) The primary goal of bashing is the Dragon thing. Basically a class/skillset designed to make you a more efficient basher by massively upping your audit. After you reach dragon, based on what I've heard, the goal for bashin becomes the acquisition of talismans and such, which is their equivalent to relics. Even if their gold wasn't a thing, they have some goals still.
I mean, I recognize these are all different MUDs with different goals, different stories, and different populations/resources. My intent for this post is like.. perspective-driven. Also, I'm probably missing a fair bit of information, since Aetolia is the only one I've actually reached endgame in. The others are ones I've just seen people at endgame in.
And frankly with or without the factor of "stakes" - which I think are a huge discussion that are probably worth it's own thread, Imperian's bashing is just better in a lot of ways, that frankly boil down to this:
When I died in Imperian bashing, I did not feel it was for a lack of artifacts, I did not feel it was because the game was being "cheap", and it usually wasn't because the game had fifty roaming aggressive mobs roll up on me at the same time. When I died in Imperian, it usually was because I was not paying enough attention. I flipped to youtube to put on a new podcast video, I went to answer an email, or just ... something else had the attention I should have been giving bashing. I died because of me, not because the game decided to mess with me.
Aetolia cannot say this, at least in my own personal opinion. I feel like a lot of areas are very artificially difficult. If I have someone's artifacts I can clear them easily. If I do not, I cannot. Simple as that. It is a PVE environment dominated by artifacts and, by extension, by credit cards.
Imperian gets around this with encounters. There are a variety of boss-style encounters that require you to do specific things in specific ways to get through them, and they therefore do not neccesarialy reward artifact weight, but rather knowledge of the encounter, and skillful enactment thereof. A very popular example of this is the Wraith Lords in Necropolis, or those in Demon's Pass. Other encounters that exist but aren't as strong in design in my opinion include the horde orc lieutenants, Lakhild, and Gromgar. While these encounters are undoubtedly more coding work for the developers, these encounters are the difference between me enjoying Imperian's bashing, and not enjoying Aetolia's.
Moreover, these encounters offer something worthwhile to people in the form of temporary (lasting one week) artifacts that drop and can be used by any of the individuals that were in the group that killed the monster you were in the encounter. It cannot be understated how powerful a draw that was. I regularly was helping people bashing those Wraith Lords up, and indeed, people wanted to do that content, because that was a huge reward for them - it helped ease the pain of the other bashing areas significantly. I feel this is worthy of consideration for Aetolia too, because temporary artifacts as the drops for more involved encounters would help "bridge the gap" without devaluing the existing artifacts. Moreover, having a "trial" of an artifact in such a way would no doubt help drive sales, I think.
And finally, those kinds of encounters offered a place to people that were of lower level but wanted to group bash. We could help achieve the mechanic of the encounter without having to worry about the encounter being hugely out of place for them. For example, there was one Wraith Lord fight where you had to lob an object at one of three different coloured vats. So you were basically using a specific command at a signposted time, while someone else was fighting the big bad (or you were, if you could handle it, of course). As a result of having encounters designed in this way, you could feel like you were contributing at least in some small way to the actual bashing, rather than just being dragged around by a higher level character whom, frankly, probably wouldn't be doing it, if they weren't inclined to help you out.
There's a lot I could break down in a comparison of Imperian and Aetolia in this regard, and I feel I would be remiss if I didn't say Imperian doesn't have its problems too in the PVE arena, but that's my thoughts on one very specific aspect I feel could be a large boon if applied to Aetolia. The prospect of meaningful reward coupled with offering under-endgame characters an actual way to contribute to their levelling when they're cooperating with a more experienced player would be a good thing to add to the game.
Valkyrior system