Memories…

Shit sucks and has nothing on End of the Line; which has been around getting updates since 1989. Have fun with your memories while we keep playing the best and probablty the oldest online MUD in history.

You guys should think about hosting your own server for Holla Forums. It's not that hard, just needs a Loonix machine.
I've set it up once for singleplayer where I used 5 characters following a leader to have a full party. It's fun but very micro intensive.

Being the best of shit ain't much to brag about and being the oldest neither. Windows 2000 is older than 7 and I'm not seeing recommendations for it either.
HellMOO is still fundamentally broken across all servers anyway since it expects PvP to come out of literally nothing but someone deciding to be a dick.
It's a neat world with neat mechanics but it needed a whole lot more to actually justify many of its facets otherwise, it's another "log in to kill monsters and grind XP\loot" like any other.

what are you blathering about you drooling retard?

HellMOO/InfernoMOO are shit yes, but EOTL is a MUD not a gayfuck DIKU or MOO. You faggots keep talking about your gay memories of MOO and are too fucking scared to try EOTL. Says a lot. Considering 90% of MUDs/texts are shit.

EOTL is the diamond in the rough. It sets the standard by which all MUDs/MOOs/MUSHs/DIKUs are judged.

telnet eotl.org 2010

If you want the game to give you a reason to PvP then the guild rivalry system in EOTL is for you.

Oh sorry I thought Win2k was EOL'd over 10 years ago. I wasn't aware Win2k was getting regular updates and added featuers. I'll have to check it out!

That's that clusterfuck of a setting, isn't it? As strange as it sounds, my favourite part of HellMOO was the world and exploring it, so it doesn't seem like EOTL is for me.

He is talking about Dwarf Fortress, and it's actually 2 different posters.
I guess the idea is that highly-interactive games still do exist and don't happen strictly in MUDs.

Does that shitty attittude ever atracr any more players? Besides tryhards and insecure faggots that want to prove how tough they are on the internet?

I'm not convinced. If it was that good, you'd have posted a list of differences by now detailing what's so good about it, and if you can't think of any or talk about them, than it's just the same thing all over again with a tough-guy coat of paint.

HellMOO also had a "guild" rivalry system at one point. Still didn't helped, only made the game far worse since everyone was on edge all the time, waiting for someone to fuck up, attack the wrong person and give another corp legal justification to fucking end them.
Rivalry systems are never very well implemented since the devs that code that just expect players to be dicks and start wars or rivalries for the fun of it, risking all their progress in the game both in the character and in the "guild" they made for some cheap short lasting fun due to the stakes of said confrontations.
I'm not gonna hold my breath that someone has actually figured how to do this shit okay by now.

Sarcasm is the last quiver on the arrow of wit. Insult is throwing the quiver instead
Age and veterany are not good arguments for quality. Individual elements that can be analyzed actually are. If you gotta appeal to the age of something as proof that it's good, then you don't actually have anything positive to say about it.

By the way, do you know how old the Macintosh actually is? How long it has been in the market? By your own logic, picking any Windows or even switching to Linux would be the dumbest thing ever since Apple is still cranking out their shitty OS after all this time!

CircMUD variations were the only muds that were any good and most of them weren't without issues (like powertripping moderators)

Oh ok so 20+ years of content to explore isn't enough (newest area was put online about 2 weeks ago). Got it.

TL;DR you're a hippie-diku fuckstick. Don't try EOTL it isn't for you (you clearly need someone to hold your hand). It will bite you, taste your GRIDS, spit you out and call you a faggot to your gay ugly face.

I'm sure there is a lot of content, but it doesn't sound at all coherent.
Looking at the race list alone you've got humans, klingons, centaurs, androids and teddy bears.

I WANT TO FUCK KAT

...

You're the same fag who suggests this mud everytime. But instead of really selling to us you just sperg out and act like a cunt. Why should join, you never talk about features.

I remember one time I spent 2 hours cleaning up after you animals. Then I questioned what I'm doing with my life.

Clutter is comfy.

The only thing you've convinced me is that your gay server is filled with faggots that think they have some kind of self-worth for playing there instead of somewhere else and try hard faggots that only join for "le ebin hardcore experience".
I lost count of how many of these kind of servers and games I've tried but there's only so many 12's you can handle before you just give up on enduring the little shits.

Your recruitment speech only invites the absolute worst players that spend their entire playtime making everyone else's lives miserable, including the admins, people that will bitch all the time anytime things don't go their way but will mock you if you "can't handle" them.
I'd rather stick shards of glass up my ass than endure the company of functional toddlers, thank you very much.

So it's another "moar is better!", where content is put in because it looks cool regardless of how fitting it is.
HellMOO was already bad enough with the constant 80's pop culture reference that are more than outdated today (this is why referencial humour is shit) but something that doesn't even pretend to have a coherent theme… Guess I was right in thinking that it's a server for actually autistic manchildren.

How do you even get into these games

A little bit of patience and a bunch of meming faggots to help you out. Muds can do lot of shit because its just text. It was pretty fun

Hey I'm just reminded, wasnt there some user werking on a mud here?

If you're refering to what you use to play them, you need software for that. There are many alternatives but I'll personally recommend MushClient since it does pretty much everything you need fairly well and it's pretty easy that anyone can use it.

If you're talking instead about how people can enjoy these games, the explain is actually very easy:
The more graphical the representation of something is, the longer it takes to make content as well as making sure it actually fits with the rest. This extends beyond graphics into gameplay, where the more detailed the scenes are, the less you can do with them since you'd have to draw and code every single change.

Thus follows that the less graphic a game is, the more you can get away with in terms of gameplay, and since MUDs\MOOs are text-only, you get a shitton of gameplay to use in them.
This is the kind of people that prefers or likes these games, the ones that would rather sacrifice graphics in order to have good gameplay.

There used to be a social aspect here as well regarding people building stuff on their own that is all but reduced to setting up rooms on your hotel room for HellMOO, but that was still a thing. It's like an IRC chatroom but with rules and variables to affect stuff and other players.

Personnaly, I'd actually prefer if we had something like Neocron but with HellMOO content and gameplay instead so PvP was far better and meaningfull but the gameplay was a lot more deep and interesting.

Seriously don't try it. Keep making these same faggoty threads about your dead vanilla MOO with no content.

It's a fucking text game. I shouldn't have to sell you shit since you can read with your own fucking eyes. You're too pussy to make it there; that much is obvious since you didn't even try.

Seriously, though, I'd love to hear more circlejerking memoirs of your dank MOOs.

Here's a better version

HellMOO/InfernoMOO was fun, but the no-lifers hit the ends of the content wall pretty quickly and at that point things started to fall apart due to drama, lack of interest, and a few other things. Might be cool to revisit it every 2 years or so with Holla Forums though. Maybe get some fresh blood, see some old faces, start from scratch, and see any improvements and new content the admins have done.

As long as we can all chill in corp, have a drugfest, go on vision quests, inject each other with megaAIDs and rape each other to death again someday, I'll be happy.

You aren't even trying. You always barge in and call everyone a faggot for not trying your MUD without listing a coherent reason why anyone would.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt and checked out their website and leaving the horrible design aside, I only found shit about retarded meme races and hints towards an uninteresting, generic levels/classes system.

Slap together a greentext story, show me a screenshot of something interesting happening, tell me about the amazing mechanics and about how interesting the world is.

Holy fuck you are such a whiny little bitch, I can't take it anymore. Every time you talk about that mud the only thing you can do is hopelessly sperg at us like some child.
No, we loved the company of the game, the game itself was shit. The company is what makes it, if some spergy fuck like you is what we are going to have to deal with then I'd just rather not bother.
But keep trying to get us to play your ded mud tho :^)

I want to give them to you

>>>/cuckchan/

It's been an year and both hell and inferno are literally the same shit still.

I have no expectations of Hell improving, since the mods there are retards, but when we played Inferno it had quite a bit of tweaks and changes even in the short time we were there.

If you're expecting massive overhauls, new areas, etc etc, then yeah, that's not likely, but the little things were happening and quite often. Who knows man, they might have even made Ride a useful skill by now!

Ok so i'm trying to play one of these things but I hate the fucking walls of text jesus, I mean I know it's a TEXT based gsme but still

lmap

I didn't played HellMOO because someone dared me to or because it's an ebin hardcore PvP MVP game or whatever. I was told what the story and the world was, what the mechanics regarding skills and mutations were, how the combat worked, all the cool possibilites and combinations there were and that picked my interest.
You so far haven't given any reason to even acknowledge your meme game even exists.

We could check it with our own eyes? Sure we could. You know what else we can check with our own eyes? LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE.
There are sites with lists of recommended MUD's that I'd rather try first since at least those recommendations are not given by a sassy brat with a try-hard attittude.

Seriously, you sound like a 12 year old telling us how cool your fort is and that we can't go inside because "no girls allowed". Grow the fuck up and enjoy your dead server.

MOO code is fairly hard to get into and it's even worse with a really old codebase like theirs. Changing mechanics would be quite a fucking chore.
The one thing that suprises me is that nothing similar has been tried in a better engine anywhere ever.

I mean, making a text parser that communicates it to the server and relays responses for a command prompt sounds pretty fucking easy. I could probably whip out something like that in Unity in about a day or two, after which all the mechanics and variables are just classes and objects. That shit doesn't even need to synchronyze objects between server and client, just receive the messages, and even then you could actually do that for some real neat huds.

Then again, I'm not sure what the market for a MUD made in Unity would be, even if it was incredibly modular for servers.

I played Hell/Inferno off and on for years, but never for more than a couple of weeks at a time. Either the grindan would get to me or some faggot who already got his grindan in would murk me over and over for no real reason.

Probably (definitely) would have been more fun if I'd had some bearable people to play with, but the game also needs more build variety. About 75 percent of my rerolls were "Oh man I bet these skills/mutations synergize well–oh wait they're shit and I'm dead."

The changes to the Zombie mutation were amazing, though. I basically took it upon myself to explore the entire world (including the ocean) since you could get back up after dying and shake off the debuffs with some delicious branes.

...

24 players? out of which 2 are wizards, and 7 are Guests? You call this "not dead"?

Also, take a gander at that clusterfuck of stats. Couldn't you at least come up with something better than a straight copy out of DnD?
What the fuck is "evaluation"? Is this school?
What the fuck is "spec"? Can't you just stop aping up MMO concepts from failed games?

I was also under the impression that this was yet another emo edgy dark fantasy for underage tryhards, but you never know that for sure…
Until you see a "Player Kills", "Last Victim" and "Last Killer" on the goddamn stats menu.

So it's a game with a mishmash of unoriginal content ripped out of anything that looks cool to the eyes of grown manchildren, all for the purpose of exerting some control and domination over other players. Pretty fucking pathetic, at least HellMOO had some humor, retarded as it was, and decent mechanics to keep the game instesting for a while.

I can already tell why you advertize the server here but act so butthurt and defensive everytime some asks you to elaborate on why it's good.
It's not, you just have run out of people to kick around and you need new blood, but the game isn't that good unless you think it's content is "cool" and "hardcore" so you can't defend it either or talk about it in detail, but you've already invested so much time in it, it's easier to try and sucker someone in than go play somewhere else.

Goddamn, you're like that dumb angry kid that keeps inviting other kids to his home just so he can punch them and then he gets all defensive when people ask him "why the fuck would I visit your house, there's nothing to do there!" and your struggles, trying to come up with ways that being punched sounds cool.

It's a problem that game has and likely EOTL too as you haven't explained how it avoids it.
It's unavoidable as the PvP is just something that happens without a proper structured system and game design around it (and the only time there was, it was horrible).

It's not that PvP causes drama, PvP can be really fun too.
The problem is the playstyle and attitude of some players that care more about winning than having fun, which leads to them using tactics that aren't fun for everyone but maximize their ability to win. This does include drama, since it's the easiest way to destroy a corp, but it also includes raiding newbies to prevent them from every being a thread, which kills newblood and stagnates the game.

The problem with HellMOO is that it's not structured around being PvP centric. It's PvE with PvP happening on the side. It needs other gameplay mechanics that give incentives and objectives for fights, that create actual competition you can center PvP around and gives the oportunity for fights that aren't all-ins.
But it doesn't have that, and I seriously doubt EOTL has it either.

That'd require retooling the entire games balance and structure. As it stands, everyone is near instantly running around with high level text, of which they have multiples, so their loss is negligible. This eliminates all fairness and encouragement of lower level PVP, since it's either insanely one-sided, or just not even worth it. Thus necessitating next-level PVP, such as needless griefing, corp raiding and munching, etc etc. But as you stated, those are all-in affairs and are best to be avoided unless you're dedicated to going full retard.

It's all a bit of a sticky wicket. It's likely never going to be fixed, because even attempting to has a very high risk of alienating the userbase. I like the current system as-is and think it would work well with more playerbase.

Anyone play Armageddon MUD? I spent a lot of time on that game, years back.

You only need to make the world less of a stage and more of a tool that makes "high level text" less important or with a maintenance associated with it.

Skills and Stats there's really nothing you can do about it except make it less grindy to adquire. Perhaps remove all combat XP and leave only journals so your character progresses as he gains actual experience with the world, encouraging traveling around. But after that, they can't really be removed from you, unless we'd consider death to equally or less skilled players to cut down some stats from you.

However equipment is usually where a lot of power comes from, and that's something you can do a lot with, considering most high-end gear is player-produced.
Resource aquisition could be tied to controlling some areas in the game, like a mine for minerals or a farm for food. Owning said business means you can work in there to produce resources or hire an NPC to do it for you. However you have to pay maintenance (rent\taxes\actual maintenance) just to keep the building and whatever NPC salary that is required too.
Crafting could be moved onto factories, buildings that have a lot of different machines to produce things en masse provided the required resources are there and have maintenance similar to resource nodes.
Tie it all up with transports that carry items around (that can be intercepted by players) and instead of a game about moving somewhere high level, scav for a few minutes or butcher enemies for a while and then crafting something in your corp HQ, you now have a game about controlling areas and establishing supply lines.

The best part is that since players can fight over these nodes and buildings, guerrilla tactics become feasible as does surveillance, hiring guards or just low level players fucking with higher level players.
And even then, if higher level players put what they produce for sale (so they can pay the maintenance to produce it in the first place), lower level players can buy the items too and have access to higher level equipment they wouldn't get in the first place.

After you change the game towards corporations actually acting like corporations, you can tie in the PvE with it. An unseen maintenance cost of running a business is that your buildings are targetted by NPCs too and the higher your corp is, the worse threats come after you.
A small grocery shop will be occasionnaly attacked by gang menbers, but high-tech factories might see attacks from NPC high level corps, for instance.
This means you have a constant threat looming over and keeping players busy even when they are in the end-game, a threat that let's new players mostly alone until they become stronger while also making them usefull as well.

It'd be like The Guild, but in HellMOO, I suppose.

Incidentally, let's say that someone makes a MUD codebase that can be coded externally to the game in C# with not just objected-oriented programming but also composition.
Let's say that someone makes a client you can use to connect to a server made in said codebase.

Would you pay 5$ for said client? Assuming you could get much fancier huds, macros and improved gameplay?

How would you deal with people going offline, though?
From what you've said, it seems that only really big corps would be able to keep themselves afloat since they have members online 24/7, so I dunno about that idea either.

Fuck hellmoo and fuck infernomoo even more for the massive censorship.
Hatemoo was the best

These games are filled with goons and people raping me every two seconds

You mean turning the ages from 13 to 18? or is there some other censorship I'm not aware of?

Maybe you shouldn't dress like a slut.

Orphanage is replaced with a clonefactory and if you complain about it an admins strikes a lightning on your ass.

Yeah, the clonefactory and 18 starting age are kinda lame. Orphan rape aside, I really liked the lord of the flies vibe.

Big corps are only a problem because the game is pretty much manual mode only. The longer you play, the more you achieve and the stronger both you and your corp get.
You stop this by tackling gameplay to elements that are parallel to this.

For instance, the idea of most crafting being done by NPCs you hire in factories means essentially that instead of the griendiest corp winning the day, smaller corps still have a chance, they just have to find some space not taken over by bigger corps.

You can also add the option of hiring NPCs to guard your shit and their costs increase the more people a corp has hired, so bigger corps with more players have to rely on their members while smaller corps can enjoy 24/7 protection from strong mobs.

The invasions that happen in Freedom City are another mechanism that can be used for this.
The forces that show up don't just wander about and randomly attack people. Instead, they spawn with a target, be it a player or a building. The stronger the corp and the player, the stronger and more numerous those threads are, and the more players in that corp that are online, the more of these guys show up.

This means that bigger corps will always have something to both keep them busy and keep them in check, giving some margin for smaller corps to expand and even giving the possibility for diplomacy. If mobs are capable of taking over a resource node and several players are required to take it back, a corp might actually hire smaller corps to help them.

The trick is always to incorporate PvE and the world into the PvP. Make the players fight for the world but also use the world and set the world as a decent challenge and opposition based on how strong an oposition the players need.

I wanna play as a kobold :3

issue with your idea, what's to prevent the larger corps from just having people to take over all the spaces, even if they can't control it, just PKing people who come in and try to establish space. The problem only gets worse as the gap between smaller and larger corps widens the reason for having a smaller corp exist much less join one becomes an idea reserved for people defecting from a corp or new players who don't know how bad the divide is.

Rent and maintenance. Areas inside a city have to pay rent for the space, rent that goes up depending on what you put on it and how many areas you control. Controlling too many areas puts you into serious debt and it's not profitable if you're not able to do anything with that space.

Areas that are outside of a city work differently, having a maintenance cost tied to how the place runs. For instance, a mine requires fuel delivered to it for local generators, as well as food and tools for workers. Areas are also attacked by NPC mobs from time to time and areas outside of the city even more so. You'll need to set up security there, which incurs extra costs.

Their own turf will be under attack constantly from NPC threats. The bigger the corp, the more and harder said threats will be. A corp of players that spend their whole time griefing will slowly lose their controlled areas to the environment at which point they are free game for everyone else.
Areas inside a city are also protected by local law enforcement and just murdering players there gets the cops on your ass with jail time as a cooldown for your shittery. This means that these areas are a relatively safe start for a player to get a business started, even if you have to buy every basic material you'll use but eventually, you'll want to move onto exterior areas once you're stronger.

Bigger corps will pay less to it's members (your salary should be the biggest reason to join a corp) since they have not only more but also more maintenance. They'll also have no use for newer players, who'll do better at working for someone smaller instead.

Corps might also end up having to specialize. If there are many different kinds of industries or businesses you can get into, having enough facilities for all of them might not be feasible, so a Corp specializes in one corner of the market while another sticks to a different corner.
For instance, Monsanto sticks to farm\ranch nodes and grocery stores to sell food while BigPharma sticks to chemical nodes, laboratories, and pharmacies to sell drugs.

This also means that smaller business chains\ventures like a book store or a restaurant\disco are ideal for small corps that can only hold a small amount of areas, while deeper more complex chains like asteroid mining or mech production is more suited to large corps. Smaller corps can cohexist alongside bigger ones since they don't occupy the same space in the market.

The key here is to use NPC mobs as a way to give players something you can't get out of PvP: chalenging, fair and fun oposition.
Players make for dastardly foes because they are smarter and more dynamic than regular NPCs, but they prioritize winning over making things fun for everyone.
Mobs on the other hand can be coded to make fights you can win with some effort and without costing you everything you own if you lose to them.
You really can't make a good MMO-type game with only one of those, but the key to success is to use both at the right time and with proper measure.

I've thought it since you started talking and proposing this shit, but the massive problem I have with your proposal is that it simply shifts the tone of the game. Everything you've stated has turned the game into a massive PVE resource control type of thing, which is gay as fuck. Instead of tweaking the current system or fixing the real issues with current PVP (power creep, all-or-nothing leading to cold war) etc etc, you instead want to implement a system where PVP is further marginalized. By turning crafting into a coordinated system, you've all but assured that corp HQs, unless they're mega huge end-game ones with the means to stockpile everything under the sun, will have nothing of real value in them. Nobody will want to break in or fuck with them simply because it isn't worth the hassle outside of griefing purposes, and the massive ones will have the same protection that the current ones do. And by turning the major focus of the game into controlling areas under constant (level-scaled) NPC bombardment, you've turned the players attention more to king of the hill bullshit against NPCs, instead of tomfoolery and plain old fashioned dickery against your fellow man.

The worst aspect is that none of this addresses the most common and unfair PVP found in the game; opportunistic PVP, where you are simply passing by and decide to start shit with someone cause you can. I can't see any way in which this will fix the massive level/power disparity of which this brand of PVP is typical of. People will still be free to take their high level text out to slaughter faggots who can not possible stand against them, and there will be no practical recourse, as usual. Hell, it might even be worse than it is now, since your corp will no longer be stocked with an arsenal of assraper text itself, making it truly pointless to try to rise up against someone.

I actually like the idea and think it would be pretty cool and would slow the game down a bit, even for the no-lifers, but it needs either serious adjustment, or you'd have to start changing the entire game around it. As is, it mostly addresses the PVE side of things, and the last thing the game needs is more PVE. What's already there is pretty fine.

That's subjective. I much prefer a game structured around point control, with PvP surrounding those points.
It gives clear objectives to work towards with tangible rewards, but also an element that can be taken from you without massively impacting your gameplay.

Think about this. What leads to "all-or-nothing leading to cold war"? The fact that a corp has it's HQ where it stores it's valuables and the individual characters with their inventories.
The second you lose a fight, you're likely to lose everything you had on you since you're not gonna beat the other guy without your gear.
The moment a rival corp breaks into your HQ, say goodbye to literally everything in there since they can come in and out at will now.

Splitting your HQ, or rather expanding it, is the only way to solve this. Having multiple buildings, each with it's own purpose, means you can lose one to a rival corp without losing literally everything. Even if it's just random robbery, you'll lose whatever is on it and nothing else.
It also means that trying to screw with a corp is easy, just pick a building and raid it, but actually killing it would be much harder. It would need coordinated attacks in all of it's buildings with all the time and resource investment in it.

The power creep comes naturally with the game and I'm not sure you want to remove it. People that have played for a while want to be more powerfull than they were when they started.
What you can do instead is bridge the gap. The advantage of a player driven economy where corps make the items that are sold is that a lot of powerfull gear ends up being on the market for players that can't produce it but can buy it to use.
Guerrilla tactics are also possible and you can harm the bottom line of a corp without requiring direct combat (you're not gonna fight fair if you're lower level than they are).
Even the mobs that swarm the players can be influenced by players with some criminal network that takes money for services. Weaker players can hire the same services for less, for instance.

Corp HQs will have to serve a different purpose indeed, but that would require new mechanics into the game. HQs should be where information is stored and breaking there would be the most direct access to it. Information regarding the deals of a corp, passwords for networks, guard patrols and such.
Alternatively, a corp HQ could be a few rooms inside a larger building. The owner of a restaurant has a single office upstairs as it's corp HQ, but the owner of a larger laboratory has an entire floor dedicated to it's HQ.

Player amount plays a role into this too. Larger corps would see more NPC and online players would count twice there.

Remenber that "tomfoolery and dickery" often end up being straight up griefing. It's a hard line to define and you can easily end in either side of it.
The idea here isn't to keep players 24/7 guarding their fort however. You can always stock up NPCs to guard some place and provided you pay them and keep the place supplied, you won't have to worry too much about it. Rather this is more of an oportunity to other players that can use the oportunity of a recent attack to break into somewhere when security is weakened, or they can pump up that stream of NPC's with their own money and actually make it an harder problem.

We are currently at an extreme where players have nothing to worry about but other players, which the results being bored powergamers killing weaker players.
We need not reach the other extreme where everyone holds his hill, but we can instead have a middle ground, where mobs keep stronger players busy half the time, punishing those that don't pay any attention while still giving plenty of room for just playing the game.

It does actually. Since you can buy pretty much anything you lost from regular stores and you'll have a business generating money for that, losing stuff in PvP isn't so much of a problem, nor is there a reason to just kill random people you see passing by.
Oportunistic PvP will always exist since the only way to permanently fix it is to remove it entirely and that's not a good solution.
What you can do is remove incentives from doing it or implementing penalties.

Coincidently I considered a Karma\Alignment system where a player can commit crimes\evil deeds and rack up evil points or the reverse for positive actions.
Karma could work like Luck in other games where it influences a bit of everything by a small amount, for an incentive to be good with some specific events and items happening and dropping only for people when they reach a certain amount of it, both up and down.
Bad Karma shouldn't just be about penalizing the player, since some people like to play as villains, so they could have access to fences and other types of NPCs\businesses that can give better deals. They'd be cursed with ill luck but their rewards would be worth far more.

Finnaly, combat could see a change here regarding hit chances.
The more evil you are, the better the odds of hitting people closer to neutral. The more neutral they are and the more evil you are, the easier you can hit them.
However good people get a bonus to hit you that increases with how good they are and how evilyou are.
Good people get a penalty to hitting netral people based on how good they are and how neutral the target is.
So Neutral > Good > Evil > Neutral.

I've actually started working on making my own MUD framework in Unity instead so I can write content for it in C# and outside of being connected to the game.
I've already done the basics (can create areas, connect them, travel between them, spawn mobs, furniture, items, look around, save the current state of the world) but I'm considering doing something more interesting here.

Unity allows for the creation of Asset Bundles that can be downloaded and executed in runtime.
I could make it so a server has it's own HUD bundled together that you download whenever you connect to better display information relative to that server.
Then the server itself could have all the code and run all the procs, the client player would just send and receive strings or information it's expecting like your character's stats. I'm aware some MUDs already do this to some degree but implementing that in a MUDClient is dependant on the server using that and some heavy scripting on your end.

Ideally this would turn out like Tabletop Simulator: You get the game and connect to a server, at which point it configures itself for the game in question and you play along.
Meanwhile devs are free to make content and develop their server on the side, updating it without ever bothering the players but not requiring that they know how to code a MUD.

...

That are static in nature and once obtained can't be removed from you. That leads to power creep.
The few that can actually be removed from you, like gear, require someone more powerful than you to remove it. In other words, the objectives and tangible rewards right now are power creep and the only way you have to solve that currently is with more power creep.
Points of interest can be lost and regained affecting how powerful you are without making it an all-in fight.

The idea is that gear is moved around automatically by NPCs to be stored in relevant locations.
A mine will be stocked with minerals that are taken to a refinery where alloys are stored.
Then said alloys are carried over to a manufacturing plant where guns are produced and stored until they are taken back to your HQ or a warehouse or a shop for selling.

It's not meant to be something that happens all the time, the system doesn't need to be that unstable.
You should only lose areas if you don't pay attention to them for a long while, you can't keep up with the upkeep or your business is just too large for your corp size and power.
And of course, if a player is actively trying to take it away from you, something that will take some effort on his end and you can thwart.

But you don't own the rest of the building and you can't use it save for a few communal room. I'm saying you have a building where you conduct some form of business like a manufacturing plant, a laboratory or even just a disco or restaurant, and a room or an entire floor of your building can be dedicated to your HQ.

Let's be real here for a second. Currently your HQ is just about the safest place in the whole game to the point you can forgo having your own house or hang out in public bars. You get all the storage and cool furniture you'd need in your HQ anyway.
Changing it's purpose so it's a place where you run your corp and store delicate information regarding it IS an inprovement as it forces players to hang out in the rest of the world with everyone else and keep their shit stored in other places, interacting more with other players and the world instead of autistically staying in their fort all day.

On the contrary, scarcity is what you want to avoid. Item scarcity creates a huge gap between players and leads to power creep. But by having items being something that can be easily bought once it's produced, you ensure that should a corp rise to the top, it's also giving everyone else a shot at it.
This need not be the best gear possible, it's up to the corp what they want to sell after all and they can keep the experimental stronger weapons to themselves, but mid gear being freely available in the market does help bridge the gap between weaker players and stronger ones.
Also don't forget about corps that don't focus on combat or producing weapons and rather want other types of businesses.

And harder still to take away from you, unless someone is willing to risk his own strong gear. That's the crux with "ultimate weapons" that are rare or hard to craft, they don't actually carry as much risk as you'd expect since they are meant to give you a massive edge in combat, to the point that your enemy has to show up with something similar just to have equal chances of winning. And that just leads back to power creep and huge gaps in power between players, etc.

Personnaly, I prefer the game to be about how you use the gear and skills you have to affect the world and the other players, not how you adquire it. Getting stuff should be 10-15% of the game, using it should be everything else.
So I'd rather have gear in 3 qualities:
Crap Gear that you can find or buy cheap just about anywhere and will do in a pinch or to start you off
Mid Gear that requires established production chains to make available to the world but stays available, affordable and competitive the whole time.
Good Gear that requires specialized characters\NPCs and facilities, all with huge maintenance costs to gather the rare materials and hard processes to make it.

So for instance, you could easily craft a small crossbow out of junk parts or buy a 9mm beretta in a shitty shop to begin playing. You'd start your business and rent a few areas to produce the minerals you'd need for an assault rifle and ammo line production, making them available for you but also introducing them in the market. At this point, as long as you can keep your areas (which shouldn't be too hard) you have freely available assault rifles, ammo and you're even making money from selling the surplus.
So now you move on to adquiring uranium mines that you must defend from mutants, buying laboratories and stocking them with scientists (who cost a lot to pay and other corps might hire them too for higher salary) to research laser weapons, buying factories with engineers to carry out those production plans and stock up on laser weaponry that's far better than assault rifles.
And now you have an easy supply of laser weapons, ammo and selling the surplus for even more money, but you're sitting on an even more unstable system.
There's more maintenance, more facilities, more things that can stop working and more ways another player can fuck with you.

They can raid your shipments, kill your scientists\engineers on their way home, break into your place and take weapons for them, hack the plants and stop production for a long time, hack your corp HQ and steal the plans for themselves, etc.
The more you progress in terms of power, the more you can do in the world. But at the same type the more flaws you create in yourself that other players can exploit, thus completely removing the concept of power creep while still allowing your character and corp to grow.

you mean introducing greater power creep, that only other massive corps can even try to deal with.
"Oh cool a laser rifle plan, too bad I can't do anything with it, and the only people interested would be another massive corp" which only creates a snowball effect for massive corps, which as we've seen again and again in eve online leads to a stability of incredibly high level corps who actually do anything and then 99% smaller corps who can't realistically accomplish anything except when a larger corp forgets to pay their space taxes.

Spent an hour or so reading the changelogs of both Hell and Inferno. As expected, Hell had drastically less changes than Inferno, usually limited to bugfixes and nothing else, whereas Inferno, despite tons of implemented *ideas, quality of life improvements, bugfixes, and even some new mutations, was still a dead game. Such is life.

7 connected out of 35 active players for Inferno.
64 (30 admins) connected out of 361 active players for Hell.

It's not primetime by any means, but I don't see those numbers drastically changing regardless.