General Discussion

Back in my MUDing days I played an LP MUD.  For those of you not in the know LP MUDs tended to be non-D&D based and usually at least partually skill based.  In my opinion they were far more inventive than DIKU MUDs which is where EQ comes from if you want a reference for what they were like.  Bot LP and DIKU hard forced grouping and no-force grouping variation, but classes were quite a bit more free-form in LP of course these trend had many exceptions.

So on my old MUD they had guilds you joined after character creation these were essentially classes that gave you access to skill training and gave you special powers.  For any of you who have read the Illumintus Trilogy there were two guilds and a sub-guild  based on these book.  You had the POEE, Erisian Liberation from and the Legion of Dynamic Discord.  Collectively they were all Discordians

One of the their powers was the "quote".  This essentially let you pull from a radnom quote from a vast repository that was mostly or perhaps all player submitted.  Any kind of Discordian could submit what quote they wanted and periodically one of the volunteer devs would OK the ones they liked.

You could quote on command or just set you yourself to spew random nonsense at people every minute or so.  You could even tell it to randomly pick a language to quote.

I tell you what  I have rarely seen so many funny things. Sometimes I would sit around for 30 minutes quoting and reading the quotes.  I even had one of mine I submitted make the grade which was nice to see when I randomly quoted it.   And of course some of them you just have to look up.  it always cracked me up when I was in the store and suddenly busted out with "Negative, I am a meat popsicle".  And then finally figuring out that was from Fifth Element and I had forgotten all about it.  Ha the things you miss.

The great thing about it is sometimes you would bust out with something like that and then someone in the room would emote something like a raised eyebrow and then say "Oh you are a Discordian".  Really fit with the guilds and association.  Plus there were always new ones.

Soemtimes I wonder if I will ever see something like that in an MMORPG,  I kind of doubt it.  Its too bad, imagine if you had something like that for each server.  It adds character to that server.  But I doubt they have the balls to do it or the desire to pay someone to go through the quotes etc.  Suggest something like that on a board you invariably get some keyboard jockey wannabe developer trying to cost it out and tell you the devs time is better spent on a new class.

Although I guess in a way Ryzom tried something like this with Ryzom ring.

I dunno everyone loved the quote power.  The funniest thing about it was it was always described as an extremely powerful Discordian power but it was just silly quotes and had absolutely no practical use.  It was awesome.  And the thought of it going away or not being kept up would have had the entire population of that MUD up in arms I think. 

But I would have to admit another MUD player probably would not have cared.

 I guess things like this are not valued until you actually have them.  It kind of grew on you, like a fungus.   I think it is what I miss most about that MUD.  And that MUD had a lot of cool things.