Eric: 00:00 Welcome Minotaur, Sidhe, Fey, Sahaugin one and all to the Titans of Text text podcast. We are your host Eric Oestrich. Danny: 00:18 And Danny "Austerity" Nissenfeld. Eric: 00:21 And we have with us today, Sean of Materia Magica. We're going to take a journey through Alyria and learn all about the land and those who live in it. Welcome Sean. Sean: 00:31 Hi, great to be here. Eric: 00:33 So first off, we always like to start with, sell us on Materia Magica why should I as a player want to join? Sean: 00:40 Oh, that's a great question. Well, we're huge. We're passionate. We're really optimizing for fun. We're I think probably one of the larger muds. Historically we started in 1995. We currently still have a couple dozen people on at any given time. I've been involved in the game for almost 18 years now. And then another five years before that as a player. I've been working on the game for, you know, a couple hours a day, almost every day for 20 years. And it kind of shows. We've got a giant world with a ton of features and people that are passionate about it. We've got a pretty large staff building things and queuing things and just going to, doing our utmost to make the game as fun as possible for as many people as possible. Danny: 01:36 So you mentioned that you started on Materia quite a long time ago. Was it your first mud or was there another mud that you that you tried out first? Sean: 01:46 It was my first mud. I was in high school. I saw some people doing something in the computer lab and I said, Oh, well, what are you doing? And they said, Oh, we're playing a game. And I sort of took notes on what it was and how I could connect to it. And it's using Telnet, some protocol that I'd never heard before. And that, you know, sort of spiraled out from there. Eric: 02:08 And how did you go from just being a player to becoming a part of the staff? Sean: 02:13 I played for about five years.I was really interested in the game. I think Materia Magica probably still, but especially back then, catered a lot to a very specific kind of person. You know, muds in general are sort of all about roleplay and immersiveness and community and the relationships between people and material. Materia was 100% about that, but it also was very mechanical. You know, muds sort of span the gamut from RPI and it's basically like a chat forum and you just sort of describe what you do versus Materia Magica which I think is kind of at the far end on the other side where it's almost entirely mechanical. There's not a ton of role-playing necessarily. There's certainly room for it, but the combat and the depth of experience and the diversity of experience and like, what can you do in PVP. Sean: 03:18 What can you do against this gigantic complex system and really make it your own really shone through. Even back then, or even, especially back then. So there were a lot of people who, how do I put this nicely, went to the limit of what was possible within the system. So at the time that I became an immortal, I was actually in the midst of being punished for doing various things that involve memory leaks. So that was exciting and they were like, OK you're passionate about this. You can obviously break the game very effectively, but like, unlike most of the other people who do this, you're not a dickhead about it. You're just kind of curious. So let's see what you can do. And I was grateful that they took that chance on me. Danny: 04:10 You say, I mean, Materia Magica has been around for a long time. As long as almost every other mud that's still around has been. Well, first what codebase was it started in and, and is it still in that has like a lot of the old muds went from C to C++. What's the technical progression? Sean: 04:32 As far as I know, it's always been a custom code base. There was a very large initiative in the late nineties to change it from what it was that maybe wasn't necessarily as stable or secure as it needed to be given both modern requirements and the player base. So they did a multi-year overhaul of the code base when I started working on it in the mid two thousands, it was certainly very different from any other code base that I've seen. And I've been working on it for over a decade at this point, almost 15 years. And it's something like C 11 with a smattering of C++ that's sort of snuck in here and there as different coders who preferred that worked on it. But it's almost entirely still C 11 at this point. Eric: 05:30 So what are some of the unique features to Materia Magica? Sean: 05:34 Oh gosh, that's a great question. Materia Magica was my first mud and kind of my only mud. I've sort of looked at other systems and checked out different things and nothing else has really ever took hold. So I'm not totally clear on the uniqueness part, but some of the systems that we have that have made me stick with Materia Magica exclusively. I think we technically pioneered. The original founder, Vasago was a big IRC guy in the early nineties, I think. And he coded the Phoenix IRC client, which I think was very important on the internet 25 years ago. And then he moved out of that and started Materia Magica. He I think he was the first to make the compass system. So instead of listing the exits that were available in any given room, it shows you the compass. Sean: 06:32 And I think he opened source that like on slash code or something late nineties. He also made the first open source quest client as far as I'm aware, or I'm sorry, not quest client, our open source quest code. And you can still find the snippets of those things all these years later. That's what really grabbed me. And that's the sort of thing that we've been building on. In terms of our, our big features since then. Gosh, we've got a gigantic world. We've got a ton of systems. We've got clans, we've got groupings of clans called alliances. We've got a ton of content. Almost all of the content added in the past couple of decades has had my influence on that or has been influenced by me rather. So we have several hundred proper bosses that are at the ends of Dungeons and such. Those all live in the hundreds of areas that we have. Sean: 07:38 They're all custom. They're unique. They're coded by us. They're made by us. They're not stock areas. We have an achievement system. I think we're currently at something like 800 achievements that are all unique and interesting. We've got thousands of quests that are all handwritten. We've got all sorts of things. All of these systems have spent the past couple of years, both making systems more accessible to visually impared players as well as making the systems hook into one another. So you can do novel things like say we've got a requirements systems so that any content can be gated by any real metric. Like your strength must be greater than 20 or you must have done this content in the past or you know, we have this wide array of prerequisites and that used to just be applied to equipment but now it can also be applied to achievements or quests or all sorts of things. And it's sort of making, making, making the richness of any given system spiderweb into one another. So instead of there being dozens and scores of these monolithic features, it becomes one feature set where any given thing can impact any other given thing. And it really provides a lot of room for a future development, interesting interactions, all sorts of different experiences that get modified in different ways at different times. One of the other things I want to bring up as part of this, Eric: 09:15 I just want to say you guys have one of the probably the best looking MUD website out there. Sean: 09:21 Oh geez. Eric: 09:22 Like I know the bar is typically very low, but I, I do think it looks very nice. Sean: 09:30 Thank you for saying that, but that's very kind of you. We just had a staff get together in Florida this past weekend. I actually just got back there, got back from that last night or night before last and on the plane, one of the other staff members and we're sort of looking at other muds to be like, Oh, you know, we've been doing Materia Magica for 20 plus years. What else even is there, like, what are other people doing in this space? And sort of looking at other games, we found a ton of cool other stuff where it's like, Oh, this is, this is really neat. Like, I wish that we had the system. I wish that we had this technology. Sean: 10:11 And one of the things that we were talking about was the plans that I've laid out for the next year and then sort of figuring out what other directions that we want to go in over the next five years. And so we were looking around and there's just so much cool stuff in the ecosystem that we really appreciate where we're focusing on things like making an in-browser client, making native clients for all the different systems out there, just because we know that accessibility is such a big feature. And such a big draw, not just for visually impaired players, but just players in general who might not have uninterrupted hours to sit in front of their PC and my value being able to play on their phone or something. Danny: 10:57 So you mentioned a lot of PVE things. You mentioned bosses, which I imagine when you say boss you mean something that takes multiple players possibly to take down in the end game. Is it mainly people doing this, you know, a typical raid style stuff with their alliances or clans or is there also a good amount of competition among players, PVP type stuff? Sean: 11:27 So it's sort of an interesting historical question where a vast ago the original founder didn't really like PVP. And I think that was definitely colored by his interactions with the people who did like PVP chief among them, me. And so we sort of had an interesting back and forth over years where he would sort of dissuade people from behavior that might deter people who didn't derive benefit from PVP. He would deter those people being predated upon. And you know, we would sort of talk about it and be like, well sure, if there's, there's definitely value in protecting those people and making sure that they're having a good time and you know, not having them get chased off by whoever's chasing them. On the other hand, when we make all of this content and all of these systems, there's a certain complexity ceiling that you can reach when you have relatively dumb NPCs and bosses who you're trying your best to not have cheat in the system. Sean: 12:36 And so there's all of these systems that you can use as a player that the NPCs can't leverage, aren't smart enough to do anything with. And so you're trying to make them not cheat, but you're also trying to have an interesting dynamic system where things matter and at the end of the day any interaction in PVP is going to be a deeper, richer, more complex than anything that we can throw at you that's automatic and coming at you from a boss or a set of bosses or whatever. We are never going to be as clever as a player who is fighting you in real time. And so a lot of our players who value PVP still do that. They still fight with each other. Occasionally they'll chase other people. But a larger aspect of that where we've sort of been dealing with in the larger design scope is expectations have changed for games since the mid nineties. Sean: 13:36 It seems like a lot of muds and TTRPGs and just games in general have very different sets of expectations in 2019 than they did 20 years ago. It's not all about the Grognard who punishes you for typoing or you were too slow or you need syntax help and it yells at you because you did the wrong thing. Now we want to leverage the system. We want to make it be more flexible. We want to make it be more forgiving. So instead of saying, Oh, we don't recognize this command, you should type better. The error message should be something closer to, Hey, we applied a soundex graph to the thing that you did type. It's pretty close to this other command that you didn't type but sounds very similar. Did you mean this click to do that? Did you mean these other things? Sean: 14:24 Here's contextual help files, etc, etc. And so being more forgiving and being more, again, accessible is a huge design goal. We we recently overhauled, I think like two weeks ago, our chaotic player killing system. That's a system where when you fight in PVP, or even if you die in PVE all year and all gold on you gets dropped to the floor and anyone can grab it. That's historically been a very large motivator in PVP and even just looting people in PVE, etc, etc. And so we felt that that system was kind of detrimental towards, was detrimental to where we want to go as a game. If you die, if something goes wrong, if you get snuck up on, we want that to be a bad day or an inconvenient day. We want there to be repercussions to your actions. We want other people to benefit for the work that they put in to accomplish that end state. Sean: 15:28 But we don't want it to ruin your character. We don't want you to lose 15 years worth of work. We want it to be day ruining, not life ruining. So we sort of changed that system where you drop an amount of gold that is commensurate to the quality of items that you were wearing rather than the items themselves. So it might take two weeks worth of work to make that gold up rather than, I lost an item that, you know, my partner gave to me 15 years ago when we were in high school and that sort of thing. Has both made PVP more forgiving. It has made people more courageous in PVE, and it sort of set the expectation on a large scale that we've currently been doing on a small scale up until this point. And we're looking forward to doing more of that in the future. Danny: 16:21 We're going to take a brief moment for a word from our sponsor for the show today: Grapevine. Is your mud empty? Do you tout your 20 plus player count but know, deep down that most of those are AFKers, alts and bots. Allow me to introduce you to Grapevine. 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So like what, are there specific things that might, that are there to entice new players versus. Sean: 17:49 A hundred percent. Absolutely. We have, we do a lot of work on both fronts. One of the metaphors that we reach for pretty frequently is the rubber band. On the left side you've got the brand new player who has never played a MUD before. They haven't really worked with text before. They're a slow typer. They don't really know what's going on. They found us somehow word of mouth, Google search something and they're starting out. They want to play, they want to have a good time. We love that. Welcome to Alyria. Let's set you up. Let's get you having a good time as quickly as possible in the most efficient way as possible. On the other side, we have people who have been playing for 25 years. They've spent the last couple of decades perfecting their character, learning everything that there is to learn about the game. Really honing their experience, their social group. Sean: 18:49 They can do anything in the game as easily as anyone else can. So we've got this elastic band with these two pegs on opposite sides. And so some of our older, more senior, more vocal players who have been doing this for a very long time want more content. They want to be more powerful. You know, how it goes. And so we can accommodate that. We can give them more things to do. We can give them the ability to become even more powerful than the skill ceiling that they're at. And it's not just numerical, it's also about you know, it's not just, Oh, you're at 10 times the ceiling. I guess we'll add an 11 and let you go to 11. It's more about adding more niche dynamics, giving people more choices. And so it's not really about making them more powerful, but giving them more tools to figure out how to best express their personal preference for how to be powerful, if that makes sense. Sean: 19:46 So we can expand the scope of the elastic band, but that increases the distance between them and the new player. On the other hand, if we want to shrink that distance, we can do things like making it easier to level. We can take old content that's again more suited towards this design sensibilities of 20 years ago where it's hard, it's punishing, it's, you know, very unforgiving. And we can say maybe it's not fun to die in a situation where you're certain to die and then you spend three hours getting all your stuff back. Maybe that's not what we want you to be spending your time on when you give us your attention. Maybe we can make it more forgiving. Maybe we can make an automatic way to recover your corpses will make it easier to level. We'll take this old content and make it a little bit more accessible because we spent a thousand hours writing this dungeon and 20 have seen it this year. Sean: 20:48 What if a hundred people saw it this year? Is that a bad thing? Well not really. We want you to have a good time. We want to remove the speed bumps between you logging on and deciding that we're the thing that you're going to spend your evening paying attention to and allowing you to have a good time. We want as many people to be having a good time, as quickly as possible in a way that's healthy and sane and secure and whatever we can do to do that, whether they're a new player, or an old player who's been around forever, we're going to do that to the best of our abilities while maintaining equilibrium in that elastic band. Danny: 21:24 Talk a little bit about a revamping old areas, which you know is just something every MUD faces, especially one that started in the 90s. And I don't want to talk about revamping old areas with this specifically cause everyone ends up doing that at some point. But are there any things that you wanted to change for a while in the systems itself? In the mechanics and class design or race design or anything like that you just can't poke at because it's, it's been there so long and the players are just used to it orit's just too complex. It's too ingrained. Is there anything that you've, that you've wanted to be able to knock out or, or just completely change like that? Sean: 22:08 Happily, unequivocally, no, there's never room for the broken stair. In terms of content or design or the code base or the player base, if something's wrong, you fix it. And that's kind of at the core of my design philosophy. I've produced a lot of the content. I've also written a lot of code. I'm the primary programmer. I do most of the design. We have a large staff, everybody has a lot of input. We have a chat room in the game that is dedicated to players. Just being able to talk to staff and you know, we try and staff it 24/7 for the last 15 years if you've got an issue, come and talk to us about it. And so the, the core, the core driving motivation in working on Materia Magica is, it's a large, weird old game. The average seniority for people that are playing it has is, you know, something in the 10 year range. Sean: 23:09 Even though we have tons of players who are new, we also have tons of players who've been here for 20 years and are kind of lifers. And so we have this big ancient system that has infinite wellspring of cool things that could be better. And so every day you just wake up and you look at who's around, you say, okay, what are we going to work on today? We've got a one year plan, we've got a six month plan, we've got a five year plan, and they're all focused on, we're going to take a system and we're going to figure out how to make it better. And you just do that. You spend 20 minutes on it or an hour on it or an evening on it, we're gonna make a new system. We're going to Polish the system, we're going to fix the error messages, we're going to take this thing that's really cool, but not enough people are seeing it. Sean: 23:58 We're gonna make it more accessible. Take a thing that could be a little bit better and make it a little bit better. And then you just do that 10,000 times in a row. And that's what keeps us active. It's what keeps our player base loyal and happy. And there's always room to fix everything. There are some giant ancient systems that are imperfect. And you know, six years ago it was like, Oh, this, this, this thing is going to be a problem in the future. This is at some point is going to be the thing that hinders our ability to move forward. And I've spent the past six years working on infrastructure and coming up with plans and documenting what it's blocking and how we'll benefit from unblocking it. And I've spent most of this here fixing that. It's the player persistence layer. It's ancient, it's terrible. Sean: 24:50 And I'm happily rewriting it. We're currently in the middle of the big 5.0 revamp. Our last major revision was in early 2001. And this is going to be the biggest overhaul possibly ever including that where we take all of our systems, we reexamined our assumptions, we reexamined people's sensibilities and expectations now versus 20 years ago. We figure out what 80% of the things that we've done are working really well. What do we want to refine? What do we want to improve upon? What do we want to simplify? What do we want to document better? We figure out what 20% isn't working as well. What can we get rid of? What can we consolidate? What can we overhaul completely? What replaces that? And this is something like a two year project. We hope to be done in about 11 months. And it involves going through something like 600,000 lines of C, a a hundred thousand scripts, 400 areas, and just taking everything apart and making it a little bit better. Sean: 25:56 And then putting it back. And at the end of that we say, this is a new system. This is a new game. If you connect to it, you won't really see a difference. But as soon as you play it, everything works a little bit better. It's a little bit tighter. If you need help, it's easier to get help. It's easier to help yourself. You can see how things work and you can have a good time doing it. And at the end of the day, that's what we want. Come on. Have a good time. It's a game. Enjoy it. Eric: 26:21 So one of the things that I noticed at the bottom of your website is that it says Materia Magica LLC. So how did that come about? Like how did you guys do an LLC? Sean: 26:30 So about about 10 years ago Vasago, who was the original founder sort of, I don't want to say lost interest, but he's about 10 years older than me. You know, he was hitting his late thirties. He was, he had founded a couple of companies. He was busy. He'd been running Alyria since college. I want to say maybe before college, he'd been doing it for a long time, 20 years. And I don't want to say that he was over it, but an offer came to us from one of our players who said, Hey, your heart might not be in this. I've got the resources to make sure that Alyria lasts forever. Can we talk? And we discussed it a little bit. And the answer was yes. And so we sold the Lyria and so the new owner came in and made it be a proper LLC. He said, the IP is really interesting. I think this this game has a lot of promise. It's not that your passion's not in it anymore, but Hey, maybe pass the reins to someone who has a little bit more resources, a little bit more appreciation for the novelty factor. Sean: 27:49 So he hired some new staff and you know, that worked out for a bit. And then after that he rehired us and he said, okay, I, now that I've been in the driver's seat for nine months, I get what you guys were doing. I get where you were going, I want to be involved in this more. And so I took over as the lead developer and the lead designer. And we've been doing that for about five years. And it's, it's, it's really nice, but I know a lot of months have struggled. You know, there's sort of the universal experience of we were doing great and then EverQuest came and we dropped 10% and then wow came and we dropped another 30% and we're kind of struggling. And if 10 people log on, that's a good week. We're a little bit stronger than that. We've got the resources. Sean: 28:43 We've discussed it at length. We just had our staff summit this past weekend and it was, let's look at the financials. Are we going to last forever? Yes. And being able to design within that space of, we know we're going to be here in a year, we're designing for the five year milestone where setting things up to be important in the future. We're designing around API APIs, we're designing around these big systems that won't come to fruition for years. But we know that our work won't be wasted. And that's so different. Not even just from muds, but from the larger tech context. Oh, and alienating yourself from your labor. We know what this does. We know what this is for. We know how we're going to benefit from this. We know how our players are going to benefit from this. And even if that doesn't happen for five years, this is still the best work that we can do and we're proud of it and we've got goals. And that makes such a big difference. Interacting with players, interacting with each other, taking pride in your work, really building up a system for long term success. Danny: 29:52 You're using words versus an LLC then you mentioned hiring we're, we're using business words here. Is Materia Magica a business; Are people being paid for their efforts? Or is it still, I mean there's organization obviously, but is there a paid staff in any way? Sean: 30:13 So we're not quite cash positive, but I, not only do we have payroll, I think when I paid the November payroll, there was more than a dozen paid staff members. One of the big things that we're doing over the past couple of years has been a professionalization push. When I took over as lead, there were a bunch of big things just in terms of organization where, Oh, maybe we shouldn't just be talking in game. And those are all of our plans because that's so volatile and if you're offline you miss it. Instead we moved to Slack. We've got a very large Slack presence. We've got a couple of dozen people in Slack paying attention to things. They're not necessarily full time people, but Oh Hey, we've got a PR question. We've got a PR guy, we'll talk to him. We've got an IT question. We've got a very senior staff member who is capable of just about anything who will come help us if we've got an AWS issue or a security issue or just questions. We've got a Trello board that's got a couple of thousand tickets on it. We've been running off of it for five years. I think we just completed our 2,500 ticket and these are all like features and bug fixes. And all sorts of things. Yeah. We've got a large staff. We're professional. They're paid. This is, this is the thing we, we aim for long term success. Danny: 31:49 And I know part of that success is outreach of for accessibility. And you've told me yourself that you attend visual impairment conferences on tech and obviously things they can do games, other things. How did you guys get into that and how do you see that adding to Materia or to muds in general? Sean: 32:16 That's a great question. It wasn't initiated by us necessarily. We had one of our long time players in the early two thousands, I wanna say who was fully blind. He, I'm not sure of the cause, but he became blind in his late teens and he knew that he loved video games and Materia Magica was one of the video games that he could play as a blind person. And he ended up becoming a guide, which is one of our, like a mortal staff members who helps novices, answers questions. He was a leader of one of the biggest, most successful clans for a decade. Plus, he was one of the most accomplished PKers. Most times when he fought people in PVP they wouldn't even realize that he was blind and he would win and he would consistently win. And that was so awesome to be able to see someone who can just completely disregard this difference in abilities. Sean: 33:24 And, you know, they're listening to the game in text to speech at 5x speed or something and succeed better than our sited players. That was incredible. And that was kind of the big epiphany. And so I started working on that and I don't know, 2009 or something and it started slow. We have pretty significant GMCP, MXP, I think MCCP integration. We have all of this metadata stuff so that you can access different aspects of the game in real time without having to write a custom parser or something. We've got a bunch of commands that exists solely for the benefit of blind players and sited players ended up finding out that it benefited them too. But again, one of our big design goals is having everything be accessible to everyone. One of the big features that Vasago pioneered in the 90s was the overworld map. Sean: 34:30 So you walk out of a town and instead of there being described rooms, it's this giant wilderness that's all ASCII art and that's cool. You, it takes a little bit to understand it as a sighted person, but your screen reader can't handle it if you're blind. And so we've added all sorts of things where the design wasn't necessarily a taking blind people into consideration at the outset. You know, these are systems that have been around for decades, but we can figure out how to retrofit them. If we've got this big inaccessible wilderness map, we added roads so you can walk in between areas without getting attacked, but you have to be able to see the roads enabled in order to be able to run along them. So we added mounts and if you order the amount to follow the road, the mount will take you from one area along the road to the next one. Sean: 35:20 But that was kind of dumb. It was more on a directional vector than an actual destination. Then we added road science, which uses a sort of in game routing protocol. So you can say, Oh, I'm at this place, I want to go to this place. And every time you a new area or a branch from the road, the sign posts will route you to the next point on your destination. So then you hit your destination and you say, okay, I know that there's going to be something nearby that I need to pay attention to. I can't read the symbols. How do I access this? And so we have this check commands. You can use the check man. I think it's got probably 50 sub commands and one of them is check the surrounding area. You can check it for the wreckage of pirate ships that you've sunk. If you're sailing your dread night, you can use it to check for area entrances that are visible on the map if you were looking. But if you're not cited, it provides that context for you. All sorts of little things where the feature itself might not sound super impressive, but you just improve it 10,000 times, and then you've got a big functional ecosystem where a lot of our most successful, most dedicated players are blind. And that's awesome to see. Eric: 36:43 Thank you for coming out on the Titans of Text, Sean