Dragonball Evolution

SUMMARY:
Two auditors played the Mud for about 10 hours each, one as a male char, the other as a female. This report is based on their combined impressions.

The recommendation is negative on this one. Although the Mud is probably unusually good for a DBZ Mud, and does have some positive sides, it doesn’t have the qualities that we are looking for. The character of the playerbase is the biggest minus. Apparently the theme mainly attracts pre-teen twinks.

Positive Factors:
- Maps available.
- Chargen easy and fast, and with reasonable choices.
- Mud and skills true to DBZ theme
- Zones original… but rather mundane… (see below under negative)
- Some Quests available in the zones
- Helpfiles available, not always complete, but better than average.
- Newbie zones exist, in all hometowns, and are very easy to level in.
- There is also ‘help start’, ‘help newbie’ and ‘help newbiezone’ commands with some basic info.
- One of the testers, who has some DBZ background, found some of the skills ‘promising’, but we didn’t get enough learning points to really test what they were like in practice.
- This tester also liked the way the mobs damage status was displayed during a fight.
- Comparably big and very active pbase, given the times of day that we were logged on (5-10 players)... but… (see below under negative).
- Players very helpful, (almost overly helpful, at least to female players. The male tester didn’t have the same experience)
- There is an option to turn all colour off completely, and a lot of effort has obviously gone into the colour system, but… (see below)

Negative Factors:
- Colouring much too gaudy. A lot of work and thought has gone into the colour design, but the result is still painful to the eyes. Many objects have every letter coloured differently, and the rooms are coloured depending on the sector. There is also excessive colouring in the global messages, fight messages etc. A lot of the equipment also glows and hums. (If half the effort that was put into the colour scheme had instead been spent on descriptions, the Mud would have been a lot better).
- The zones may be original, but most descs we saw were short and repetitive, there seemed to be no extra descs at all, and mobs and objects had scanty – if any – look descs.
- The Playerbase seems very immature, judging from the incessant and rather irritating OOC spam.
- The Mud claims to be RP enforced in the listings*), but there is no info about RP on the webpage and not a sign of any roleplay on line, just OOC chatter about who ‘owns’ who.
- Too many and excessive rules. (presumably a reaction to the immature pbase).
- Lots of bitching and PK ‘drama’ on the open channel, also lots of racist and sexual slurs (although those are forbidden in one of the many rules).
- Balance doubtful and combat automated and boring. Even without weapons and armour most mobs seemed to be pushovers. This might be better when you get out of the newbie zones and start to develop skills, but we didn’t stay long enough to determine that. Levelling was very fast, but according to the players we should have been able to level 20 times faster than we did, (but then again the main part of our stay there was spent on other things than killing mobs.

*) Comment: After the evaluation report was sent to the Mud, the listing was changed to RP Encouraged. (This might have influenced the decision in a positive way, if the Admin had not lied about it on their own webpage, and pretended it was always listed that way).

CONCLUSION
Based on the above, the Mud was not accepted for the List.

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This report was written by Angkor