Spamfunet Nanny Forum

Everyone seems to refer to Michel as one of the greatest players, being new to NannyMUD could someone explain what exactly Michel did, his history, reasons for getting banned etc.

Hiya Michel ;)

Good question, I honestly never knew Michel as a great player (uhm, browsing the 'great players, wtf???'-thread I get the feeling I didn't think there were any at all...), the thing about Michel for me was that the admin seemed very annoyed with him and he used several Michelxx chars to have an amazing 'Plan' (overcoming the max number of characters in a Plan for just one player).

Hopefully others on this forum will give you more facts, and if someone actually have Michel's Plan++ I'd love to see it in its entirety here on the forum...

   /Carrion, the clone

What was amazing about it, besides its' length?

I was hoping to refresh my memory about the amazingness of that Plan, thus asking for someone to add the plan to the forum... Not sure if it even WAS amazing, just a lot of quotes of people bitching at Michel... Anyone with better memory than me?

I do not presume to know much about it, but this I can tell from having observed him, both as a mortal and an immortal (as I was active while he was).

Michel was meticulous in what he did. This included exploring the mud, building convenient, self-sufficient scripts to remove most of the monotonous work of playing. So he learned (through his own means and asked around) many secrets, how to abuse them, how to use them and how to avoid them. His client then helped him amass a lot of gold, experience and equipment, that could of course be gotten in a normal fashion by anyone; but faster and easier.

Through a combination of these things, he rose quickly in vampires and thus made a name for himself there. Hiding his few deaths, combined with beating the odds more often than not, his fame rose.

And by learning he mud, he quickly became a good playerkiller and earned fame through that as well.

I'm not sure how great he was, but the phrase "take away the client, then we'll see how good you are" would certainly apply to him. I mean, the monotonous bottleneck is what keeps most people at bay. His client raised the bar drastically for how much 'work' you can efficiently put into your character before tiring or slipping up. While that does not mean he was his client, his client did make it possible for him to recover or gain something much faster than humanly possible.

But as mentioned above, he was intelligent and meticulous, I do not presume to deprive him of that.

I think the client argument is moot.  Everyone can use a client, and everyone is allowed to use a client, so the reality of clients should not be taken into consideration when evaluating a player.  As to the effort factor, it is still an effort to learn from the MUD and prepare your client in the best way possible.  If other people fail to do what Michel did, that's their failing, and his success.  Everyone has the same means to achieving what he did.

This hails back to Carrion's argument that there are no great players because anyone COULD do something if they put the necessary effort in.  Well, so that's the way it is in real life too.  You COULD be a great artist or mechanic or industrialist, if you dedicated your life to it.  So does that make you equal to the person who DOES do those things?  How you answer that will determine your attitude to players like Michel.

Well there is a line, that if you cross, you break the rules of the mud. Namely automatic clients, robot-like scripts. Some say he crossed it, but in all fairness he never got banished for it. So if he did, he did it good enough not to get caught.

Anyways, how I compare myself to Michel? First off I agree that it's difficult to define what a great player is, so I'll just tell how I compare myself to him without using loose, predefined definitions.

First off, I tend to agree that everyone could do everything, if they put their mind to it. But to be honest, I don't know if I could do it as fast and as efficient as Michel did. Theoretically I probably could, but I never put it to the test, nor do I plan to. He also more zealously explored the mud, than I did.

So no; I do not think I am a match to Michel, however you make the comparison. I consider myself a good player, I have good knowledge of the guilds, how they interact and how to use them. My knowledge of the mud has slipped some in the most recent years, so they aren't exactly what they used to be. But great? No, I am not, nor do I consider it worth it to invest enough time to become that.

The only thing I do consider myself better at, is following the rules. I never try to bend them to get an edge over everyone else.

As for my attitude towards Michel, I suppose it's twofold.

First, I admire anyone who can devout themselves to such an extent as he did to become the best. Much like Polar's achievement in paragon levels, I admire the tenacity of their work (however misdirected I may think it is).

Second, I dislike the "whatever the cost" and "rules are meant to be broken" mentality. To break the rules to win, to be the best. To me that just cheapens the achievement, hell it even makes it void. There are people who didn't quite reach Michel's hights, but who did so without ever going near the grey area of the rules. I have more respect and consider them much better players than he, simply due to the fact that they didn't try to take the easy way there.

Nice note Kherec. :) Just a few random thoughts....

I never knew Michel since he went inactive by the time I started playing. He talked to me with his wizard a couple of times briefly, and that was all I ever had to do with him.

But from what I have heard, I guess he did have a really well-built client. I actually do admire that to some extent because it probably took a good deal of ingenuity to make it as effective as I have heard it was. I suppose the fact that I don't have the coding skill to do that makes it seem really cool to me. :P Of course, if I spend the time to figure it out, I am sure I could do that. But I'd rather do math instead... :)

I find it really fascinating how he can inspire such passionate reactions from some people. I don't know if he really was that much of a jerk. I don't think you can tell much about a person from how he behaves in a MUD and what he thinks about the "rules". Hmm... that probably suggests that I am a rule breaker. :)  (Hmm...that could be the topic of another note!)

Even if Michel really was as annoying as people say, I find it cool that he left a mark on the MUD. At least he gave people something to talk about. If he made people miserable during his time here, that just sucks and I have no respect for that. But still... I think it is something that we are still even talking about him. It doesn't make him great, but I think it is pretty cool for the _game_ to have a history worth talking about. :)

Ereshkigal

Of course a character's behaviour on the mud has no bearing on how a person is in real life. I know a pair of brothers that are pretty much the good and the bad on the mud, but in real life, it's the opposite. I suppose some people act the same on the mud as in real life, but there's no guarantee.

As for Michel being a jerk ... sure he sometimes acted like a prick, but in the history of the mud he's nowhere near the top jerks that has plagued the mud. Most people just disliked him because he killed them :)

Oh good heavens... Kherec the old still has some memories left in him!

Tell us about the true jerks, O ancient one! ;)

Eresh

How about Cassandra? ;)

But honestly, I haven't really come across any real jerks. Sometimes some people acted really bad, showed absolutely no respect for people's feelings, killstealing and being "cool" about it afterwards, or so they thought ... but not towards everyone.

It was often a case of subgroups thinking themselves better or more cool than others, feeling superior and showing it through being jerks to anyone outside their little group. Just like highschool people :)

Then there's a group of people that simply rubb the wrong way and explode verbally on each other.

Hoi! I guess your definition of a 'jerk' isn't the same as mine :)

Well.... I guess I have been a jerk to people at times. :) Of course, I probably was never a top-ranking jerk. :P

I tend to get pissed off very quickly if I think that someone is being unfair to me. And this tendency was much worse a few years back. (I started playing in Feb 2001.) And then once I get pissed off... well...then things go downhill very quickly. (I am still trying to grow up.. :P)

There was a phase in which I was totally pissed off at a bunch of knights. And being friends with Karzak helped fuel that further. (Now that was a vamp with some attitude.)  That led to quite a few amusing events. So I suppose it is very likely that a large number of people think I was/am a total jerk. To be quite honest though, I have enjoyed my bad reputation to some extent. (That's very childish I know. But knowing that doesn't stop me from enjoying it anyway.)

Of course, the fact that I have a vampire hasn't helped matters. 

Eresh

And Eresh hit the nail on the head...jerk...and the relationship to childishness.

I know one such person has changed a lot since the jerk days. But hey, all of our defitions of jerk may be different ;)

Do you consider jerk as someone who is annoying or childish or mean, etc.

/Spamfu :D

I'm a jerk!  I hope... :)

Actually, I stopped playing because of jerks in the game, those responsible know whom they are.

I agree that Eresh is on to something with the relationship between jerks and childishness.  Personally, I've always thought of the jerks as those who were just downright self-centered, selfish and... for lack of a beter word, narcissistic. 

I'll forego jumping up on the soapbox for now and leave my definition at that.

-Yavathol

 Ok, let's bring Michel back into the topic since I want to say a few words about him as well.
Now I haven't interacted with him too much on Nanny since I was still a newbie when he was roaming the land. But he was my classmate for 4 years in high school and I know his real self better than most of the nanny mudders.
Maybe this can enlighten you on his true self: he was smart, he knew it and he treated the rest of us accordingly. This kind of attitude can often make people call you a jerk. And to some extent they are perfectely right to do so. Of course, everyone changes over the years and I sure hope that he has grown up meanwhile.

Some would just call that anti-social personality disorder, especially regarding the self-righteous part of that explanation. :)

Being a jerk has nothing to do with how smart you are. Just because you're smart doesn't mean you're somehow excused to act however you'd like. Acting superior or rude to people makes people think you're a jerk, whether or not you're brilliant or dumb as a doorknob, it makes no difference, you're still a jerk!

Now I'm not saying Michel was or wasn't a jerk, he wasn't towards me. But I do know that plenty of people act very differently online than they do in real life. I know a couple of brothers on Nanny who, in real life, one of them is nice and the other rude ... but on Nanny they act the other way around, the one who's nice in real life is rude, vice versa.

So how people act in real life doesn't necessarily have any bearing on how people act online.

I found some level of arrogance with his plan. As I remember, it was a series of quotes
under Michel the xxxxx - where xxxx could be lover/playerkiller/explorer etc etc.

Someone told me (it may be absolute crap however) that this was a guy that got
thrown out of the knights for leading a group of newbs to pet??

Either way, I saw little intelligence in the way he got banned, taking Brom
on head on like that.

Respect, Eresh. I hope we killed a bunch of guys!  :angel:

Maggs, Michel was banished from Knights so many times that the Guild Heads gave the RTs leave to refuse him entry simply because he was Michel (in whatever incarnation.) He was not very adept at role play. I am sure he holds the record for the number of times anyone was refused entry into the guild. He was, fortunately, pretty easy to spot.

He had a problem with any authority and a penchant for pushing the envelope on rules. I think, deep down, he was an idealist and none of us lived up to his perfect expectations, and he sometimes used that as an excuse to do some of the things he did. That's not uncommon for teenagers.
 
Even so, he seemed to be a very bright young man, a very adept player, and as a person, I liked him. I hope he has done well in life.

Heh, yes we did have some fun, particularly with the pet's wands that I used to gather as Ereshkigal. As for pk, I never went pk with Ereshkigal but I did with Lelwanis. I was kind of tickled to see that name in the log you put up. I wish I had that log of the fight in which you, me and Sockerbit took on a team of four knights. I think it is a great example of how effective vampires can be in pk. Karzak easily took hits from four knights while Sockerbit and I suddenly rushed into the room after a couple of rounds to obliterate one of the knights.

I have some very good memories (unfortunately no logs) of some of the "big" fights we were in. We had a bit of a war going on against Law and his buddies. I used to like fights that involved two or more big  groups(i.e. 3 or four people) hunting each other. Hmm... its kind of appropriate remembering Law in a thread about "being a jerk".... though perhaps Law was more of a cheater and bug abuser than a jerk. I had such mixed feelings when he and his buddy (with whom he used to share characters) were finally banished.  I wonder if anyone else remembers that bunch.

Eresh

Damn right I do :)

Mate, you're just trying to play with the big boys :P

 Mate, I know all of them ... in real life.

Heh, those big boys are seldom very big (possibly around the waist maybe) in RL though :)

I am not sure how the word "big" came in. Most of them were just a bunch of annoying cheats.

I think I might have introduced "big" as part of a joke. "Annoying cheats" sounds perfectly alright to me ;)

My only memory of Law is that he was a high level dark. Exactly what did he do to deserve being called "annoying cheats"?

I was wondering that - he had a whole list of chars bannished, which included Legal - I remember
the link to the two names. I think the reason quoted at the time was bug abuse.

By the way Carrion, your Everlaster guy has no sense of homour - he attacked my Cultist just because
she blew a trumpet in his ear - have a word with him please!

Au contrair. He's WAY too nice, letting almost every cretin in... Must take the time to chat with him soon!

I should, sounds like you are just his type.

I'll contemplate what a cretin I am whilst driving my 997 911 tomorrow.