Played a lot and recognize all the things mentioned. That said, it was just a backup game for me. Both Gemstone III and Neverwinter Nights were multiplayer game

Played a lot and recognize all the things mentioned. That said, it was just a backup game for me. Both Gemstone III and Neverwinter Nights were multiplayer games available on AOL. Neverwinter Nights had a limited number of people who could play, however, so often if it was full I'd go try Gemstone III. NWN had better graphics. In the tradition of AD&D gold box games it had a map view and a first person view although you could only move grid square by grid square instead of moving freely. Perhaps on the down side, it was easy to hack too. You just had to flip a bit in memory and you were a GM and could make custom items, teleport, etc.. Gemstone III on the other hand, was more cheat proof since everything was done on the server. I had a script that rerolled a character until it got perfect stats, and many people used advanced mud clients like zMUD that would automatically map areas and could run complex scripts to automate actions, but it was tough to tweak game behavior. I guess it is a good example of good scaling winning over poor too, since it could handle the large amount of players NWN couldn't, and even got some form of graphics later on. It could show an image for each area you went to.