Welcome To Wyvern Wyvern is an award-winning massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) similar to a text-based MUD (or "Multi-User Dungeon"), but Wyvern also has a graphical view of the game. If you make Wizard, you can create your own mods and game areas for other people to visit. You can use our Map Editor to create new areas, and the game is also fully programmable in Java and Jython. Using the Wizard developer tools, you can create truly unique weapons, monsters, treasures, quests, guilds, and more. Wyvern is currently in beta test. We encourage you to playtest the game, and submit bug reports and feature requests. Please read the Official Wyvern Beta Test Rules before you log in.

Play it now! <-- click here to download Wyvern.

System Maintenance and Player Purge

30-MAY-06

To improve system performance, we have removed about 60,000 players from the Wyvern database. The criteria were: (a) age is 0, (b) xp is 0, (c) level is 1, and (d) haven't logged in for over a year. It's possible that in spite of the redundant precautions, we may have deleted a character that someone was using, so we backed them up first. If you are suddenly missing a first-level character with no xp, please let an Elder Wizard know.

We took the game server down for maintenance today for about eight hours, during which time we did the purge above, fixed some bugs, and backed up our databases. We apologize for any inconvenience this maintenance outage may have caused.

Wyvern's 5-Year Stats

19-MAR-06

Last month, Wyvern hit its 5-year anniversary of being open to the public. (We opened our doors for alpha on Feb 4th, 2001.) How's Wyvern been doing? Here are a few stats we've put together for you.

PLAYERS

Today we have 162,561 characters: 92.4% male, 7.5% female. The total number of Wyvern accounts ever created is now over a quarter million. (The difference is due to players deleting and re-creating their characters, or occasional purges where we delete inactive characters, and their names are re-used.)

Some people create more than one character. If you look at people (basically, email addresses) instead of characters, over 150,000 people have created an account. Over 75% of those people have active Wyvern characters.

If you add up all the time Wyvern players have spent on the game, we've logged over 130 years of 24-hour-a-day gameplay.

We also ran a quick database query to generate some stats by player race.

CHATS

Wyvern offers many ways to chat and socialize, including shouts, whispers, tells, group-tells, guild tells, "say", non-verbal emotes, wiztells, pktells, in-game email, and other mechanisms. The most popular channels are tell (over 11.4 million to date), shout (over 6 million), and say (over 3.75 million).

We've also logged over 1.2 million guild-tells, a quarter million PK channel tells, and over half a million wiz-tells (those Wizards sure are talking about you a lot!) Wyvern players are evidently not shy about sharing their feelings — we only get about 3 whispers per day.

Finally, we introduced a player-warning system in mid-2003, to help players police the game. We've had over 15,000 player warnings issued since we enabled that feature. Great job, folks!

CONTENT

All content in Wyvern is created by dedicated Wizards.

Currently we have over 15,000 unique objects in the game: monsters, armor, weapons, magical items, walls and terrain, spells, vehicles, and other goodies.

There are about 10,000 hand-created game maps, not counting auto-generated maps such as dungeons, mazes, sokoban levels, etc. Placed side by side, assuming a tile is about 1cm on your screen, these maps would be over 1.2 miles wide. Stacked vertically they'd be over a mile tall.

The scale of Wyvern maps varies by area, but if you assume that a map location in the game is (on average) 10 feet on a side, then Wyvern could be considered a "theme park" of over 15 square miles of beautiful, hand-crafted, playable territory, plus many more square miles of random content in our dungeons, mazes and caverns. And the game is always growing.

That's a lot of work from our dedicated Wizards! Not only have they created maps and objects, they've contributed artwork and source code as well. Wizards have written 50,000 lines of Java and 75,000 lines of Python code to produce custom quests, spells, areas, and fancy game effects. They've also hand-painted and uploaded nearly 20,000 images!

In all, Wyvern is about 750,000 lines of source code in Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, and Lisp, plus about 2 million lines of hand-generated XML. And we have over 25,000 beautiful game-art images, and 3 ugly ones.

GOING FORWARD

Wyvern is a thriving, complex, challenging, wonderful game. It never stands still, and yet whenever you come back after a long absence, you'll find it as familiar as ever.

As always, Wyvern remains free to play. It's all paid for out-of-pocket by Rhialto, and the content and game administration are handled by our tireless, dedicated Wizards, most especially Teshuvah, Arilou, and Raeden.

We think Wyvern is the coolest MUD on the Web, and we encourage you to try it!

The Cat is Out of the Bag!

29-NOV-05

A resident of New Verden needs your assistance. Rachel's cat has wandered out into the forest. If you'd like to help Rachel, go to her small house on the west side of New Verden. The quest is recommended for levels 2 and up.

Database Errors

13-NOV-05

We had some fairly severe database issues on Saturday, causing players who logged in to simply disappear. We apologize for the inconvenience. The problem has been fixed, and most of the affected players have been restored. A handful, sadly, were not recoverable. Such are the perils of playing a free game in beta test. We sincerely apologize to players the database monster ate forever.

Special thanks to Teshuvah and Arilou for once again coming to the rescue. They analyzed the problem, notified our operations staff, and helped ensure a speedy recovery for the game. We deeply appreciate the tireless efforts of Elder Wizards Teshuvah and Arilou: their vigilance in monitoring the game and their constant improvements to the game world itself have kept Wyvern thriving.

Gallador's Mansion

11-NOV-05

Legend tells us this mansion was designed over 200 years ago in the Black Barn Bar. The Black Barn was a noted den of iniquity, removed some miles from the nearest center of population due to extreme displays of public drunkeness by its patrons. Gallador himself never resided here for he died of comsumption three weeks before completion.

Since that time the mansion has gradually fallen into disrepair. Years ago a fire caused damage and legend says it is now inhabited by ghosts and that the undead roam its corridors and rooms. Nevertheless, it is also said that great treasures can be found by those brave enough to explore.

Gallador's Mansion, generally for levels 10 and under, can be found a short walk west of the Alaria Guard Tower.

Grave Robbing

22-OCT-05

News has spread among Wyvern's criminal population that the Amita graveyard is a treasure trove for graverobbers. Apparently, the King's Guard no longer has an interest in patrolling the peasantry's graves, so low lives are now free to steal everything they can dig up there, while in other places they would either be stopped before their shovel even hit the ground or had found that someone had looted all the graves years before they even got there. However, should you decide to join them in their dark deeds, beware, for disturbing the dead has its dangers and the last thing you would want is one coming alive to feast on your warm flesh.

Nightmares

27-SEP-05

Two new areas have burst forth from the nightmares of Binyamin's mind!

The Shoggoth Caverns are hidden deep inside sunny Beitdag. Do you have what it takes to find the entrance and brave the Arch Shogoliches within?

News archive