That certainly sounds plausible.
But how do you know this? What is your source of information?
I already knew about the race and class structure similarities. Personally I never played Torilmud, so I can't vouch for the rest of it.
But it seems to me I remember reading during the court case that parts of the database were lifted directly into the game. Things like what NPC's said and including quests. I never read exactly what these were but my impression was it was things like "You've ruined your own lands, you won't ruin mine." or "Natural selection at work."
You may be right. Parts of that story sound pretty fishy though. The TorilMud folks just out of the kindness of their hearts let a large multinational corporation develop a game based on their work? Which incidentally was a branch of another groups work?
(Note: I just looked this up on wikipedia, so I hope this is accurate. According to the wiki I read Verant was spun off from Sony at the end of 1998, and before this was a branch of Sony. EQ was released March 16, 1999 so for most of the development was directly a Sony operation.)
I dunno about this. I'm working off memory a lot here as I followed what I saw in the press about the case, but didn't save the stories. I seem to remember it was settled out of court and the records sealed but I may be wrong.
Exactly how do you know what you say?
And as to the rest of the comments people have made, well it's an old argument. But it is still valid and it was never properly addressed in old EQ.
With a small server population you are going to see these issues moreso than original with it's huge server populations at the time.
Also one other thing, "Since DIKU is 100% text-based, the source code would not even have been compatible with a graphical MMORPG to any relevant extent."
I totally disagree with this statement. At least as regards this particular game. It pretty much is a text based mud with a gui and some very rudimentary collision detection.
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