What is Pyroto Mountain?

Pyroto Mountain originated as a BBS in the 80s. Now, it's a browser based game that confounds traditional gamers looking for violence and competition.

How does Pyroto Work?

In Pyroto, advancement in the game depends on your role in the community. A good citizen of the online world will likely have an easier time getting to the top of the mountain, but an antisocial person will find it difficult to get past the first few levels. There are different quantities that effect the game.

Patience is the amount of time you have in the game. When you run out patience, you get logged out and are unable to sign back in again for 24 hours. The higher up you get in the game, the more patience you have. This is comes in handy because you'll be writing and reading more posts as you scale the mountain.

Manna is the currency of the game. You get a certain amount of manna per day, and have a limit to how much manna you can store. It costs manna to do just about everything in the game, from viewing the help files to ascending levels.

Esteem is a different type of currency. It's reflective of whether you've been a good, active citizen and have been posting and responding to messages on the bulletin boards. If you don't have enough esteem, you'll be blocked from ascending to new levels and taking advantage of other features in the game.

What makes Pyroto Unique?

I've never seen a format like Pyroto before. It's text-based, so, in some ways, it's similar to MUDDs or MUIs. Yet, it's largely asynchronous, and the structure of the world is vertically stratified, but is more abstract and less geographical than other games.

Another interesting feature is the built in limitation to the amount of time you can be logged on. Both the manna and the patience level can run out and force a player to sign off. This keeps the number of players on the system at any given time down to a number that's a fraction of the total active players. It's an innovative way to reduce the bandwidth the servers need to carry, and I've never seen a system that deliberately forces players to take breaks from the game.

A third phenomenon worthy of note is that players will often create secondary communities in order to pool their resources to help each other advance. This informal groups, or "clans," will chat on instant messanger, or create membership restricted yahoo groups outside of Pyroto.

How Much Time Has the Author Wasted on This?

Much more than I'd like to admit.

How Can I See What This Looks Like Without Having to Register?

You can look at the screenshots I've put up.