How about adding music and/or sounds to the MUDs?

I still think that sounds would be irritating for a majority of the players. One of the Muds I play has sound support for things like pages and there is also a feature called 'metal detector' that will tick when you enter a room with a metal deposit. Since that is selective and  limited and happens very seldom, it works well.

But to have sound effects at every stroke in battle, or happy jingles every time a player levels - ugh! It's bad enough with the visual spam without adding audio spam as well.

But sure, if it is an option that can be toggled on and off and would be off by default, I recognise that it could have advantages for a minority of players.

There's a command #play in the zmud command list, You can basically download whatever the hell you want, and set a trigger to play it whenever the hell you want.

Example usage:
#trigger {You have died} {#play rraaarghh_delete_delete.wav}
#trigger {You raise a level} {#play hallelujah.wav}

Couldn't find much before my five minute attention span finally gave out, but here's one site you can download a few free ones:

There are lots of things that sounds can be useful for, and as long as you're not forcing people to use it it's a win-win situation.

If it was as useless as you suggest, people wouldn't implement MSP into their codebases, and mud clients wouldn't support sound. But they do.

As long as sounds are options I think they're cool. I do think it's best left handled client-side though. Maybe if you want sounds for your MUD, offer a zipped up package of the selected wave files, along with the appropriate triggers to put them all in. Then players can download them and set it up if they like.

Me, I usually go for a CD when I'm mudding. Our players hold regular polls to see who listens to what when they play.

The mud I play has a radio station run by players. It isn't music I would normally listen to, but I often find myself tuning in just because I know a fellow player is choosing the songs.

As -part- of the game, however, it would be annoying to high hell. I rarely have sound on even in normal graphical games, nevermind mud-sounds.

Some games are very sound-dependent (say, Thief, or America's Army). Do you choose not to play said games, play them at a disadvantage without sound, or allow them to be the exception to the rule?

As long as there's a mute button, I have no problems with sound being added to a client!

I pretty much feel that way on all games with sound.

Btw, bassy, most sound would be downloaded onto your computer and then triggered by the client. It shouldn't slow your connection down at all except for when you first download it!