It's really sad to see a good mud go down. It illustrates once again how hard it is for the small muds to compete with the big commercial ones that can spend a lot of money on banners and other advertising.

The real reason RotM is shutting down, is not for money, but mostly due to the lack of developers  willing to learn the LPC programming language and the number of mentors/admin willing to have the time (and patience) to teach it and improve the mudlib for easier use. An average joe can learn the basics in about a week, especially since we even developed our own world builder's handbook w/ lots of examples.

One of the things we had on the list was to consolidate the inherits to be more structured rather than having lots of redundant code. This alone was around 50 to 60k lines of multiple inherits that would needed to be recoded and better organized (i.e. weapon.c, armor.c, thing.c, treasure.c, player.c, living.c, monster.c, food.c, etc). Our timeframe was like 4 to 6 months of redesign and redevelopment... but with only 2 active LPC admins... I highly doubt that was going to happen in that timeframe.

Maybe one day I will look at resurrecting the mudlib along w/ its modified LDmud 3.2.9 driver (we added some driver-related efuns to make it a bit more robust... but doing so also modified the mudlib so it wont work w/ newer LDmud releases w/o ALOT of modifications).

Til then, I think this is the best thing to do -- maybe sort of help with the design of a new deployment plan and better structure for not just the game, but anyone that becomes a part of it later on.

-- Silver