Our mud has quite a few original areas but nobody really thought to replace the old stock areas or to remove it.  I’ve decided to start a campaign to remove the stock areas now after so many years since half of them don’t fit into the mud and the other half is just a waste of space.

Now I’ve asked the question on our forum about which areas should be replaced first since there are so many stock areas that were left.

I’m thinking of replacing the stock areas with same themed areas so that some of the players don’t feel completely alienated, e.g. Replace The Shire with a new shire but completely custom.  The problem comes in that certain areas don’t quite fit into the medieval fantasy theme.  Now my question to all of you.  What do you classify as medieval fantasy? E.g. Smurfville according to me don’t fit really into that theme.  Do you suggest that areas such as e.g. Smurfville get replaced with a totally new area – different theme or try to make it fit into the theme of the mud as much as possible?

PS Smurfville is just one example that I'm using - there are others.

Consistency in your theme is an important part of displaying professionalism in my opinion. Each excursion from the basic theme to a different one "should" have a logical, common sense explanation of why there's so much deviation. Stock zones were usually trash by our modern standards created by people who were more interested in functionality of coding concepts than coherent expansions of the world in a logical pattern. So yes, they should be either re-written or trashed imho.

As to priority, perhaps it depends on how people access your world. Best thought might be target the ones YOU consider the worst and either do yourself or get volunteers who share your view to committ to doing them. We use a standard that says the original author will always get credit from an original submission. We have zones in the status of original and rewritten with the latter reflecting the level of modification applied to it by a rewriter. Changing approximately half may give editor status but you'll have to do 80% or better to get co-author and rewrite status.

Any newbie area--places like "Smurfville' or "Mob Factory" (*shudder*)-- are often a player's introduction to your MUD. You may want to consider giving special attention to newbie areas to showcase the theme and originality of your MUD. Often, newbie areas are overlooked, because, well, there's a misconception that it's more interesting to build higher level areas. But I think newbie areas are terribly important for retaining new players, as first impressions count for a lot.

As an aside, there's no reason to dumb down newbie areas. Just because newbies can't kill big mobs doesn't mean they're stupid. When I designed Lusternia's newbie area, I made sure that there was an interesting story line and dozens of quests, including two very long quests that are extremely difficult. A funny anecdote I've heard is that, since our newbie area is level restricted, some players puposefully die so that they can stay in the newbie area to figure out the quests!

I'd say that it is usually a better idea to trash the old zone and make a completely new one than trying to rewite parts of it. Rewriting usually end up as a patchwork, and for a skilled Builder it actually takes longer time than working from scratch.

I once had to rewrite Midgard, because it is one of the 2 zones that the code needs to work properly - (zone 0 is the other one) - and it was a terrible experience. Not only had that zone been added to innumerable times by different builders, leaving it totally without any logic structure when it came to the order of the vnums. It also had exits and entries to dozens of other zones. most of them non-existant in our mud.  It would have been a lot easier to junk all the existing files and just write a new zone.

And if you make completely new zones, you don't need to worry about whether the builder should be called 'editor', co-author' or just 'author' either.

Personally I wouldn't keep any stock zones, but if you actually LIKE some of them, and the theme fits with your general Mud theme, I don't see any harm in keeping those, after balancing the mobs and objects to fit your other zones. But if you do keep them; show some respect for the original builder, and don't change things just for the sake of changing. Try to adapt any additions to the original style the zone was written in, to keep the 'flavour'. This is actually not an easy thing to do, and if the builder doesn't have enough feeling for the language to manage it, again it would be  better to start from scratch.

You're correct, the only things to remember are to expect newbies not to know your commands and few young people care about reading anymore than they have to. *sigh*

I'm of the opinion it's a waste of time to use 10 cent words much less the 25 cent or 50 cent ones I normally use to ameliorate a nuance. *Wonders how many ran to dictionary.com*  I guess I've developed a fairly jaded perspective over the years.