[Avasyu]

I think the point is to make it easier to introduce players to the mud experience, rather then trying to 'clickify' everything. Obviously they will still have to type when every the talk to anyone and when they start to get deeper into the game.

On IRE we put in some tracking to see exactly at what points in our newbie tours people quit. A significant number of people quit when they ran into something a little tricky to type. For example, there was a mob in one of the intros players had to send a tell too, the name was complex, and the new players had trouble spelling it just right. Not understanding the problem, a huge number of people quit. We changed that part of the intro and it significantly cleared up the problem.

I agree that we are directly competing not only with WoW and Runescape, but with every form of entertainment on the web. There are thousands of free games, facebook games, flash games, console games, etc, for people to entertain themselves. If muds cannot instantly catch some attention in the 'first page' (good analogy Scandum), the we will always loose to games that provide a better, cleaner, faster interface.

Also Scandum, thanks for pointing out that wonderful graphic. We have a better one here (), but your point is taken. We are actually going to be spending a significant amount of time the next few months redoing our websites and really focusing on things like that.

As for MSP, we have not really done anything with that. I think my rapture guy would kill me if I asked him to add it at this point. Trying to get MXP to work across all the plethora of clients out there has been quite a bit of work. However, I do think we will start adding sound in the future. We will probably confine it to the client. Things such as background music, mouse click sounds, button roll overs, and such, to get a feel to user reaction to it.