[KaVir]

Support is , but several of the clients allow you to add your own protocols, so it shouldn't be hard to find one that meets your needs (this really comes back to my earlier point about muds recommending a particular client to their players).

Well if you developed a generic MUSHclient plugin as I described earlier, you could then do the same for Mudlet, CMUD, etc, with each plugin following the same standard. So it's certainly possible to do what you suggest - you'd just need to come up with a standard and a set of plugins. If the standard became popular, perhaps some clients would even add native support for it.

I'm not convinced that that's a major problem. If the player has to download a client anyway, then I think it's sufficient to offer them a "recommended" client. The fact that you also support other clients to some extent is really just a bonus - it means that players who already have a favourite client will be more likely to check your game out. Once they're hooked, they're more likely to be willing to download a different client, or perhaps even develop and distribute a new plugin for their preferred client.

No, the WGFriends client uses WebSockets, not Flash (although it does also offer a Flash fallback for browsers that don't support WebSockets). However Flash is so common that many people already have it installed - particularly if they play browser games. And even if they don't, they're not required to download something specific to your mud.

I would speculate that most first-time mudders these days are more likely to have Flash than even a basic telnet client, and the former can provide a far prettier interface, as well as look more familiar than a terminal window to today's generation.