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The thing I find about the majority of players is that they don't pay a lot of attention to ambience. Heck, even room descriptions go unread a majority of the time. They MIGHT get read once, but after that they're pretty much ignored. I don't see how bots interacting with bots is different. It's cool to see the first time, but beyond that, if the bots don't offer players something to further their goals or SOME kind of interaction I don't think players will pay any attention. To me, the time it would take to implement interacting bots would be better spent adding a new class, skills, spells or other feature systems that directly involve the players.
MUDs will never equal MMORPG, but that doesn't mean we in the MUD community can't learn from MMORPGs and emulate some of their features in our text games. The text genre is dying. Second Life is the new "MUD." Unless a new text game offers something provokative and appealing, it's not going to attract a decent player base. Will any MUD ever attract 6 mil players? No. But I don't think an average in-game presence of 40 and daily peak of 100-150 is out of the question.
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