[Muirdach]

Personally, I feel that there's a lot to be said for "oldstyle" mudding. Something that looks familiar and comforting to some degree. While some games do the cutting-edge thing very well, what I've gathered from a lot of players is that the majority of them aren't looking for the most complex or realistic system - they want one that works, and one that they can get into. When I play, I don't want a million things going on in combat with commands you have to input all the time in order to defeat a powerful AI (though some people may like this) - I want the traditional, oldstyle, not-too-difficult automatic combat with dumb NPCs. While it might not be everyone's cup of tea, I think that MUDs are a somewhat nostalgic and simple genre, and that to some degree they thrive because of this, not despite this.

People who demand the flashy and complicated are likely to move on to graphics, or to those games such as GWII that are renowned for doing it very well. I think it's important for the rest of us not to forget where MUDs came from, and that many people are looking for that, or something not too alien that they can quickly get into, without going through the "newbie" persona over and over. I think that we often add features more and more without realising that all of this makes the game something very different - which may be good, but not necessarily and certainly not always.