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"Best" is very much a matter of perspective. The claim to being "best" doesn't really have any meaning unless you fairly arbitrarily define 'best' in some way such that the attribute(s) that contribute to 'best' status are objectively measurable. For instance, if 'best' means most players, then Dragonrealms and Gemstone win, hands down.
Angie wrote:
I think this is pretty accurate, though I think there's a caveat. The caveat is that the easier the codebase makes it to create a playable MUD, the more decisions it has made for you, and the more similar your game is going to be to other games that are using that codebase.
For instance, on our in-progress MUD, Midkemia Online, we made the decision to just throw away Achaea's codebase almost entirely, keeping only some common backend systems that we maintain for cross-mud capabiliity (so we can talk to each other across MUDs and whatnot in-game) or for financial stuff (credit sales and related) and then some basic utilities that just make coding easier. It was a huge decision, and very costly in terms of time, since it means redoing everything from what a mob is on up. But, it was also the only way to make a game whose similarities to Achaea, for instance, are only by design, never by accident and never resulting from something implicit in the codebase.
--matt
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