[Threshold]

This also makes the training burden enormous. If you had a really creative player that you were interested in bringing on board as a builder, the amount of training involved just so they could BEGIN to express their creativity is quite significant. A lot of people just give up before that.

That raises another possible reason for the LPmud fade. 10+ years ago, a much higher percentage of people that were online and playing MUDs were already technically oriented. They were either involved in computer science in academia, or doing something with computers or engineering. If none of those were the case, they were at least people who were so into technology they knew about "this new fangled thing called the internet."

Now the internet is pretty darn close to a cross-section of society in general. So the average person is not already interested in programming like was once the case.