[SnowTroll]

Part of the fun of muds is character growth and development. When I start the game, I'm weak. It takes me 45 seconds to kill a snail, I don't have any special abilities to help me at the task, and I nearly die in the process. When I've been playing for six months, I'm strong. It takes me 1 second to kill that same snail in one hit, and 10 seconds to kill a super snail, because I have special abilities, cool gear, higher stats, and a lot more know-how as a player due to my experimentation with special abilities and the strategies I've developed. Turning combat into a one-liner takes that entire aspect out of the game. Instead of playing a traditional mud where I control my character's every move each round of combat, it's like I'm playing one of those sports simulator games where I give my team plays to execute and general preferences for passing or running the ball, then let some automated simulation engine play the game for me and hope the team does what I told them to do.

Another part of the fun of muds is exploration. When I start the game, there are a few zones I can go to, to fight certain enemies for certain rewards. As I play for awhile and develop a stronger character and explore a bit, I eventually reach a point where I have a huge variety of areas at my fingertips that offer a large variance of risks and rewards. The entire exploration aspect of the game goes away if I can just enter an arena, enter a command, and a mob scaled to my level fights me.

Another fun part of muds is growth as a player. As I play for awhile, I learn more about the mud. I learn the areas, the best places and strategies to advance, I learn the equipment avialable, I learn charater builds and gear sets that will work, and so on. If I go to randomly generated dungeons to get random loot, the usefulness of my knowledge as a player goes out the window. What's my knowledge and explerience as a player matter if I'm doing pretty much the same thing at level 5000 as I did at level 2, and everyone else is doing the same thing no matter how long they've been playing?

Another great aspect of muds is having a unique character that I can customize or somehow have unique abilities not every other character is going to have. If we all just have a set of stats that we can all grind to a maximum using the same abilities everyone else eventually gets, you're not going to want to group with me to go kill stuff. You'll be stronger faster if you just use the same abilities I have and fight in that arena that scales to you. You don't need me to forge you a sword or enchant your armor or heal you or spell you up or do crowd control on some mobs in an area for you if you have or are going to be able to access most of the same abilities already and can fight an area that automatically conforms to your current level. The whole unique character, team aspect of muds goes away.

This whole concept seems more akin to a fairly rudimentary, single-player online game than what we've come to think of as muds. Kind of like Legend of the Green Dragon or something. Fight in a generic "forest" against monsters scaled to your level, buy equipment that adds +X to your attack or defense.