[KaVir]

Depending on how pedantically you want to define "reasonable" and "success". As always, creating a mud is a lot of work, and player expectations have changed over the years. There are some pretty feature-rich muds out there, so players these days can afford to be more picky. The majority of players reside on a minority of muds, so you'll have to work hard if you want to woo them over to your game.

It varies. Some people just download a stock mud, change the title screen, and advertise it as open. But those who create an original game usually have a period of closed development followed by a period of open beta. In my experience it's very difficult (from a motivation perspective) to work for a long period of time without any feedback, but on the other hand if you invite players before there's anything to do, they won't hang around, and may not even come back later. I spent nearly a year in closed development before I invited playtesters, but there wasn't enough gameplay to retain their interest.

Oh and of course there are people who say that text muds are dead/dying - if you were around 5 years ago I'm sure that comes as no surprise. In fact I used to collect quotes of people saying that each year, all the way back to 1990...

However as I mentioned in my previous post, there's been a push in recent years towards graphical clients, in the form of browser clients (including Facebook applications), downloadable clients, customised interfaces for established mud clients, iPhone applications, etc. The primary difference between a MUD and a MMORPG lies in the client, so I think we're going to see the boundry between the two begin to blur.