[plamzi]

Me neither. But I haven't seen too many attempts other than my own that have an actual MUD server driving the UI, where the UI actually does away with the wall of text. One thing that I think makes my example non-indicative is that I've spent exactly 0 dollars and 0 cents promoting the app. So if you know of any truly commercial attempts to do something similar, I'd be very interested to know about them.

Not at all abandon. Rather, layer some non-realtime game activities on top of the realtime world in order to make the game more versatile in appealing to casual and social gamers. For instance, I'm currently building a web-based Guilds module that will allow people to perform most guild-related functions without actually entering the world with one of their characters. Having something like this is, I believe, a good move for any mobile MMO (and probably for many web-based ones as well), even for those that boast a realtime world. That's because even the most hardcore players of this century would prefer to be able to have short sessions in which they behave like casuals.

And btw, this seems to apply even to mudders in love with RPI, as I've seen a number of LFM threads where they state they want an RP game that lets them log in for 5 min. sometimes and still do something meaningful. A lot of mudders nowadays are people with families and jobs, as opposed to students, and time is precious.

Yeah, it can get prohibitively expensive (at least for solo indies) if you're using all-original art. But if you go with stock art for NPC's, rooms, and objects, the biggest expense by far is time. Luckily for me, collecting and mapping static artwork is work I've already done. So, in the next year or so, I'm planning to put that to different uses. For those who may be curious, I have about 1,300 static images covering about 13,000 entities, so not terribly repetitive, I hope, and definitely a bit more expansive than Fruit Ninja