[ForgottenMUD]

You need to accomodate all player types. Only explorers are going to care for little hints, but the rest won't, and they don't want to be forced to read when they don't want to. If someone is looking for hints, they will read the text regardless. Although once you've read it, you don't want to read it again and the mini-map is necessary.

I think that even without a mini-map, players are going to speed read for buzz words (directions) and ignore the rest of the text anyway.

If the map is too small, it's not very helpful and it's frustrating because you don't see where you are going and you are slowed down. I find that only showing 1 or 2 squares ahead is too little so I made mine 3.

In dungeons where reading for hints is important, I have a special room flag that blocks the mapper.