[KaVir]

Well I've written two muds from scratch, so I think I've got a fairly good idea of what's involved and how long it takes.

Bartle wrote an article a few years ago that mentioned much the same issue:

In particular:

"The market for regular computer games is driven by the hardcore. The hardcore finishes product faster than newbies, and therefore buys new product faster than newbies. The hardcore understands design implications better than newbies. They won't buy a game with features they can see are poor; they select games with good design genes. Because of this, games which are good are rewarded by higher sales than games which are bad.

In virtual worlds, the hardcore either wanders from one to the next, trying to recapture the experience of their first experience or they never left in the first place. Furthermore, in today's flat-fee universe, the hardcore spends the same amount of money as everyone else: developers aren't rewarded for appealing to the cognoscenti, except maybe through word of mouth that always comes with caveats (because of point #3)."

SMAUG was pretty big when it came out - but then it was spawned from a big mud. All those Realms of Despair players suddenly had the opportunity to own their own version of their favourite mud, fully functional out-of-the-box with no programming skill required. It was the same to a lesser extent with GodWars - all of those early GodWars muds were run by former players of the original God Wars mud, who suddenly had the chance to be the king of their own little kingdom.

To repeat the process again would really require a big mud to release its source code. That would probably be rather undesirable.

There seem to be more custom muds today than there were in the past, but these require more effort to get up and running - I've followed a number of custom muds that showed promise but sadly never quite made it.

The three main Aber-inspired mud families (Diku, LPmud and Tiny) have never really mingled much, and that hasn't changed. But Diku is probably still the easiest to get up and running. Cratylus did try to lower the entry barrier for LPMuds, but as far as I'm aware LPMuds are still the least numerous of the three.

TMC or here are about the best you're going to get.

Diku areas don't require specialised technical skills to create, they don't impact the familiarity of the mechanics, and they're thoroughly paraded in front of the players. As such, the stock areas are often one of the first things people start changing if they start up a new Diku mud.

That aside, if you're creating an original custom mud then the hardcore Diku players probably won't like it - so you'll be marketing your game at those who are willing to try something different. If the first thing they see when they connect is stock Midgaard, the chances of them staying are minimal.