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One of the weakest parts of the vast majority of text MUDs I've found has been the parse. They often follow a very rigid syntax focused too much on syntax than actually figuring out what you mean. The simple command 'get the sword' fails on a huge number of MUDs because of 'the'. If you want to get a yellow sword from a blue box you usually end up having to type something like 'get 'yellow sword' 'blue box''
Personally, I've wanted MUD parsers to be more English like - 'get the first and second yellow swords from the weapon rack' should work properly. I've also thought that it would be cool to be able to have adverbs in sentences, so something like 'quickly get the sword' would modify get appropriately. Although I imagine it would be mostly emotive, there could definitely be some interesting game mechanics based around it. I've also wanted to see better error messages. Most muds give you 'Huh?' or its equivalent. 'get the sowrd' will probably say 'You can't find that here.' Why not 'There's no sowrd here - did you mean 'sword''? Finally, I think that there's no reason that a MUD shouldn't support having multiple verbs in a sentence - 'quickly stand and get the sword from the table'.
Although a lot of these can be done in most muds using other syntax, I think people are forgetting that the parser is the player's interface with the world, so the more expressive it is the more freedom it gives the player. With the two verbs in a sentence example - in most muds, you'd have to do 'stand' 'get sword table' which would appear to the world as 'Drealoth stands up.' 'Drealoth gets the sword from the table.' instead of 'Drealoth quickly jumps to his feet and grabs the sword from the table.'
Anyway, just some thoughts. What would you like to see in a MUD's command parser?
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