[KaVir]

I've considered using that approach for things like alchemy, to prevent players from sharing their recipes OOC, but it seems a bit strange for world creation. I do have randomly generated mazes, and yes they're created on the fly - but I want them to be different each time the player visits, I don't want players learning a fixed layout.

I do also use a fixed seed for generating large amounts of the world, but in this case I want the world to be the same for everyone, otherwise you could end up with some strange scenarios such a player swimming through the ocean and meeting another player who's walking through the forest - one player would see someone walking on water, while the other would see someone swimming through a forest!

I guess it might be useful for instanced quest areas though, as then players could learn the area without giving away the locations of different things. But for player-owned towns, I would rather let the players design the layout themselves (within reason).

That sounds like the approach I used for my two . It worked pretty well, although my obsession with persistence resulted in the rooms getting pretty cluttered in my second version. That was also one of my stepping stones towards a roomless design, as I came to realise that the virtual rooms weren't really necessary.

My second wilderness had over a billion rooms, and players could change them by digging tunnels, mining resources, laying roads, building houses, sowing fields, etc. My playerbase, tiny as it was, used the tools I'd given them to write their names or crude messages across the landscape in huge letters.

In my current mud I only allow players to modify their own worlds. I still like the idea of letting them change the main world, but I've learned to fear the consequences.

As an aside, I thought Diablo2 was a very cool game, and it provided a lot of inspiration for my mud.