[plamzi]

I've seen good things, too, along with the bad, but I think the bottom line is that this kind of gaming is extremely niche. If we had many thousands of active fans, we would have no trouble staying on the radar.

The historical importance of MUDs seems to be fairly well-recognized in a number of Wiki articles on actually prominent games. We are not prominent. It's even hard to tell if MUDs ever were prominent. All that we know for sure is that MUDs were influential and ahead of their time in certain types of online game design.

My return to MUD administration in 2009 was driven by the desire to re-invent mudding for a new generation of players. Unfortunately, I don't see much of a community when it comes to that goal. The general consensus seems to be that if something has graphics, or doesn't have room descriptions, then it's no longer a MUD. At the same time, most actively developed MUDs seem to be engaged in the 0-sum game of developing increasingly esoteric features to draw from an ever-shrinking pool of jaded veterans rather than try to reach people who have never played a MUD before.

With such priorities, we should be okay with becoming footnotes to other games.

In short, I agree with prof1515. These are all self-inflicted wounds.