[Aeran]

It is trivial to start a hobbyist MUD if you define it like the_logos has done. That anyone can start a finished one and then shut it down. If we look at the more serious attempts where the hobbyist wants to start a MUD and make it really good it starts to become more like the commercial MUDs, and then it is far from trivial. It is amazing we have decent quality MUDs out there made by hobbyists because there's so many things that needs to be solved. Unlike the commercial MUD the hobbyist does the work as a hobby. This means continue long hours of work after getting home from day-work. Even if it is a fun hobby it does require you to put energy and effort into it.

As a hobbyist you can be very uncertain about what to do. An angry builder might tell you to remove all his areas for some odd reason. Most hobbyists probably neither want nor can afford legal help. So they go to TMC and ask for help . Also if your game is story intense with zones tightly connected, and you decide to remove the zones, this could mean effectively cutting a big hole in the plot line. It could take weeks to repair.

Also once the game starts to have players you have to handle player relations. Some players will login to your game just to tell you how much it sucks. Others will complain and make a scene every time you make a change they don't like. With more players there's more who find reasons to make a scene. I have even seen one case where players from another MUD started to login, just to harass some player.

If you get exhausted with your day-work and need to take it easier on the MUD side awhile, it can cause trouble ingame as the morale can suffer.

And what do you do if you find a serious bug that keep crash the game, but it is subtle and can require many hours of debugging? Meanwhile the players complain on forum that the game is more offline than online. As hobbyist you might only be able to work on your project 3-4 hours per day if even that.