[Will]

I have to confess, I've been involved in online text gaming since the late 80's, but I haven't played a lot of MUDs. I cut my teeth on GEnie: Stellar Emperor, Orb Wars and Gemstone. I moved on to Legends of Futures Past and then Inferno was born. So almost all my experience lies in pay-for-play. As a result, I have no exposure whatsoever to "automatic combat." Combat in Inferno was based on timed commands. We called our timing mechanisms "roundtimes" instead of "balance," although there really were no "rounds." You swung your weapon or prepped/casted a spell and incurred a "roundtime" for your action.

Combat in Shadowfall (in development) is similar, but is crit-based instead of damage-based, which makes things much more fast and furious. I find that one of the greatest downfalls of MUDs is advancement centered on killing stuff where killing stuff is a boring grind and eventually becomes a process of client-side scripting. It turns characters into auto-advancing robots, takes players out of the game and destroys role-play (hard to RP if you aren't at your keyboard, or at least paying attention). The developer response to this is usually implementation of policies that prohibit scripting. I think that's a crock. The better solution, IMVHO, is to design advancement mechanics that make players not want to script. EG: player vs mob combat that's fun. This is the direction I'm moving with my new game.