[Aeran]

If you look at modern games and compare them to older games you might notice that the new ones are far easier to learn. Many modern games have intuitive interfaces and are designed so that you can almost start play it directly. There is also some standard between genres, e.g Unreal Tournament and Quake both have similar interface. In many of the older games you need to read a large manual to properly begin play.

MUDs in general have a large list of commands you need to learn how to use. The interface is often not intuitive. Many modern graphical rpgs have more intuitive interfaces where you at a glance can quickly see what options are available. So to a graphical gamer the text MUDs will be very frustrating to get into.

It is funny when you look at MUDs, because many of them still haven't started use simple user interface design rules such as grouping similar things together and categorizing. For example in Aardwolf, I believe, if you type "commands" it will just throw this huge list of commands at you. There's no grouping and no categorization. In e.g the ack!mud codebase commands are instead listed after categories. It improves readability and gives almost a binary-search approach to find the command you were looking for.

With protocols such as MXP the interface for MUDs can be improved further. For example you might want to group chat messages and help texts in separate frames, and provide buttons to help control combat.