[SnowTroll]

Lemme be devil's advocate here. I like about 1.5 of those 6 points. Not 1, not 2, not 6, half of 3, 4, and 5.

1. Doesn't every mud have tangible objects for characters, whether crafted, found on mobs, found via quest, found randomly? Every mud has people who have things, who can get things, who can make things, who will buy and sell things, and/or who will steal things or kill for things. While yeah, items can be a plot motivator, I wouldn't tout this as something unique you're doing, or something that's going to somehow make your mud's RP more player driven and real than any other mud. I can steal someone's fancy weapon and start a big RP stink about it on any mud.

2. Doesn't every mud have rooms that are fit to RP in? Inns are great because they're traditional fantasy world gaterhing places, but people meet in parks, in barracks, at busy ports, conference rooms, or even out in the woods. I can't think of a single RP mud I've ever played that didn't have a huge variety of places people could RP, but people always tended to congregate in the "main inn" type place, because that's where everyone knew to go to find whoever else was online and looking for RP. If you have a million RP appropriate rooms, people will still sit around in the inn waiting to see who shows up. And again, I'd hesitate to say that this is a unique feature for your particular mud that's going to make RP more player driven or special.

3. Most muds have organizations that have ranks and positions players can acquire. Your most active and powerful players are also usually the leaders of the local kingdoms, clans, guilds, tribes, or whatever, and people meet to discuss politics, trade agreements, and alliances or wars all the time, and some muds even allow for the voting out and/or overthrow of current leadership, and allow the current leadership to structure the organization however they want, even making massive changes (i.e., "Surprise! We were ruled by a democractic council yesterday, but now that the new guys are in power, we're a religious dictatorship.") The key question here is: can these player-run organizations really change the world as a whole? If I want to recruit 20 other players, and together we want to chop down the forest area you worked hard to build and everyone uses to level, make my own village there, and turn the rest of the forest into farmland, you'd really delete this popular leveling area you built and create my village, then give me passive income every few weeks for the money I make from crops and taxing the locals, all because I changed the world through RP?

4. I like your point #4, though some new players who really just want to get into the game can find that whole kind of process intimidating or tedious. For example, I like to log into a mud, make a fairly generic character, and get a feel for the place, not write an extremely detailed description and background after reading four or five novels worth of information on the website, then have to negotiate exactly where I'm going to fit with the staff before I actually get to play. But I, personally, would love to get a note or private in game message from a staff member telling me, "You know, I've been watching how you RP and looked over your background a bit, and it seems like you'd really fit in well with these people over here. It would help flesh out your background and give you some more to do, and help them flesh out their group a little more. You want me to hook you guys up out of character so you can talk?" Some people might hate that.

5. Interesting combat is always a plus, but if it's stupidly complex or tedious and there are 5000 things to remember and configure, it really ticks me off. I'm a huge fan of muds that give characters unique skills that complement and benefit each other, making groups and strategic use of abilities a huge success. I'm a huge hater of muds that want me to try to organize my group into some kind of formation, type a six-line emote every time I want to attack something, or make fighting and using abilities some kind of nightmarish thing where I have to type more than ten keystrokes before hitting enter, then try to modify my combat configuration based on what I see go wrong. I've always found muds that say, "You must RP a good reason to PK someone" to be using too many words to say something a lot simpler: "You must RP." If you're RPing, then you're not going to off another player for no reason. Creative ways to mess with people besides PK stem from the mud code and the world people live in. If death is trivial and people come back to life 30 seconds later with minimal consequences, then "murder" in your mud world isn't nearly as big of a deal as it is in the real world. But if your mud world is closer to the real one with regard to the trouble you get into for killing someone, more creative ways to conflict with others should naturally appear as the players find things they're willing to risk doing.

6. I'm ambivalent on the "constant state of change" thing. If a bunch of players are RPing hard to keep everything a certain way, and their RP should logically accomplish that, who am I as a staff member to screw all that up because I want to keep everything changing? If I interpret this point to be a little less about always inserting contrived and artificial sitautions into the world just to keep people interested, and more as just having an active staff who's always willing to make results possible when people do stuff where appropriate, it sounds a lot better in my mind.