[Elvarlyn]

I'm glad someone brought this up because it's something I've thought about a lot.

I think the most important thing is actually 'playability.' What do I mean by this? I mean that the first five minutes of the game have to be incredibly intuitive and easy to use. If a player logs into my game, tries to move north but finds that "n" and "north" don't work and only "North" does, chances are they won't stick around.

Graphical MMO's have a huge leg up over MUDs in the sense that absolutely everyone on the planet who has ever played a game before is familiar with the WASD interface, which tends to vary very little from game to game. MUDs on the other hand tend to be far more diverse and have varying conventions. Also, MUDs have much smaller exposure and the odds of a player being unfamiliar with them is that much higher.

As to some of the other issues you raised

At Lithmeria, we recently completed work on the bulk of our intro and we decided to go for an approach that was comprehensive while making as many things optional as possible. We also aimed for a high level of specificity. Each base character class receives their own custom tutorial on how to kill things. Subsequently, players can choose to play through introductory missions that demonstrate each aspect of Lithmeria from ship combat to crafting to the war system. The idea is to provide players with as much information as possible while allowing them to tailor their own introductory experience to their own interests.