[Eagleon]

You should spend less time going on and on and on (in excruciating detail) about your ideas for the MUD's story and instead put something in about how you plan to obtain the necessary resources for multiple MUDs. Especially since you evidently have no coding knowledge and are asking coders to just come help you for free. Particularly, how will you pay for the hosting and how reliable is your paycheck? Are you an educated professional or a kid eagerly planning a "fifteen year" project that would run entirely from your parents basement? When coders are considering devoting their talent to your cause, these are the things they are worried about, not whether you know how to throw together some stock fantasy theme.
I note in particular that your personal homepage does not exactly scream "this person is reliable enough to embark upon a 15 year project with".

[Eagleon]

That is exactly why I said we'll meet, to discuss funding and hosting services. Notice that I'm taking a tiered approach as well, not focusing on all of them at once? That's because we'll probably only have room for one MUD at first. I know how much this will cost, and as much as I hate it, it'll probably be pay-to-play, at least eventually.

Personally, I'd rather not devote my energies to some place that has lots of money, but absolutely no goal as to what to do with it. And if you don't like my concept, don't read it. It's there for people who may be interested in doing it. That's why I put it last. Your post is all flame and destruction. There is no constructive purpose to it. You didn't offer ideas on _how_ to raise money for it, or why you didn't like my ideas (or my webpage), you're just a bitter little turd.

I've also found that MUDs which are run by people who don't know how to build, but only how to code, get nowhere fast. Even a MUD with incredibly innovative ideas is nothing without the ability for the environment to put a player in it. I don't code. That’s right. Neither do a lot of people. Is that any way to measure the ability for a person to manage a MUD, though?

[Hephos]

Egleon, I did not mean to come off as flaming you, if thats the way it seemed. I apologize if you took it that way and indeed I could have softened my words much.

My advice to you is to pick up a beginner level book on programming. These can often be obtained for under $1 from library booksales. Also there are a plethora of online tutorials. Make sure it is a decent language, C and Java are good. You can look at open source codebases to get an idea where to start, an excellent one to see just the very basics in very well commented form is Kavir's Gladiator Pits.

Start by making small changes (but real changes-- not just making colours flashy) to a codebase you know well, move up to doing bigger changes. This all as practice. Then you will be ready to begin writing your own MUD from scratch. 2 years ago I didn't know the first thing about C but I started making small mods to the SMAUG codebase which gradually got bigger and now I can do massive original code projects at the drop of a hat. You, too, can do this with a little practice.

I recommend reading everything you can get your hands on about communication protocols. You will realize that everything on the internet-- ICQ, http, Counterstrike, FTP, e-mail, Everquest-- is all the exact same as a MUD, but with very fancy MUD clients. When you send a message on ICQ, you are really using the ICQ program as a MUDclient to send a "tell" command-- except instead of a simple "tell" its a rather convoluted binary code, but essentially the same thing. You can connect to the ICQ or AIM servers through a simple telnet window, and in theory if you knew the protocol well enough you could log on and chat with just that.

[Eagleon]