23 Feb, 2013, Sazzer wrote in the 1st comment:
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I'm playing around with - for now purely as an exercise, but if it evolves into more than that then that's fantastic - with writing my own MUD engine and MUD to go with it. And so, as a collection of people who like to play MUDs a lot, what would you say should be features of your absolutely ideal MUD? And I mean anything, from setting to rules to mechanics or whatever. If you could design your exact perfect MUD to play, what would it be?
23 Feb, 2013, Idealiad wrote in the 2nd comment:
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I would like a dungeon crawling mud where all the characters are persistent. When you login you take control of one of the persistent characters (perhaps selected from a menu where the options expand the longer you've played the game). As a result sometimes your group members are game-controlled and sometimes player-controlled.
24 Feb, 2013, Rarva.Riendf wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
> I would like a dungeon crawling mud where all the characters are persistent. When you login you take control of one of the persistent characters (perhaps selected from a menu where the options expand the longer you've played the game). As a result sometimes your group members are game-controlled and sometimes player-controlled.

Fun and easy enough to do. Basically logging like the swich command of an immortal. And with mobiles IA.

Edit: switch being the command you use to play in the place of a mobile (and have his skills/spell limitation) when you are an imm.
26 Feb, 2013, Jhypsy Shah wrote in the 4th comment:
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Always good to hear of new ideas out there. XD

An ideal MUD for me would start with a small world. 1000 rooms or less, with focus on quality over quantity. Minimized races and features.

I like the idea of a flash client that would be capable of supporting graphics. Nothing extravagant art-wise, something simple and expressive, fun. Sound as well. Just some original character, equipment and action icons to go with a story and a relativly quick end game. I would still want it to make use of text. There's a twist tho'..

I'd be more interested in smaller ones because instead of working on a huge world and
only having one shot, I think it would keep it from being rushed and have more room to grow in the future. I think it would also keep anyone working on it, including myself, from burning out too quick.

The idea would be to release 1000 rooms or less at a time, maybe add another race or hometown with a new client. Maybe a few new customized buttons for the new race added. So each client would be customized for a particular race/hometown/faction.

I'm also fascinated with the flash portals, it seems like they would be a good outlet for such a game. I have to wonder how smaller, ever-growing MUDs with multiple flash clients would do on them. I've played with some ad revenue enabled channels, I thought they were pretty cool and it seems that some of the game sites are becoming integrated with mobile publishing lately but I'm still pretty ignorant that. :/

So basically the idea would be to build the first hometown then submit a monetized client that is customized to the area within the MUD. Then begin building the next 1000 or so rooms and working on the next client, commercially.

I figured that if someone didn't like the first client and theme that went with it then maybe they would like the next one. I also figured that doing it this way would always keep a new client up in the portals for users to try. Needless to say, that this would not be a project geared solely to players of the mud community.

There would be alot more to it than that but that's a rough explanation. It seems to me that some elements of a mud would be better off presented with graphics on a client, with the exception of the blind players, of course, who'd probrably want to stick to the telnet client, I assume.

I would think travelling by water would be better represented with some graphics, especially large areas of ocean, group combat, tradewars and just some new stuff, fresh stuff, for better or worse.

Hopefully that made sense. XD

I always liked the idea of a cartoon series with a storyarc that ran paralell with a game storyarc or a webcomic even.
26 Feb, 2013, roguewombat wrote in the 5th comment:
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If you look at the trend in other MMOs, I think Jhypsy might be onto something with the incremental releases. It's about creating that "release event" - unloading a bunch of great content to keep existing players coming back and draw new players in. That would make for much more interesting blog posts than, "Yep, we'll still here!"

However, instead of pushing for a Flash client, I'd go for an HTML5 client. I believe I can do all I'd want in the browser and be compatible with a wide variety of browsers, operating systems, and devices. You may need Flash still for the socket connection (unless you develop a server using Web Sockets / AJAX instead), but from a front-end standpoint, I think there's much more to be gained using JavaScript / HTML.

I hadn't thought about the Flash portal sites, but yeah, I think you could get some good network effect out of sites like Kongregate / Newgrounds, especially if your game integrated with their existing achievement systems somehow. Achievements may not fit in the model for a traditional MUD, but I'd be interested to see how they could be integrated into a MUD that assumed them from the start as a way to draw in new players through a portal.

I'd add that my ideal MUD would allow for persistent changes to the gameworld by players and for an object / room system developed in such a way that it allows for emergent player behavior to arise. This requires a level of abstraction in your server development but still quite a bit of simplicity from the gameplay side… hard to get right… but just think about all that you could do in a game if you had a few simple control mechanisms (tripwires, weight traps, light traps, etc. in a fantasy setting, electronics based ones in a sci-fi setting) that could be plugged into other components or environments seemingly at random, allowing players to really personalize areas or interact with the environment in a more meaningful fashion. I won't call it "Minecraft as a MUD", but these are definitely two key things that play into its appeal, even for a casual player like myself.
26 Feb, 2013, ForgottenMUD wrote in the 6th comment:
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First, an ideal MUD should have a combat system based on player skill that's as fun as a first-person shooter i.e. based on reflexes and designed so that even if you play for years, you can still improve your skills.

Then, I'd like to see a MUD with simple commands and a great graphical interface, where a character doesn't use more commands than there are buttons on a gamepad. In fact, it would be nice if the MUD could be played with a gamepad, and typing was only done to interact with other players.

Finally, a lot player-generated content is necessary to make the MUD truly fun and endless although it becomes more optional if the combat system is really good.

I haven't played Minecraft, but I have been thinking about something similar to what roguewombat describes; a MUD based on the Wikipedia model, where everyone can edit the descriptions, add new rooms. More sensitive content such as dungeon rewards and mobprogs should probably only be added by higher-level users. It should also display a list of the last edits, and all the edits done by an user. In theory, the result should be better than what a team of professionals could design.
26 Feb, 2013, Ssolvarain wrote in the 7th comment:
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Bug mud would have been sweet.
26 Feb, 2013, roguewombat wrote in the 8th comment:
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ForgottenMUD said:
Then, I'd like to see a MUD with simple commands and a great graphical interface, where a character doesn't use more commands than there are buttons on a gamepad. In fact, it would be nice if the MUD could be played with a gamepad, and typing was only done to interact with other players.


I think that's a good insight - and it reminds me of my favorite roguelike, Brogue. In Brogue, Pender's philosophy has been to minimize the number of action keys a new player must learn to get in the game. As such, the "A" key gets used quite a bit to apply potions, wands, and staves - as opposed to having to quaff, zap, or brandish. That said, MUDs are a lot more complex than a roguelike - but you can probably still group commands together to reduce the number of top level commands. Or maybe just make more things automatic - combat attacks like rotating kicks, dirt kicking, bashes, etc.
01 Mar, 2013, ForgottenMUD wrote in the 9th comment:
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MUDs don't have to be more complex than a roguelike, especially since we are talking about a MUD written from scratch. The only difference is a text environment vs ASCII graphics.
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