>Off the top of my head:
>
>- No real way to know who is in a cabal or who the leader is,
>much less anything about the cabal dogma. Good luck getting
>inducted into a cabal as a newbie. (Usually, a new player's
>first long-lived-ish caballed character ends up being an
>enormous leap forward for their game knowledge.)

This is something that has definitely been changed for the better, but knowledge of where cabals are isn't exactly spelled out in a helpfile. I'ts available from the diku wiki map, and there is a quest, but the quest isn't exactly something everyone (or anyone) would stumble upon. Perhaps making that quest more tied into Simon's quest would be a good idea. Knowing who is in a cabal has really only changed for a few cabals as well, and for a leaders mostly.

>- Most people don't know what powers cabals even have, much
>less what they do and how to counter them.

Cabal powers might be mostly demystified, but there are plenty of skills/spells/songs/sups that are still a mystery. To the true newbie, there isn't much that really spells out where bash is useful or how to play a conjie or where to find herbs as a druid (or what they do). There are also a lot more abilities out there than there were, so I'd call this one a wash at best. Sure, cabal powers have helpfiles, but keeping track of what you opponent can do at what level is a whole lot harder in the class/character customization era.

>- Knowledge of cabal locations not widespread, and cabals
>tended to move locations whenever that changed. (Good luck
>getting your item back from Shadow when you have no idea where
>it even is.)

Woops... see above.

>- The best players had a sense of how to gear; most players
>didn't and geared literally everything for pure damroll.

This has changed, but at the same time gear today is a whole lot better than it once was, and the true newbie doesn't know how to gear any better today than they did 10 years ago and the amount and quality and variety of gear today is much more, but there is a still a lot of worthless crap out there. There is also the truly high-end gear that not so many people know where to get and even fewer can truly gather with confidence. How many folks have had Mel-Kartha? (yes I'm picking on you specifically, but it illustrates my point nicely)

>- The best players know tricks to get gear from some really
>difficult high-end mobs that you weren't realistically going
>to beat honestly unless you rounded up a dozen people.

Regen rings? ST gear? Dragon lairs? Has this *really* changed? Seems like more loopholes have been closed and rounding up a dozen people is harder than before more than anything to me.

>- Charm person was still a thing, and one of the consequences
>of that was that top tier mage/a-p/ninja players knew what and
>how to charm to stomp you into the dirt.

NPC pets (outside of class abilities) are less important than they once were, but other things have more than covered that difference I'd say. Preps (number, variety) would be a good example.

>- Top tier players understood that skill percentages mattered
> in many ways, more than today, prereq-based skills/spells
>excepted) and how to bot them up; most players had no idea
>they were even all that relevant.

Meh... On some muds, practicing something to like 10% is a thing. Depending on how new the player and what their background is, they still may not know this. It isn't like there is a help file that spells it out (I just checked and didn't find one anyway).

>- Mud-wide summon into deathtraps (and a lot higher percentage
>of characters with summon to go with it) radically increased
>the advantage of aggressive players.

Hard to argue this one except to say that mud-wide summon was something everyone had a shot at. A gang of noobs with summon could be just as deadly as a vet with summon in most cases...

>- One-shot and near-one-shot kill abilities are much, much
>more common/unrestricted, again increasing the advantage of
>aggressive players who already have good gear.

Perhaps I'm misremembering, but assassinate used to be just a base chance or something... so that's improved-ish. You recently nerfed cleave, but I'm guessing it hadn't changed before that for essentially forever... PWK is just as deadly... Hold person has dissapeared, but neuro is somewhat the same... Dual backstab is the only one that comes to mind as being more or less totally not as likely to kill you as it once was... mostly because it's been completely nerfed... Am I missing something?

>- XP being much harder to get + 15k unlimited-stacking XP
>holes per death = lots of players literally could not hit 50
>at all despite constantly trying to level. Imagine playing a
>character for 200-300 hours and you're like level 20, and
>you've spent almost all that time trying to get XP.

I would actually argue that being unable to rank up actually compressed the skill gap instead of making it larger (so the opposite of what you are implying). After all, lots of people rank into hero range now and promptly get steam rolled until they delete. Many more so than before as they would never have been able to make it to hero (given their skill level). I didn't enjoy the infinite XP holes, but I think the PK ranges might actually reflect skill levels more closely if they were back (and dying to PK was XP loss).

>That's just off the top of my head.

I'm mostly arguing here for the fun of it... I really wish I could combine this forum and reddit somehow without having to repost stuff...