It's especially spurious logic to say "Carrion Fields has had a playerbase decline in recent times. You should steal more ideas from these two other MUDs that have had steeper declines."

I mentioned repeatedly that those were code snippets available to anyone. You are slanting this to be in your favour yet again. Hell Arm OFFERS their code snippets if you ask.

Yep. At the risk of repeating myself, MUDs in general have had a decline over the last couple years, largely due to new competition from commercial MUD-like games. Even a couple years ago, your options for RPG-type gaming online were very limited. Now, that's not the case. I still believe MUDs offer options that MMORPGs don't, notably depth, speed of change, personal impact on a world, content customized to an individual, and the greater storytelling freedom you have when you're not constrained by what graphics are available. We like to think we provide a gourmet meal, but a lot of people like eating at Wendy's (*).

1) Competition by games that offer more rewards for a player who not only spends time but money. I stood beside your posts about the problem with that on the forums of TMS.

2) I repeatedly said that Muds have more to offer from MMORPGs with respect to RP and that muds should strive to go in that direction.
Hence your declaration of "PK driving RP" statement falls apart based on your own logic here.

3) Storytelling. Now wait a minute you and Valg and the rest of the playerbase are complaining about people going outside the Box. Storytelling is all based on GOING outside the box. Again I am 100% behind you on this concept, not implementation though.

To me, accounting for that marketplace shift is a lot more believable than blaming it on every game feature you want changed (even if that feature predates any decline, thus weakening the proposed causality even further), like the duration on Plague.

Malediction latency and strength was set up during CF's peak time. Hell the majority of skills were and the way there were set to interact with each other definately was. If there is a marketplace shift it could be because people take the avenue that offers more return early on in their playing experience and NOT suffering the ill effects of overkill skills/supps/spells.

Sure I died on WoW but heck I could die a few times trying to figure things out without suffering a character mangling detriment. Add graphics to that and you have competition for those starting out in gaming. The ones CF really really really wants.

All the vets in the world won't help without fresh blood Valg, and without opening up to ideas to facilitate fresh blood you get RS/Avendar results.

Done, done, done. Chow.