There's nothing wrong with intellectual amusement. I certainly would not be one to say so. But there is something very wrong with thinking that it is necessary or even helpful when you are trying to create a player-oriented game. Sure, it might be fun for the world builders (devs, etc.) to add touches that nobody else will see. But thinking that it makes the game better as far as players are concerned is simply wrong.

In this thread we are talking about very concrete problem solving: we care about representational efficiency, information processing, and so forth, from the perspective of programmatic resource usage and players' experience of the world. For that reason, this other stuff – while very interesting in and of itself – is just not terribly relevant right now. It is not solving the problem. It is not appropriate to make an argument about what is intellectually amusing to the developers when the question is about how to let players navigate the world in a meaningful fashion.

My bad, I didn't think there was anything left to say in the "interesting npc's are interesting" and
"efficient programming is efficient" part of this thread, so I thought I'd pipe up with my disagreement
on something I found interesting.

:(

-Crat

My point was that I think you were disagreeing with the statement in a context that it was not made in.

And your new sig image is 'teh awes0me'. :lol:

I would say it all depends on the mud type, I have seen some muds run while battling over 30 mobs in 1 room, yet smaug will allow only about 9 without lag depending on the server. If your messages during battle are short then you may allow more but you have to take into account that the more spamming on the screen the better chance I find that you will have of dropping your connection.
But what do I know, I'm just a man with a paper bag on my face! (jk lol)