If you advertise the fact to potential staff/players that you plan on starting over a year later, you'll likely find that you'll not have many people willing to sign on.

If you don't advertise it, then you'll likely have most of the staff/players abandoning your game once you do start over.

Normally I wouldn't bother commenting, but since you started this thread asking suggestions on how to succeed, I think that this is a large mistake. The harder you make it on yourself, the less likely you are to succeed, and the harder you make it on the people who give up their time and energy to help you, the less chance you'll have of retaining their loyalty.

If you want to spend a year modifying a codebase to enhance your skills, I would highly suggest you do it without listing your MUD and without trying to attract much of a staff or playerbase. Sure, it will be boring, but if you are truly dedicated to succeed, you would be much better of spending that year developing pretty much alone rather than basically stringing along a bunch of other people while you tinker.

I've been working on my MUD for quite sometime, and there was a year out of that time I was doing so pretty much alone, with the occasional friend from other MUDs popping in to check in on progress or to chat. It's a long, often times boring, and certainly lonely route to take, but it was one I felt was necessary to succeed. Take it from me, there are few things that players hate more than very large sweeping changes throughout a game they've become comfortable with, and something as drastic as changing a codebase will definitely upset any playerbase you manage to build, and with as sparse as MUD players seem to be these days, I don't think that's something a start up MUD (especially one with so many other MUDs they are in direct competition with) can afford.

I agree, lol I've been into mudding for a very very long time and done a whole lot of it on my own and yep it can be boring. Do what I do when I need some fun interaction go play someone else's mud and chat with them a bit etc…

I'm just going to run off into my own little world and pretend I didn't read any of this page. :P I'll just keep on believing that I was right and this DOESN'T sound horribly wrong. :x

If it makes you feel better Kayle, "I (wish I didn't have to have) told you so". :tongue: So, yeah…

We've been down the same road of making drastic changes to the game that alienated large numbers of people. It happened around the time the overland code was introduced and people needed to use it to get from one place to another. They weren't used to it, some didn't like it and left. Others loved it. Unfortunately even they loved Evercrack more, so eventually they all bailed out on us :P

DBS codebase is decent, but as zeno said it is not stable and would require alot of bug fixes. If you are looking to start from scratch then I too would recommend SmaugFUSS, it is free and error free. If you want a Dragonball Codebase that has already been put together and you do not mid modifying it and mass bug fixes then go with DBS if you like.