@Griatch — I'm answering your post quite late, unfortunately, but I've been away from the PC during the last week.
I am really looking forward to your coming articles on IR magazine, I really appreciate them. Since IR magazine deals not only with MUDs but also Interactive Fiction, I think it could be a good idea (in general) to write some "cross-genre" articles—ie, I come from many years of IF, yet I find it often difficult to grasp the differences in overall mechanics between IF and MUD (multiplayer, realtime, and persistent world being the main differences amongst the two genres).
Since IR mag covers an audience from both genres (and others as well) it might be interesting to cover issues which might fill the gap that separates these genres. I guess that for those who "come from MUD" many issues just seem natural and obvious, while on the other hand for those "coming from IF" there is a bias toward thinking virtual worlds in a different way.
Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages is a classic book on IF that deals with general questions of design and play—possibly, it's the "IF counterpart" of MUDs' Bartle's Designing Virtual Worlds,
Coding issues aside, there is profound difference in design amongst the two genres: IF works are meant to be played once (rarely you might find some works that rely on randomly generated worlds that might offer different playing experience at each game, but it's not so common); MUDs are meant to be played continuosly and simultaneously. This obviously means a great difference in design from scratch, and things like "plot" take on a different dimension in those genres.
So, I'd be interest to read considerations on how plot integrates with MUD game desing/experience, on how a designer juggles the design process to suit both the individual player and the collective players. In a work of IF everything rotates around the single-player: the world, the plot, the time-scale, everything bends to his gameplay, so every action the player takes moves the story forward by changing the game universe. How does plot emerge in a persistent multiplayer world?
These are the difficulties that I've been facing while trying to step from one genre into the other. Possibly, IR mag is a good place to discuss such issues.
Thanks.