My thoughts on the world design

Hello,
In the client topic I said I'd talk about what I thought of the uncial world design. Well, I do like that it will be dynamic. There is very little of that in text gaming, and as someone who relies on text gaming to be his Wow or Everquest, this is sorely lacking.
Story-based quests are also lacking too, just go fetch/kill this NPC quests which I find incredibly repetitive. I think that the area design is nice. Autopiloting to areas you've visited before is a much needed feature and I wish more games did that. However, my concern, and this needs to be an improvement for blind players, is mapping. Since you provide a high level of detail regarding descriptions and even combat battle text I hope, my idea is that you can provide some kind of text map that is dynamically generated based on the area. We shouldn't get straight directions, as when people look at a map they generally still have to think about where they are going. On muds with southeast, northwest, southeast and southwest as well as the four N E S W, I'd ask for directions. But since THom doesn't seem to have that, I welcome that and wouldn't mind any kind of dynamically generated text map on where I am and maybe I can select where I want to go or just get a general overview of the area.
I'd like to see more wiki pages as it's not very refined yet. If you're curious on what great battle text in a mud is, check out Cybersfear. While their theme isn't exactly related to Thom, and the text can be a bit unrealistic at times, the battle flows like a story and is worth checking out just for the combat system alone. Everything else in the game flows like that, but you need a character background and all that to start.
Anyway, I hope you take these thoughts and can make suggestions from them somehow. Loving the design concepts so far, though I do agree with one post on TMC, that mud players will be mud players and Wow is Wow. I don't think we'll ever get anyone to switch regardless of how easy the game is or how much you don't have to grind.
That's another thing, how do you plan to prevent grinding so much?
Thanks.

I'm not sure I understand the specifics of what you need from a text map. Will you please give an example of a game which does a good job of that so that I can have a look? Just to clarify, our navigation options won't change over time, just the content of the room descriptions. At least, that's our current plan.

I will certainly look at Cybersfear, that sounds like an amazing experience. I hope we can do something similar for Tohm.

I know many WoW players who were once MUD gamers, and might give text gaming another try if a game is innovative enough to make the experience feel new. That is the subset of MMORPG gamers we hope to attract, not the larger population of happy experience grinders.

We're planning to create lots of very unique enemy combatant concepts, then layer personality types on top of that, and finally mix them the results into enemy groups for combat so that there will be less combat scenario repetition. Combat will also last longer in general, and will almost always involve multiple combatants on both sides. In my opinion, this is the most important element of our game and we have to get it right. We will be putting LOTS of effort into populating the world with interesting, varied combat situations.