I was semi-addicted to these growing up. Some cost $.50 an hour, which was rough. My modem was too slow, and I never could compete in PvP either. Super fun, though.
I don't specifically remember if it was considered a MUD, but I spent SO MUCH time on Legend of the Green Dragon at my local library back when we didn't have a good internet connection at our home as a kid. I'm sure I played others, but would not be able to remember any of them
I enjoyed them too, but I do think that there's room for someone to make a similar genre, but more mobile-friendly. Like, same level of support for easily letting users create more content -- just write some text -- but where the actual play differs.
The UI was really centered around a keyboard and onscreen keyboards aren't as-convenient.
Some of the flaws in the UI were patched over via macros and triggers the like on the client side. Like, if my health gets low, automatically heal or something. That provides a lot of flexibility to technically-adept users but is of limited accessibility to others. Generally, I think that if everyone is having to set up triggers for something, it's probably a flaw in the UI of the game that should be addressed in the UI.
While combat could be somewhat-autonomous, depending upon MUD, there was something of an assumption that connectivity would be more-or-less continuous, and even short dropouts were somewhat visible (albeit not as much as some other online genres). That's maybe reasonable for a terminal on the Internet, but wireless connectivity on a phone may or may not be there for a given person. It'd probably be possible to make a similar genre that is more resistant to dropouts and changing latency. Instead of running a constant world "tick", where updates happen on a regular basis, maybe have separate room "ticks" where players in isolated rooms have the room tick depend at least to some degree on connectivity with their client.
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