Oooook. So, I guess its best to just assume that your player base will be morons....
That may be true, but my example doesn't require it.
Humans learn by analyzing patterns and drawing (hopefully) logical conclusions from those patterns. If I log into a mud, especially if I've never played a text mud before, and I see a description of the world everywhere I walk, indoors, outdoors, during the day, at night, in the middle of a blizzard; and that description always shows me what's in the room and where I can go, it's pretty reasonable to assume that those conditions will always apply unless something extraordinary happens.
Suddenly, I'm outside killing villagers and I see:
Dusty Road.
You are on a dusty road which serves as a corral for helpless villagers.
A small burn barrel sits off to the side, and blood marks the ground where
many villagers have been slaughtered by adventurers like you.
You see a villager dejectedly holding a sign that says, 'Kill me for XP!'
> kill villager
You swing your rusty tin opener at a villager.
Your tin opener *@!**MEGAOBLITERATEOMFGBBQS**!@* a villager!
A villager dies.
You gain 37283823 experience and 1 copper piece.
Congratulations! You've gained a level!
> look
A Dark Place.
It is too dark to see anything. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
>
I dunno about you, but I'd find that a bit disconcerting. What happened? Did I get the killing-villagers-makes-you-go-blind curse? Did the wind whip dust in my eyes? Am I being punished for leveling too fast? I didn't get a message about the sun setting, and it was the middle of the afternoon a moment ago. I'm not in combat, so nobody cast blind on me. What gives?
Nobody told me that my reward for not being a newbie any more was that I'd have to carry torches or not be able to see anything.
I don't think being a moron is a prerequisite for confusion here. This is especially true if the player in question hasn't played a text game before. If they come from a graphical MMO, night isn't typically so dark you can't navigate (at least not in modern ones). If they've never played one of these at all, they don't even have any preconceptions.
In text games, the words you see as you walk around are the only input you have when trying to figure out how the game works, and what you're supposed to do in it. Every single inconsistency makes it that much harder to succeed.
Surely some of you remember the "guess the verb" games we used to play when trying to solve quests. That's the whole reason Lima (formerly ZorkMUD) came into being, to try and force common verbs so you didn't have to sit and try "turn knob", "twist knob", "pull knob", "push knob", "kill knob" for a month.
Now, one could put a hook into the gain level code so that once you pass newbie status, it tells you about the changes to the game rules. However, that's more code to maintain, and if other things are added which work the same way (such as not needing to eat or drink, not leaving a corpse when you die, etc), those all have to be added to the text too.
That's why I'm making the argument. Not because I think mud players will be morons (they may be, but I'm holding out hopes that most of them have moved to WoW). Not even because I hate coddling newbies (I do, but that's my preference). Because I think it brings added complexity to an increasingly more complex code base, and because it introduces inconsistency in the game environment.
Put another way, if you want it to be forever bright to the newbies, why not either disable night for the newbie zone, or put light sources (street lamps, torches, bonfires, glowing magical garden gnomes) in every room in the newbie zone?
