[ndguarino]

Yeah, Telnet will definitely be a lot of work if you do decide to go for it. For cooldown bars and such, I'll recommend using a subnegotiation protocol for all that (GMCP is the one widely used these days, all the major clients support it to some extent and it's effectively just a 'string + json blob' payload), and my experience is often "if you make it available, it will be built" with MUDs.

I'm extremely happy to hear that visually impaired players are accounted for. It was always one of my personal 'hills to die on' in MUD development.

As for Patreon, it's just personal preference. I just want to be able to put in my card details and go - Patreon makes me juggle Yet Another Account and, if you aren't a Patreon user already, the time to get a subscription is highly increased. Anecdotally, I'm not the only one I know who feels this way. I spent years just avoiding anything that made me sign up for a Patreon account just to avoid the hassle of it, and only caved in to support a friend's project. I know some who will still just see Patreon and run the other direction. It also might just be me, but I have horrible luck with services that integrate with it - it won't link the patreon account or recognise that I'm paying, and I need to get manual intervention on getting the thing I'm subscribing to.