You might be willing to wait while the description of the room loads, as long as the conversation is still coming across, but you'd never accept the reverse situation. We need this system to be disk based if we are going to allow for rich media. MUD's are bloated as is with only textual descriptions. There will be a performance hit because of this, as we have to load new rooms from disk, but I believe that this can be performed in an acceptable fashion with smart caching algorithms. I think it is the best medium for the kind of community we are trying to build, and I would love to hear counter arguments if anyone has them.
Servers are aware of each other to a limited sense, and able to find each other on the network.
They will be able to pass objects to each other just like nodes inside the distributed network do. The only difference is that these objects are subject to more significant security restrictions and checks. Well, MUD's are supersets of a lot of the different online community platforms that we see today. Well, good questions, and I'd love to hear from you on your ideas. Some ideas that we've gotten are to support online learning, by enhancing things like the Classroom 2000.