Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Realms of Despair
and Merge with SMAUG  as notability is subjective and  as the subject as a whole (SMAUG and/or RoD) is notable within the scope of MUDs, and it is difficult to expect the inner workings on a free online text game to be publicly documented to the same degree as Everquest or WoW, despite these games being predecessors. Realms of Despair has been well known for 25 years, has been in the top five MUDs for at least 20 years, and is still up and running. Its source code -- SMAUG, was released near 24 years ago, and has been the basis of hundreds of other MUDs over the years, and also spawned several derivative code bases (AFKMUD, SERF, SmaugWiz, SmaugFUSS, SWR, SWR2, SWRFuss, etc), which also went on to support many MUDs still active today. As far as what it had specifically contributed to the DikuMUD -> Merc lineage, this is of course not unknown, but would have to be sourced to the ''source code'' itself, which is public and open, and should be citable. Source code does not lie, and is unbiased. If the feature can be found within the source code, then that should be an acceptable ''source''. Thus, I mention these few things to be found in the SMAUG source code, to distinct it from it's parent, Merc2.1, and its grandparent, DikuMUD: complete online creation for every single feature including even spells -- magic spells could be created and edited in game, repairable equipment, a clan system, a PK system (player killing), object grouping, object and equipment layering, corpse saving (across crashed and reboots), pet saving, projectiles, mounts, unlimited online message and bulletin boards, etc, etc, too many to list, but available in summary here https://www.smaug.org/features.html, and yes, I know that link can't be a citation, but the original released source code should be citable. The SMAUG code introduced a lot of features not available in other public code bases. There is no contest to this, and it shouldn't have to be published in a half dozen books when the source code is there for all to see
— User:Thoric, 19:19, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
Stance: keep
Cited policy: WP:IAR||WP:PRESERVE (Wikipedia:Ignore all rules)