MUDs

[Raph]

Simple mobs would attack the first player in the name list. ("look" to see what that was.)
Some muds had aggro control, apparently.  None of the ones I played did.   If the tank got in last, several muds had a "rescue" command that would "Pull" the rescued player 'behind' the tank.  You did this until you were at the first-in-room list.

  (Or if you were a tool, you did it out of combat because you wanted to be first on the room list.)

Any special skills had to be typed in.  'kick'  'trip' 'sweepingstrike'  They had timers and a countdown would show how long until you could do them again.

But yes, it was entirely like staring at the chat box in EQ/WoW/Whatever.  The upside was you learned to read (and type) fast, and fights tended to be a LOT shorter than even 'quick' fights in MMOs.

Wow, you played muds with bad/plain vanilla Diku combat systems. :) Yes, of course there was aggro management on the better ones. One with decent mob AI would switch targets based on factors like damage done, targeting healers, etc. There were proximity systems, aggressiveness/defensiveness modifiers, and other stuff that games like EQ2 and WoW haven't done yet, too...

[Sunbury]

Well I tried one for 6 hours or so:  http://www.kaldana.com/  since it didn't have as much typing/reading as others...

Pretty much like the mainstream MMORPGs, except no graphics.   I never realized they were near-real-time client-shared-server type.    I doubt I'll play it much more, I miss looking to the distance, seeing a mountain / river / house and heading that way.  Also miss seeing a mob and avoiding it, instead of walking into a 'room' and being instantly 1-shot.

[Nerf]

Try a few of the PVP muds before you give up on them alltogether, if it's still around, Ground Zero (as mentioned above) is wicked fun, has an almost non existant learning curve, and no /played benefit coded in, you're just as awesome as the guy who coded it, except he knows the commands better.

Genocide is also alot of fun, but the learning curve is a bit steeper, and it's stagnated over the past few years, it's mainly just the devs sitting around making racist jokes these days.

The Two Towers is also a great Tolkien MUD, heralded by most as the best of the best, drop by Tookland if you try it out, I hand a pretty big hand in coding that area, the baby killing was my idea.   

[Nerf]

Also, I refuse to let this thread die.

[Sjofn]

Ancient Anguish was my one and only. 

I tried some other ones, but I kept going back to AA.