I've toyed with MUDs a bit as well. I'm actually thinking about doing it again because I want to play around with a component-entity-system idea I had. Anyway,

I've toyed with MUDs a bit as well. I'm actually thinking about doing it again because I want to play around with a component-entity-system idea I had. Anyway, I've always figured that keeping everything as a zero-sum-rule is the only way to really balance things. A spreadsheet makes this much more visible (because you can list all your assumptions (weights etc) in a sheet and calculate if everything balances or not. Then if you learn the assumptions are wrong, modify them and rebalance). So yeah, definitely good advice!