I'm an advanced user, so I can't really speak on how hard MUSHclient is to use for beginning players. However, there are some things I want to mention from an as neutral perspective as possible.
Clients differ. MUSHclient is not Gmud is not SimpleMU is not Zmud is not Cmud is not telnet is not TinyFugue is not Mudlet is not <insertclienthere>. Things easy in one client take a bit more effort in others, and waay more effort in yet others. What you think of as the 'really simple basic behaviour' is only that because you grew accustomed to that behaviour: for a new user it can be equally baffling to have extra stuff at the end mess your aliases up. 'I didn't want it to do that, why does it do that, I didn't put a * there!'
Now, I agree that complicated regular expressions are not for everybody. But they are not complicated for simple things: hell, simply look at the Convert-to-Regular-Expression button in the dialogs: it converts a non-regexp * into (.*?). _All_ MC triggers are regexps; the non-regex triggers simply get translated into them without you being aware of it. :-)
For what you want, what I put in the previous paragraph _is_ your solution. Use a plain trigger/alias (=don't tick 'Regular Expression'), put whatever you want, and put a * at the end of it. Then whenever you really want to use the extra text, use a %1 in the trigger, which is no different from what other games do. (Essentially, this is what Andos last post does, except without the regular expressions to confuse users with.) The only functional difference is that an alias for 'see' also matches 'seesaw'.
But once that becomes a problem, I think it is not too much asked for people to do a little bit of self-study. MUSHclient is not rocket science after all, and it has very good forums and documentation for people them to learn from. :-)
And as you so aptly state yourself: you do not want to write every alias for everyone. At some point, people will want to do more than they can readily know how to do, and the only thing adding features for things that can _already be done_ will do is that 1) one adds complexity & reduces efficiency, and 2) moves the barrier where 'newbie' mode stops being sufficient away. Sometimes being pushed into the water is the only way to really learn how to swim.
My best advice is to simply be available for questions, and to prepare plugins for your players to (ab)use. It will give a better experience for them game-wise, and if they really want to script it will also give them a testbed to muck with. I've done it in the past, and found it to work pretty well. |