Waterdeep is great! The newbie school is great for learning basic commands and getting started with muds. Commands are pretty intuitive..generally they do what you expect them to do.

Waterdeep has two tiers of levels. The first tier is a great opportunity to learn and you don't have to worry about your mistakes leaving you with a sub-par character forever. The second tier is the one that sticks and defines WHO YOU ARE! It's really fun to explore...if you're not into that, there are also wiki guides with tips and tricks to level quickly. The realms are huge! I doubt I've seen 10% of it in two months.

There's always people around to answer your questions. Generally immortals are online to solve your more challenging problems too! Great social environment and chit chat is encouraged!

Property building, running cargo (airships), quests and area-quests are all pretty fun activities. The cargo & quests can get stale after a while...

OK, the cons. 1) Handful of veterans, fewer newbies. - Once you hero, the way to continue advancing is to get better and better equipment. This usually means doing 'runs' which involve multiple people (2-10+). I'm not sure if the veterans are bored by them or what, but it is difficult to get a group together to do them. Newbies also have a tendency to piss the veterans off when they don't do something correctly. - The good news is, there's currently a group of approx five newbies who are trying to do these and are helping out other newbies to get them to where they can help! 2) Not all the tips and tricks are published - Some things you have to learn by asking lots of questions, or trial and error. Which is fun but can be annoying at times. 3) Player Killing (PK) will DESTROY YOU if you have never played Waterdeep before. The veterans have MUCH better equipment, so plan on fleeing all the time. Better off to create a NPK first, then consider a separate PK character later. 4) Speedwalking command is kind of lame. Easily fixed with a good MUD client. 5) No active coders. Fortunately, the realms are huge and there's LOTS to do without additional code.