I don't know how other MMORPGs do it, but in Guild Wars targetting works cyclically.
There's one button that:
1. targets the nearest enemy if no enemy is currently selected
2. targets the next enemy in sight on subsequent presses
I'd love to see something like that in TomeNET, because at the moment targetting is a major pain. You can only:
1. target the nearest enemy
2. target the same enemy as last time
3. target the nearest enemy in a certain direction
4. target a certain square, which involves a ton of keypresses and is absolutely not feasible during combat
I'm aware that this might not be easy to implement, you need to keep a somewhat sorted list of enemies in sight for each player and have sane behaviors when enemies are added or removed. But I think it'd improve the experience a lot. In addition, when you're already keeping such a list, you could give players an option to have that list displayed in a window, so they could see the available targets, and their order, at a glance (instead of blindly pressing "next target").
Bonus points for macros to call targets on party chat and pick up targets called by other party members.
Cyclic targetting
Re: Cyclic targetting
As far as I remember it works that way in Angband and ToME. Was it removed from TomeNET on purpose?