[MUD-Dev] Pay Muds & Free Muds - working together, or against each other?

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 11:19 PM 6/4/99 +0100, I personally witnessed Greg Munt jumping up to say:
>
>Is it possible to get even a rough guesstimate on the proportion of members
>and/or posters that are involved with pay muds, rather than free muds?

Sort of pay, sort of free. Ultimate Universe has traditionally been
shareware, but on balance we decided it would work better if the server was
freeware, the client was shareware, and some useful utilities were
available as shareware. We are currently hashing out WHICH utilities are
both optional enough not to include with the server and useful enough to
pay money for. Tough question. In any case, UU is not a pay-for-play
effort, although we're certainly not planning anything which would prevent
someone else from charging to play their game.

>How do pay muds get all their players to part with their cash, when there
>are so many free muds around?

I think it revolves around an old Beavis and Butt-head line: "Hey, it was
free, asswipe."

There's a big difference between donating your time and selling your time.
If I am servicing you because I just feel like it, then I can decide you
should all go suck big green donkey dorks, and take the game down. I don't
have to tell you anything. I don't owe you anything. And you should be
grateful for what you DID get. If I do something heinous to the server that
you don't like, and you say "I don't want to play anymore" -- well, good!
Up yours! My game! Go to hell!

No, this isn't typical. Far from it. But it *could* happen, and there's
absolutely nothing to prevent it.

If you pay for what you get, then the person you pay has a certain
responsibility. If you gave me twenty bucks to play my game for a month,
then you should get to play my game for a month. If the game goes down for
two weeks, then you should get credited for that two weeks. Payment implies
obligation. If I am obligated to service you, then when you come to me and
say "I don't want to play anymore"... whoah, suddenly my whole attitude is
different. It's not just one less player using my server, it's twenty bucks
less in my pocket every month, and that guy's going to talk to a bunch of
other guys, and hey we're talking REAL MONEY here. What's the problem? How
can we fix it? Let's *work* on this. 

It's also worth noting that if you want good people, you will have to
attract them. If you want the best builder on the face of the planet,
another LP is just not going to bring him over to you. But if you contact
that guy and say "hey, I'll tell you what: come to my game, and be one of
my builders, and I'll pay you"? Hey, you've probably got yourself a
builder. If your game is big enough and cool enough to pull in a couple
thousand paying customers, you can pay a dozen staff members an acceptable
enough salary that they could quit their day jobs. Every hundred players at
$20 a month is a 24K a year salary. If you get a thousand players, that's a
half dozen guys making 40K, and they're all tickled pink. And they get to
put their best effort toward YOUR GAME, not toward a day job before coming
home and trying to find the time to work on your stuff. 

>In terms of advancing muds in general, what role do pay muds play, and what
>role do free muds play? 

Honestly, I think both are necessary to the advancement of the genre. I
think pay muds have a larger incentive to improve upon the state of the
art, and to conduct themselves as professional operations rather than
recreational activities. Free MUDs, on the other hand, have a certain
freedom to experiment that pay MUDs lack due to the very same factors that
make them more likely to improve upon the state of the art. I think in the
end, it's the free MUDs that make the huge leaps that change the way we
think about MUDs, but the pay MUDs that make the small incremental changes
we end up taking for granted.



-----
| Caliban Tiresias Darklock            caliban at darklock.com 
| Darklock Communications          http://www.darklock.com/ 
| U L T I M A T E   U N I V E R S E   I S   N O T   D E A D 
| 774577496C6C6E457645727355626D4974H       -=CABAL::3146=- 


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