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

[Ross Nicoll]

On Fri, 4 Jun 1999, Greg Munt wrote:

> 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?
I've played pay MUDs, and was working on a pay MUD server...

> How do pay muds get all their players to part with their cash, when there
> are so many free muds around?
The difference tends to be quality. I'm sure, if you looked hard enough,
you could find free MUDs every bit as good as pay MUDs, but pay MUD admins 
have a lot more time to work on their MUDs, and generally are more
experienced...

> Is it in the interests of people involved with them to promote the idea
> that all free muds are stock (rather than let's say "higher quality")
> muds, or so-called "derivative muds"? (Please don't get defensive about
> this one.)
I wasn't aware of anyone directly associated with pay MUDs doing this. I
know there are a lot of free MUDs like that, but there are a lot that
aren't, aswell...

> Is it a given that any pay mud that wants to have any noticeable profit
> needs to be GUI, GUI, GUI, all the way?
No, look at Avalon, http://www.avalon-rpg.com, and Achaea,
http://www.achaea.com/. Calmar (my MUD) was also doing pretty well, player
wise, until the admins run out of time (I'm at university).

> Obviously it is expected that if you are going to pay to play, then the
> mud needs to be *substantially* 'better' than free muds - if they
> weren't, they wouldn't get any players (?) - so what would happen if
> mainstream free muds gradually started to become higher quality?
You mean, apart from their admins losing their jobs/failing their degrees?
Sorry, but my interpretation of the reasons free MUD admins have less time
is because of either work or university. Pay MUDs would probably try to
become better still, and failing that, would disappear.

> If the stock muds of the future came saddled with GUIs? How would
> this affect the pay mud arena?
I don't think a GUI in itself would make much difference, in fact, may
even make the pay MUDs more popular; a lot of people have experience
working with text MUDs, few with GUIs...

> Sidenote: I tried Avalon a few years ago. Text-only (even when you used the
> custom-written client!), and looked and feeled not dissimilar to any old LP.
> What gives? WHY would people pay to use that? I remember being dumbfounded
> at the time.
Drat, must read all the way through messages before replying :) It may
have looked LPish (heck, I suppose Calmar does too really), but I feel it
has a lot more depth than most LPs. I've never seen a MUD with such a
range of skills, and at the time when I played, MUDs with any form of
society (Avalon had a lot of positions of authority that players could
occupy).

I left it because of cost in general (we pay per minute here, the phone
bill was costing far, far more than the MUD), although I do still drop in
from time to time...
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