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

[Ross Nicoll]

On Fri, 4 Jun 1999, Greg Miller wrote:

> > 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
> The whole "free trial" thing seems to work well. There are lots of
> people that WILL pay if they're first informed that they don't HAVE to
> and are given time to get addicted.
Yep. Very few people would be willing to play a MUD they had to pay for,
from the start, I think, and it does give them time to do a little
character generation...

> If a player finds himself playing frequently and enjoying it, you can
> get a number of them to pay for bonuses ranging from the small (extra
> socials, the ability to capitalize their names however they want, etc)
> to the large (selling cheater eq,  bonus stats, etc).
*nods* I do disagree with the larger bonuses myself, though, and wouldn't
play a game like that, but that's just me. Having said that though, Avalon
was extremely cunning; you paid per hour, and character progression was
directly related to how time you spent playing...

> > 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).
> However, it's probably a significant advantage, since most game players
> seem to insist on graphics.
There is certainly a far bigger market for pay to play graphical MUDs,
yes.

> > is because of either work or university. Pay MUDs would probably try to
> > become better still, and failing that, would disappear.
> I disagree. A certain inertia would cause people to play whatever they
> first run into, even if it's inferior and costs money. Look at the
> StockMUDs, people still play many of them even with better alternatives.
[snip]
> In short, marketing will bring people from outside the hobby to pay muds
> *first*, and once they play a given mud, many will never move elsewhere
> even if the mud is both terrible and expensive.
Good point. Isn't human psychology so wonderfully broken in places :)

> > > 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.
> I haven't played it, does it seem to fit the situation I mention above
> in at least some respects?
Not really, I did actually like it... a lot... if I had time to really
MUD, I'd go back to it.

> > 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...
> And to think that the FCC is considering giving us an actual *discount*
> for connections to ISPs in the US :) The real solution for you guys is
> to get American communications companies to move in and attempt to take
> over your local company's territory. That'll happen, but maybe not until
> revenues in the US stop expanding at godawful rates in several areas.
Well, we've got Cable & Wireless, and First Telecom (which I think is one
of yours), and a whole pile of cable companies. And certainly, prices are
dropping, but it's still a long wait before we get free local calls,
methinks...
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