[MUD-Dev] code base inquiry

[Miroslav Silovic]

Richard Woolcock <KaVir at dial.pipex.com> writes:

> Whether the codebases had restrictions or not has no baring on the
> quality of the muds.  If you took away the restrictions we'd *still*
> have thousands of rubbish stock muds - except they'd all be pay to
> play.  In turn that would make people even *more* likely to start
> their own up rather than having to pay to play on someone elses mud.

There are quite a few unrestricted MUDs. Cold and Ben Greer's thing
(for the life of me I can't recall the name right now) are examples I
can think of offhand. And the several worlds built using Cold are not
for pay (with one exception that switched to ads).

Essentially, there is a large number of high-quality free games out
there, they're free because their admins *want* them that way, and a
commercial MUD has to be *really* good to compete with them, since you
have to pay for it.

> At least with the restrictions it ensures that the majority of
> text-based muds are run by hobbiests, while those are just in it for
> some easy money are put off by the idea of having to create a mud
> from scratch. Those few muds which *are* written from scratch for
> commercial use are then put in a better position to compete.

Actually there already is a large number of free MUDs - if you allow
people to charge for playing crappy stock MUDs, they'd still be crappy
stock MUDs. And if majority of stock MUD admins started asking for
money... heck, -I-'d open another free stock MUD. :)

BTW, my experience with a company taking an existing server and
building a pay MUD on top of it shows that the free version of the
server can profit a *LOT* from the feedback (and code donations).

--
How to eff the ineffable?



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