It seems like you're just hearing what you want, KaVir. My appeals to logic and other players' testimony don't seem to matter much to you.

What about the tailoring/jewellery permits, the houses, the pets, etc? Don't you need credits to unlock these aspects of Achaea as well?

As I said, I have only played Lusternia for any length of time, and there is so such thing as permits there, houses cost gold, not credits, and pets don't give you any sort of edge over other players; they just follow you around and look pretty.

Sure they do - I'm already building up a pretty good picture from the various posters. For example two posters have already said that PK isn't really viable without money, while the more non-competitive activites are. I'm still waiting to hear about some of the other aspects (such as houses, pets, crafting permits, etc).

So in Lusterian it's mostly just PK that requires money in order to be viable?  I suppose that's not so bad if you're not into PK to start with, although it really comes back to that chess analogy again (as a PK fan it'd really annoy me to compete against someone else's wallet rather than their brain, and it's definitely something I'd want to know before investing time into a mud).

No, they said it wasn't viable without credits (an opinion of a professed non-PvPer I might add). And they repeatedly tell you that credits can be obtained without spending any money.

Oh, credits alone will never be enough to make you a good PKer by themselves. You need to set up an elaborate system of triggers, aliases, timers, and hotkeys to respond to any situation, you need to know every single affliction in the game (I think there's 50-100 of them), all the ways to cure it, what it does to you, and be able to cure and counter it quite quickly. It's a very complex system. I've seen people with very few credits dominate, and 'credit whores', as we call them, with every artifact in the game, get absolutely destroyed by a weakling with the superior system.

Yet still a non-PvPer who has "played IRE games for the past seven years" and "became an immortal". And even Gorgulu has said that PvP is "stongly affected by credit purchases".

Nobody has yet provided a single means by which credits systemically enter gameplay without spending money. Winning a lottery? That might give you a boost, but you're not going to be able to systematically develop a character with it.

Can be, yep, but they can still be obtained for free. But look how he also points out the HUGE skill factor in pvp combat. And not just bashing skill, but actually knowing the ins and outs of the game.

They have. I think at least 6-7 different ones have come across here, only one of which was winning a lottery. Every other one is 'systematic' as you'd put it (which, incidentally, I read as "spend my free time to get").

Well he certainly stressed the need for triggers, aliases, timers, and hotkeys. I'm not sure if I'd consider that 'skill', but I guess we all have different tastes in that respect, and it's not really the point I'm debating.

Systematic, as in something you can deliberately plan and repeatedly do. You cannot set out to win the lottery, and while it may be possible to win the occasional contest it's not something you can consistently do. The only other option I've seen for bringing credits into circulation is through money - either your own, or someone elses, but still something which is definitely non-free in nature.

To delve a bit deeper, I'd say that PvP is dependant equally on three factors.

1. Credits
2. System
3. Knowledge - Of PK in general and of your system

To a lesser extent, reflexes, or hand-eye coordination. The 'twitch' factor.

The best PKers, and I mean the ones who are almost never beaten 1 on 1 and are legends in their respective games, possess all three. They have a full set of artifacts to enhance their offensive and defensive capabilities, they have an extremely elaborate system that allows them to swiftly defend against and counter any single skill or combination of skills in the game as best as possible, and they have a flawless knowledge of how that system works; how it will react in any given situation, what every single alias and hotkey does, and when to use them. Reflexes are also important, because in the heat of combat you'll be slamming in commands at a very high rate. A good IRE fight is the spammiest thing you'll ever see, and it can be hard to analyze all the things popping up.

You can buy a million credits and still die. You can buy a perfected system and still die. If you master one or two of these three elements you'll be a contender. Although someone with few artifacts will die 1 vs 1 against someone with a lot of them, assuming they are of a roughly equal skill level, they will still put up quite a fight. In Lusternia, at least, almost all important PvP occurs in fairly large group battles, and even without credits you'll still be able to kill the weaker enemies, soften their most powerful fighters, and support your allies with healing and buff magic.

Well, the other posters seem to disagree with you, so I'll pin it up to "opinion". Obviously the perks would have to be good enough to buy, or it wouldn't be a viable business model.

Your definition is flawed though. With that definition, every mud could advertise itself as 'free' - you don't have to pay the monthly fee for Gemstone IV if your gf agrees to foot the bill, for example. The same is true of other computer games - if a friend buys you a copy of Halo 2 as a birthday present, then you've not paid anything for it...but that doesn't mean those games are 'free'! Someone still has to pay the monthly fee for Gemstone, someone still has to buy Halo 2 - and someone still has to pay for those credits.

It's one thing to argue that you can play the game for free, but quite another to claim that all aspects of it are free. The credits enter gameplay through the expenditure of money, therefore they are not a free resource, and therefore aspects of gameplay which require them are not 'free'.

Heh, sorry bud. I'm done. I've got other stuff to do, and you're not bothering to see my points. I had hoped to change some misconceptions you seem to have, but I'm tired of trying.

As an aside, I challenge you to find something, MUD or anything else, where nobody has ever paid anything along the line to get it (air and sometimes water were my trivial examples that fit, but are obviously not valid to prove your point).

Carrion Fields is not 'free to run', because someone has to pay for the server and bandwidth. They can get someone else to foot the bill or get the players to send donations to the hosting provider - but even if the owners themselves end up paying nothing, the mud hosting service is still not 'free'.

However it is completely 'free to play'. As a customer, there are no aspects of the game which are unlocked with real-life money.

Wow, I suddenly see the legendary the_logos "cronies"... In short, I agree with everything KaVir posted. There's technically no free way to unlock everything in the game. The credits players are selling did not fall out of the sky, although I'd love it if they did, they do not. So, how DO you define your game as a free to play Mud (free to play not free to host/create) when it is not possible to unlock everything without someone paying IRE?

Heres yet another example, of how buying credits give you a large advantage over those who haven't bought them... I have a friend, who has been granted 75 credits for being there when the game was in open beta testing... I am now an equal level to him, a little higher actually. Yet he is still 200% of my might. He has transcended a skill, (meaning he has mastered it) and is working on a second one... I however, have not transed a skill yet, and I have put all lessons into pretty much one skill. If you dont know the difference between a player who has transed a skill and one who has not, its a big difference in ability to gain exp. Soon I'll probably have put more hours into the game too.

My point in these are to stress how much pay for perks does in reality surpass skill. You can exaggerate it and say that someone who doesnt know how to play the game and has bought perks is not better than someone who has played the game for years, but thats just folly to even compare.