Without commenting on the rights or wrongs of it or of how it should be displayed, can anyone enlighten me what the situation actually is as I don't know which do and which don't, say in the top 10. I know you can't buy yourself anything in wotmud, as far as I know it's the same in Discworld. Is is the same in Aardwolf, Carrion Fields or Threshold?

Thanks in Advance

I know that Threshold is purely Pay to Play. You are going to get a.... yearly(?) fee. You can play for free for a number of hours, twenty I think, then your account will be frozen until you make a payment. Of all the pay to play muds, I prefer Threshold. I've never gone further than the trial hours, but the stretch I did play there was very, very fun. Neat quests, fairly unique gameplay, and, my own favorite feature, the Heritage levels. Great game.

Carrion Fields is completely free, from what I remember. Donations are accepted for server fees and the like, much like many other muds, but without any in-game compensation.

I'm sure others will pipe up to add to what I have.

The vast majority of all Muds don't let you buy perks, since they are Diku derivates, and the Diku License forbids it.

You will however not find many of these truly FREE Muds in the top ten or even the top twenty or forty list. The reason for this is not that they are less good than the big commercials, it's because they haven't the funds for advertising, and consequently don't get as many players. There are however some real gems far down in the list, if people would just take the trouble of looking past the top 20, which regrettably very few seem to do. Which is why the small quality Muds tend to stay small, in spite of their quality.

Well, Medieval Times is totally free to play. As a Diku (Circle) codebase yes it is in the licence, and although only about 3% of the orig circle code still exists after all these years, the game would still be free to play even if we eradicated the last remaining functions.

It is not difficult to break the top 10 for a Free MUD. We have proven this time and time again. It only takes a dedicated base of voters, voting 2x a day. It especailly helps if you have voters in college who can goto the labs and form playing groups or just get people in general to vote for the game.

I invite you to play Medieval Times. It is fun, challenging and ever evolving into a more complex world. We offer just about everything the pay-to-play games do. With over 75 races and 13 classes to choose from you'll spend a long time making new chars and playing the game from that perspective for a long time. And just when you think you know everything, we change it up, make it harder, more challenging.


By this summer we will probably have near 100 races, a few new classes, and many new quests, areas, items, mobs etc. This is not a stagnant place. Sure this may sound like a recipe for chaos, but everything is balanced as well as it can be to ensure fairness and gameplay. This summer we are posed to practically double the wold from 14,000 rooms to around 25,000 rooms. Currently there are over 13,000 mobiles in the game, some interact, give quests, etc. 7 Continents, 3 home cities, auto-quests, imm run quests, optional PK, optioal RolePlay in Clans, man I could go on forever. Some special things...

Gem socketing - yeah just like in Diablo, you can learn the skill of gem crafting, to turn lower quality gems into higher, then gem socketing to socketup to 6 gems into items, imbueing them with properties

Elemental Damage/Resist system - not only do we have physical damage, but elemental! Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, and Lightning.

Battle Rages - unique atacks or skills given to classes every Avatar level (5). They kick ass!

A total of 50 mortal levels and 100 remorted levels. Then once you reach Hero, we have an Angel/Devil system in place where you are blessed/cursed with a spirit of your character and can play an unlimited level, unlimited stats gain spirit plane character which is obviously pitted against each other (angels/devils) It's almost like having a godload in the mortal realm. You have a hom eplane and can raid the other for PK fun, and other gains.

Clans with a forced RP, with a world conquering system. Conquer areas, post guards to secure them, extract tribute and defend your lands! Clan Quests, activities, etc.

Houses with an equipment locker, no rent, no fees, we autosave so you can keep everything you earn!
...
We develop MT because we love to MUD. People play MT because they love to relax, kick back and have a little fun with out having to dedicate their entire life or pay for special treatment.

Tank

Shattered Kingdoms has no donation, payment or coffee mug type link of any kind on their website: 100% FREE. A regular member of the top 20 on TMS.

Armageddon.org

Can't buy perks. You -get- payed in fun memories though. If that counts or not, I don't know.

Our Immortals at SlothMUD have payed for our mud to run for the past 15 years. We have never asked for donations nor do we accept donations( although we are asked to by our players all the time-as most free muds are I bet). And the costs are overwhelming for a bunch of hobbyists that we are...

Speaking of that, shameless plug time...

Recently our game server had been experiencing quit a bit of lag. Our previous host had become grossly overloaded and as a result, our game suffered. Due to this, SlothMUD III has moved locations. Our dedicated server is a Pentium 4, 3.0 GHz, 200 GB HD, and 2048 MB memory, which is now being hosted at the Harbour Data Center located in Vancouver, Canada.This center specializes in providing space to the telecommunications industry and is located at the terminus of the largest Internet pipeline between British Columbia and the United States. The Vancouver data center is fully N+1 redundant.

What does all of this mean? For the most part it means that our game is close to lag free and is running faster than ever.

Besides changing locations, our game has been under constant change over the course of the last year. In recent times, we have added MXP(Mud Extension Protocol), MCCP (Mud Client Compression Protocol), an astrological event system, addition of the 7 magical strata, tons of new spells and skills, etc. We are quite excited with the direction our mud is moving in. We are one of the oldest Diku muds in existance, yet we continue to push our devopment in the hopes of continually providing an entertaining, fun, and well thought out game.

As well, one of our creators, William Lees, has been busy updating his MUD client Wintin.Net(an updated version of wintin95 which he also authored). It possesses many of the features we have added lately such as MXP, MCCP, etc.
For more information on this great windows client, please refer to .

Our website has moved to a new location as well. It is no longer being hosted on our game server. The new address is . For those interested in logging in and checking us out, telnet:slothmud.org port 6101.

Aardwolf is a DIKU and lets you buy in-game stuff, I might point out. They've never had any trouble with the DIKU people as a result that I'm aware of, leading one to suspect that the DIKU owners don't really care.

--matt

<< Semi-On topic post remove by over-zealous non-moderator >>

Hey, I don't care if you accept in-game donations or not. I'm not the license holder and it has nothing to do with me. I'm sorry if you consider giving the poster who started this thread the information he asked for a flame.

I will say this: When you consistently get something of non-trivial value for your "donation" it isn't a donation: It's a purchase. You guys pretty blatantly sell things, and whether you're doing it some of the time or all of the time doesn't affect whether you're selling something or not. You can look at that as a flame, but I don't see it as one. I have 0 problem with you charging whatever you want for whatever you want. I'd also guess that Hans knows you guys are charging for in-game stuff, and doesn't appear to care.

--matt

The "flame" part wasn't aimed at you. In the meantime, feel free to read my post and do s/donation/purchase/g, I'm not getting into some pointless debate on semantics with you.

AR is usually rank 13 and doesn't accept money for any reason, not even donations for server fees, so I guess it is possible to have a top 20 totally free mud. We also discourage vote stuffing (using multiple comps to vote) although no way of knowing if people are doing that.

Threshold isn't really pure Pay-To-Play, it's more Pay-For-Perks. It's difficult to explain it by a simple term. Threshold requires you to pay a one-time $50 fee, and after that you can purchase new perks if you wish, but supposedly don't have to. However if you don't purchase more perks they do send out mailers asking you to send in more money.

Officially, the game requires a $50 one-time fee and no more additional payments. Unofficially, you will be solicited for more payments, and it is unclear to me what happens if you refuse to pay additional fees.

Armageddon MUD, as noted, is pretty consistently in the top ten and is free to play. We don't provide any way to advance your character or to get any in-game (or out of game, really) perks by donating. There are also no in-game reminders to vote, although occasionally a player will bring it up on the discussion board.

However, it's not to everyone's taste. The emphasis is on roleplay - there's no chat channel, and we prefer that people use OOC only for pressing needs. The discussion boards tend to be less serious, though, and you're welcome to come check them out and get a feel for whether or not you'd like to test the world out with a character.

Thanks for the responses folks, so we're really talking WoT, Carrion Fields, Armageddon, Discworld (apologies to those missed out, no slight intended)... how about other biggies like Realms of Despair, can you buy stuff there?

Don't know about other MUDs that haven't been covered in this thread yet, but as for Realms of Despair, no, it does not allow any sort of purchaces of in-game items or other perks for out-of-game money.
In the past, there had been certain players who sold in-game equipment and characters for rl cash despite the rules of the game, but some time ago they were rather sternly asked to leave and never come back.

OOC influence can be detrimental to RP, at least serious, in-depth RP without a break in the game atmosphere. Hence, all of the RPIs which are presently open don't allow OOC influence like paying-for-perks of any kind. So, Harshlands and Shadows of Isildur also qualify, as likely will the half-dozen or so RPIs in development including my own.

Take care,

Jason

Aabahran, the Forsaken Lands (or FL) has been and always will be free for the reasons mentioned above (license, etc) but also because that's the way we like it.

Donations are accepted from players who wish to volunteer them for server costs but nothing in game is gained or lost by donating or not donating. If never a dime was donated by our players, the MUD would remain open with the server supplied by the IMPs (always has been that way, always will be).

We are frequently in the top 20 on TMS, top 10 rated on MudMagic, and top 20-30 on TMC.

Matt certainly didn't have to chime in there, but it still would've been nice to see all the fine print.

I think the real issue is whether someone in-game is going to have something they didn't earn with their own ingenuity and skill, and even if the money-exchange works out like a donation, (no idea how it works; have a hard time in any exchange more complicated than cashier giving change) it still has an impact on gameplay.

I don't mean this in a "look at you, you're no better than him!" sorta way, but I think this is another sort of thing the player ought to be warned ahead about, in case they're that picky and that happens to be the case. So even though that was a suckerpunch by Matt, I would have still liked the difference noted, this thread being about what it is.

Let's stay on topic here. The poster didn't ask if you liked me (irrelevant). The poster asked if certain specific MUDs sell things. I had to moderate out one of DonathinFrye's post already for trying to derail the topic with flames. I mean, seriously, is it necessary to try to derail EVERY thread with attacks on <whoever>? The poster asked a simple question regarding whether a few MUDs sell things or not. Aardwolf does (give them money, they give you quest points or something similar. I may have the name wrong.), and stating so is not an attack any more than stating that Achaea sells things is. Let's try to remain calm here please.

Edit: DonathinFrye: Please stay on topic. My ethics are not the subject of this thread, nor are anyone elses. That's two off-topic posts that have been moderated out.

--matt