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Old 08-24-2007, 06:13 PM   #51
KaVir
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Name: Richard
Home MUD: God Wars II
Posts: 2,052
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Re: What does "Free" Mean?

That is certainly apparent, and for some people I think it's almost become a way to try and dodge the issue. Therefore I think the easiest way would be to avoid the symantics and instead focus on the intent - such as:

Seems okay, although personally I'd still like to see an option indicating whether or not you can earn everything without paying - i.e., your "ALL game content available without donating Y/N?" option. While people could give the content stupidly high in-game costs, as you mentioned, I don't think they'd bother (and if they did, it's the sort of thing that would come up in reviews).

If you don't like that, another option would be to indicate whether people can purchase non-transferable bonuses. The importance of this is that if the bonuses can be transferred between characters, players will form their own market and set their own prices based on supply and demand - which effectively means you can buy the bonuses from other players using in-game currency if you don't want to donate with real money.

Finally, don't forget that pay-to-play and pay-for-perks are not mutually exclusive - as such, you might want to keep the "payment required to play" separate from the other choices (the other three are mutually exclusive, so I'm assuming they're not supposed to be checkboxes).

I think that falls outside the scope of the definitions, to be honest - you could argue the same thing about PK, RP, or whatever else. You have to assume on good faith that someone doesn't get rewarded with extra RP points because they're a friend of the mud staff, and that they don't get a PK modifier as a birthday present, etc.
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