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Old 01-11-2006, 06:30 AM   #56
Sinuhe
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Join Date: Nov 2003
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For someone like me, who has been away on vacation over the holidays, it’s interesting to be met by a mega thread (34 pages) and new-started thread (6 pages and still growing), which both mainly circle around the definition of the word ‘FREE’ in the Mud community, and whether or not it is acceptable for a commercial company like IRE to advertise their muds as ‘free to play’. I wish I could also say that reading through the threads was entertaining, but that would not have been true, since wading through the same arguments, repeated over and over again with small variations to apparently totally deaf ears on both sides, soon became really boring.

But interesting, yes. In particularly three things were interesting:

1. The relatively new poster PinkFloyd, who only appeared in the first thread after the_logos had announced his withdrawal, and who seemed amazingly familiar with the IRE helpfiles and advertising strategy, although I believe he claimed somewhere, (correct me if I am wrong, I really don’t feel like wading through it all again), that he never even played an IRE game, much less has got anything to do with the administration.

2. The fact that the two main combatants (The_logos and Donathin Frye both made claims about speaking on behalf of the ‘Mud community’).

Comment: In a way both claims could be said to be justified. The IRE games certainly have lots of players. On the other hand there are 1817 muds listed on TMC right now. (I don’t know how many are listed on TMS, since the list only goes to the first 100). A very large majority of those muds are free, because they are running on some kind of DIKU derivate, meaning that according to the licence (which they all, except apparent rogues like Vryce, honour). The licence explicitly states that you are not allowed to make any money from selling in-game benefits to the players. It could be assumed that a majority of the owners of those muds are against IRE marketing itself as free. I would also have assumed that most OTHER commercial mud owners would be against it, since it gives IRE a business advantage at their expense, but that seems to be contradicted by some posts from the Threshold administration. (And by the way, Matt, ‘a handful of forum posters’ is hardly accurate, since to a very large amount of mud owners, who were brought up to honour the DIKU licence, FREE means something very specific. But you probably wouldn’t understand that, since you don’t honour the licence. I have even seen you actively supporting Medievia’s breach of it and encouraging other administrators to do the same).

3. Even more interesting, but also a bit disturbing, is the fact that the_logos also claims to be speaking on behalf of the List owner Synozeer, and also is rewriting the voting rules to fit his own system as closely as possible.  This claim seems to be supported by the fact that Synozeer, at least so far has been very silent, even though he at some time announced that he was following the debate. On a side-note I also find the veiled threats about large subscribers retiring if the list were to be change distasteful, to say the least.

Comment: There is a saying: ‘Money speaks’. I really hope that isn’t true in this case. Commercial muds buy advertising space on various Mudsites. For this they should get exactly what they pay for and no more; namely banners in prominent places to advertise their gamers. I really hope that is all they get. Because, (as the_logos arrogant posts and Synozeer’s silence seem to implicate), if they also get any more influence on the policy decisions on the site than members that don’t pay for banners, then it would be really grave. I sure hope this is not the case here, and that the reason why Synozeer himself has not yet commented on the issue yet is simply because he hasn’t yet made up his mind about what course to take.

Finally. DonathinFry very commendable asked for the opinions of other mud administrators and players. That would of course be the best way to settle the question in my point 2 that is if they really came forward in large numbers. But I doubt it will happen. Most mud admins and players are very silent on these Forums. Probably for two reasons. The first is that they really don’t care, most of them even bother to read the forums. The second, more grave one, is that they  feel their opinions don’t matter, because decisions will be taken over their head anyhow.

My opinion probably don’t matter either, but I still am going to give it.

1. I think Jazuela’s suggestion of dividing between commercial and non-commercial muds is excellent, because in one stroke that makes the entire haggling about how the word ‘free’ should be interpreted redundant. Commercial or not commercial is a real divider among mudders, even more so than PK or RP-enforced, and it is worthy of its own tag.

2. If that cannot be implemented, I second the suggestion to implement 3 or possibly 4 categories of commercial muds, that I think first was proposed by Valg. The only reason why I don’t put that as my first choice is that it obviously demands a lot more work on the side of the Site owner than any of the other 2.
  1) 100% free.  Non-commercial.  RL money cannot alter gameplay.
  2) May pay for perks.  Optional fees may change gameplay.
  3) Pay-to-play: Fees are required for gameplay.

3. If that still cannot be implemented, I second KaVir’s suggestion that the current division between ‘free’ and ‘pay-to-play’ gets removed completely, since it only leads to confusion and opens for misleading advertising.

If this site really is a Resource site, and not just a ‘traffic exchange hub’ as some posters (but not Synozeer, I hope) keep claiming, then some care should be put into making the listings as useful and accurate as possible to the audience. The present system is misleading, and should be changed. The length of the discussion threads shows that there is a real concern about it among the members.
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