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Old 06-11-2003, 06:43 PM   #13
KaVir
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Name: Richard
Home MUD: God Wars II
Posts: 2,052
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category 3 and 4 should be relatively easy to distinguish between - imagine we have player X who pays money into the mud, and player Y who never pays anything. If player Y has (or can get) access to the same commands, bonuses, etc as player X, then it's category 3 - otherwise it's category 4.

The only real difficulty that I see is as Atyreus pointed out - trying to define bonuses given for non-monetary things. You could argue that bonuses in return for writing areas of helpfiles doesn't count (it's still time put into the mud), but it can get quite fuzzy. Generally I would say that if the contribution has some sort of financial equivilent, then it's counted, otherwise it's not - for example, if your mud sells Uberswords of Megacastration for $50, then you'll be category 3 (if they've got the same stats as regular equipment) or 4 (if they're better than regular equipment), regardless of whether or not players can also earn such weapons from area submissions. But if you can ONLY gain the item from area submissions, then I would still consider it to be "time" that you've put into the mud.

The reasoning behind that is that this categorisation is supposed to indicate whether you need time or money to play - thus it's fairly irrelevent (in such broad terms) whether you spend that time playing or building.

There would of course be some more tricky situations, such as muds which do the occasional auction in order to pay off some hosting bills, but don't regularly accept payment.

Unfortunately as with any type of mud classification, it's not possible to guarantee complete accuracy all of the time. However I still think that this would provide a fairly good indication of what players can expect in the vast majority of cases.
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