[Suicide Boy]

The incentive to log on should ideally be enjoyment of the game, rather than a daily carrot-on-a-stick. While I can't argue with your results (i.e., people logging on for their XP and then staying longer), I personally wouldn't appreciate missing out on rewards if I didn't clock an hour per day, and I doubt I'm the only one. I played EVE Online for a period of three months, and the need to check my skill-learning queue daily and select new skills to work on made me feel tied down, eventually sapping my will to play. (If I'd ignored the queue, my skills would have stopped training.)

It's also intrinsically unfair. Under that system, let's say I play 3-4 hours per day, 4-5 days per week; on the other 2-3 days, I'm out of town, very busy, or otherwise indisposed. If I don't log in for at least one hour during such days, I miss out on 2-3 days' worth of rewards. On the other hand, someone who "really" plays only a few hours per week, yet logs in for an hour each and every day, receives a larger reward -- despite being far less active in the game than I am.

As you can see, with this system you could conceivably chase off players who would play very actively most of the time, yet can't be at a computer every single day of the week. Thus, it's a double-edged sword.

Personally, I don't think people should be rewarded for hours played or for frequency of logins, no matter how sophisticated the system used to track player activity. I see these as artificial methods of bolstering the number of players in-game, both in the MUDstats.com sense of "Players Online" and in the sense of trying to keep your MUD populated.

I'm playing an IRE MUD at the moment, and ever since I started playing, they've been doing "log on for at least X minutes daily and you get Y" promotions. This is slightly annoying to me, but it's minor and promotional incentivizing. If daily login/hours played rewards were a permanent and integral part of a MUD, I would not play it.

And that's a key point I should touch on: If these sorts of rewards are truly minor in nature, they're fine. If they're significant rewards, though, that's another story.