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The childish rage many people show towards pay-to-play MUDs has died down over time ("It's so unfair to have to pay for something! I deserve it for free! You must be evil!" (standard misspellings and poor grammar not included)), but there's still definitely some of that there.
Really though, who cares? There's no such thing as "The MUD community" in any meaningful way. There are a few forums, frequented by far less than 1/2% of people playing MUDs, that are not at all representative of MUDers generally, no matter how much some participants would like to believe they are.
Despite that, it still used to bother me some, but then I realized, "Hey, you know what? Screw them. Our games rock. We are way more fastidious about proper in-game management than 99% of free MUDs, we have a large playerbase who loves us, we donate to charity, and we take some of our dedicated volunteers on vacations they could not otherwise afford. If anyone has a problem with any of that, that person is unlikely to be someone whose opinion is worth anything to me."
I'm not at all ashamed of being financially successful. Everytime a player spends money on us, it makes me proud that they love our world enough to do that, and when we get the occasional player that spends in the thousands, I just marvel that we've created something so compelling that someone would pay that much for it, despite thousands of MUDs they could be playing for free.
Rock on, Melissa.
--matt
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