Thread: Pay to Play?
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Old 10-04-2002, 04:53 PM   #13
Molly
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Sweden
Home MUD: 4 Dimensions
Posts: 574
Molly will become famous soon enoughMolly will become famous soon enough
I think the main difference lies right there; whether they are free or pay-to-play. And for many that is an determining factor, simply because many of us just don't have the funds to pay a monthly fee.

(Incidentally this is why I definitely think that a sign directly in the listing would be beneficial for the community. Every extra click you have to make on a web page is just annoying. You already have to go pretty far down in the list to find the first free mud, and in addition to that you have to click the info button on each mud, to rule out the P2P. Add it up and it becomes a lot of clicking. So why not put that $ sign beside the info button and make things a bit easier for everybody? This didn't use to be a problem, since there weren't all that many P2P muds on the list before. But during the last few weeks the problem has accelerated and has now become significant, since all the smaller free muds are more or less  'elbowed' out of the top list. It would also be a rather simple addition to the listing, I assume)

Apart from the money, I assume the rest of the differences are individual. Just as there are good and bad free muds, there probably are good and bad P2P, (and with good and bad I am not referring to the size of the playerbase - that really has little to do with quality). And the only way to really find out is to play a mud for some time, since, like Seraphina very rightly stated, reviews can be very misleading - but in both directions. You've got the disgruntled customers, just as well as the over-enthusiastic players/implemetors, who don't have the experience, judgement or self-criticism to view their own mud in comparison with the competition.

I've actually tested some P2P muds myself, because some of our players also frequent one or the other of these, and they invited me over to have a look. What actually amazed me was how similar those 'big dragons' were to my own mud in many significant ways. I guess we all owe a lot to our roots, the Diku Mud Team. And I guess that's why I stick to the old ideas - that muds should be free, because that's the way it started, and that's the way the original founders of the genre wanted it. But I guess I'm just an oldfashioned romantic, an endangered species, like the free muds on this list...
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