[chaosprime]

Sure. Why wouldn't they? If you're running an outright pay-to-play MUD, you have less reason to be shy about it than if you're running a "free trial" style MUD, because there's never any benefit in someone who doesn't want to pay to MUD finding their way to your game.

Commercial MUD operators of the actually professional persuasion know that anti-commercial people getting directed to their MUDs is not going to generate conversions, it's going to generate ill-will. The reasons to be completely honest on your listing are the same reasons you wouldn't advertise your MUD by spamming.

Getting more precision in how MUDs are described is a benefit to said professionals, because while the only options are "pay" and a vague notion of "free", the only courses of action that are incentivized are 1) going fully pay-to-play, which many don't want to do, or 2) finding a way to construe your game as "free", which differentiates you from pay-to-play (as it ought to because if you can play for free, you are different from pay-to-play), but which results in people to whom "free" means "no money involved ever" winding up on your site, which doesn't help you. More precision lets the people who are interested in your kind of MUD find their way to you and lets those who aren't avoid you early in the process, and that's to everyone's benefit. The greatest harm comes when you're forced to describe your MUD using a category that's either too broad or unfairly stigmatizes your game. The exercise many of us have been engaged in is trying to work up a set of categories that does neither.