Thread: LFM
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Old 04-18-2011, 11:16 PM   #4
Jazuela
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: New England
Posts: 849
Jazuela will become famous soon enoughJazuela will become famous soon enough
Re: LFM

People don't expect to get paid for hobbies, first of all. Most MUDs -cannot- allow people to pay, because most MUDs use codebases with licensing that forbids anyone getting paid for them. Most MUDs are free. Pay for perks doesn't indicate quality, however back during the advent of Prodigy, Compuserv, AOL, and prior to the popularity of the WWW, the bulk of games that are known as pay to play and pay for perks, were extremely popular once the online services went "unlimited." At that point, anyone who played from these portals, were able to play for free, and the game companies were paid out of the online services' membership fees.

This became a huge headache for the for-profit business gaming companies, because they couldn't accommodate the massive influx of players with limited server space. They duked it out with the online services, and some were able to contract a "premium" fee paid to them when a member chose to play those particular games.

Once the internet became common useage, these pay-to-play/perks took their business out of the online services, and were able to charge customers directly.

Many of the people who had been used to playing these games, were willing to pay to continue playing these games. But many of those people, started playing them "free" because they were included in their membership to the online services. Fast forward all these years, and *most* of the people who pay to game, are the same people who have always paid to game.

While they are popular, they are popular primarily because of the mentality you express in your post - that the only games worth playing, are worth paying for. That mentality is erroneous.

A mahogany Baldwin baby-grand piano with real ebonywood and ivory keys, won at a raffle, is free - and and a $2000 plastic-key Yamaha spinet costs $2000. I'd much rather have the Baldwin. The Yamaha is barely worth playing at all, to anyone who has an appreciation for pianos.

In short: cost does not constitute quality, and pay-to-play appeals ONLY to people who are willing to pay for something that is generally available for free, or who are convinced that free can't possibly equal quality.

Lastly, this is to the OP: RPIs don't typically allow for 10-line flowery prose; RPIs typically have 2-3-line limits and there is no waiting turns. While you might find this particular style of roleplay silly, that doesn't mean it IS silly - and it also isn't part of the RPI genre. What you are thinking of is a MUSH, or similar. RPIs are not MUSHes.

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