[Jazuela]

Comparing a mud to a movie is pointless. I can watch a movie for free on my computer or TV, without ever leaving my home. It's built into my internet and TV package with Xfinity. I might have to wait for a first-run to become a third-run, but that is how I can afford it, and so that's how I do it. I haven't sat in a movie theatre in around 15 years and don't plan on going any time soon.

Dinner out - no comparison. I have to pay for food whether I eat it out of the house or in the house, because I don't own a farm and grow/raise my own.

Vacation: I spend a lot of vacation, but it's a special treat that I can't just up and do whenever I have spare time. It's something that has to be scheduled, I have to take a week off from work, make arrangements for hotel/ship/air/excursions, etc. etc. And something like that is once a year, if that. The last time we actually went on vacation away from the house was three years ago. So that can't be compared to a mud.

I used to pay for muds, back in the day when I had no idea they existed outside the handful available on Prodigy/AOL/CompuServ/GEnie. At one point they were free with online subscription, at another point you had to pay per hour. But then I realized most muds are free. Only a very small handful charge for the privilege. I also realized by playing both pay and no-pay games, that the sheer variety of no-pay games gives you a better shot at finding a better game than the pay-games you thought were the only ones in existence.

Considering my personal likes and dislikes, I can say there are no pay-games worth me paying for. I signed back up for Gemstone because they started letting people play (limited) for free. I wandered around looking for just a smidgen of roleplay (I had low expectations) and found none (the game couldn't even meet my low expectations). They put more work into their fancy web-based front end than they did in the quality of the roleplay.

I played New Worlds for a couple of days (it's free to start playing, there are costs involved at some point down the line). There was nothing about it that made me think "woah this is totally worth paying for." I encountered three people the entire 5 hours I played (an hour here and there, different times of day, making sure to spend some of each visit in the main area of congregation). I left wondering what the point of the game was, and didn't bother going back to find out.

I played Inferno when it was free and when they charged and in fact I was one of the builders for it. It was a better game when it was free. It was more fun to build when I wasn't pressured to give players their money's worth, and it was more fun to play when I knew the staff was doing their jobs because it was fun, not because they had to generate income for the game.