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Old 10-04-2002, 12:29 AM   #1
Seraphina
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This comment was in the thread about casting multiple votes. One thing I have realized since coming here is not all pay to play muds are created equal any more than all free muds are.

The only pricing structure I know of in detail is Dragonrealms. It is 12.95 per month to play. I have never liked the idea of multi-tiered memberships but for the most part it works out well in Dragonrealms. I think the same goes for the other Simutronics games but I can't speak from first hand experience with those.

I recently became a premium member but for about five years I played with a basic 12.95 per month account without it impeding the advancement of my character. I was still able to attend festivals, get alterations, get nifty articles, accumulate just as much as any other character in game.

Periodically I assess my expenditures including my membership to DR. If I didn't play DR, what other form of entertainment would replace it? What do you get for 12.95 a month these days? Not much in my corner of the world. Taking into account the number of hours I play it's an incredibly cheap form of entertainment.

From what I have read I am sure the free muds are good too, but probably in different ways. I think comparing them is like comparing apples and oranges. Both fruits but with very different textures and flavors. I recall one GM posting about all the games he plays or has played, and there were a lot of graphic games in there <shudder>. Once I got over my shock it sunk in that he liked them all for different reasons. His enjoying everquest for a while didn't take anything away from his dedication to his favorite game, DR.

Dellica of DR
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Old 10-04-2002, 12:50 AM   #2
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Is this an advertisement or a review? It certainly doesn't look like the beginning of a discussion.
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Old 10-04-2002, 01:28 AM   #3
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Err.....don't know what the point to this post was. But I'm gunna make a new point whether you like it or not.

What's everyones opinion of P2P and free muds? Some people have said P2P aren't very good because if you have several levels of payment, then those who pay the lower amount will feel disadvantaged because the higher payments have more available to them, whether in skills, events, areas, whatever.

Some people think that free muds are better, because it stops people from winging about "not getting their moneys worth" however the level of service SOMETIMES is decreased because volunteers are working on the mud and sometimes develop the philosophy "be happy with what I give you".

So basically, what's everyone's opinion of P2P and free muds? Are they both completely different types of games like graphical games and Muds?

Yeah, if this post is unreadable then just ignore me.
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Old 10-04-2002, 02:12 AM   #4
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I like it. I can only speak of DR because its the only game I know. I have checked out reviews of other games and will be asking questions at some point and maybe trying one out.

I was hoping people would offer information on other payment structures and how they feel it impacts the games they have played. I also think that some people feel that all games in which one pays to play automatically means people can buy power. I have not found that to be true in DR.

Premium means that after three months you can obtain a house, but houses do not confer special status. They are fun to have but no where near necessary. There are some small extra hunting areas but again none that confer a significant advantage. They have bank books in which they can see all the coins they have in each bank, but I could keep track of that with a piece of paper. They have vault books which list the contents of their vaults and I could do that by looking in my vault and cutting and pasting into a file. Premium benefits mainly offer conveniences, not more valuable items nor experience. A non-premium member can become the richest, or highest level, character in game.

Platinum membership is an entirely different server so has no impact on the main server. That is 42.50 a month and the population is much much lower. I think around 30 or 40 primetime. The main benefit seems to be that the players are like-minded and more heavily into roleplaying. Some players there fell in love with it and adore the smaller population. Others hated how few players there are and left due to it. Ironically the most expensive option seems to duplicate part of what is offered in free muds, a smaller more roleplay intensive environment. I suspect that what it has over the free muds is the game engine and huge world.

QUOTE]What's everyones opinion of P2P and free muds? Some people have said P2P aren't very good because if you have several levels of payment, then those who pay the lower amount will feel disadvantaged because the higher payments have more available to them, whether in skills, events, areas, whatever.[/quote]

That is the general impression I was getting, and I really don't believe it's a problem in DR because the world is so huge. My perception of some of the games is that it matters a lot. For example, free only to 20th level after which you have to pay. To me that translates into trial membership not free. What happens then? Do you pay each time you level? How much? Can you buy equipment that gives you a significant advantage over others? That sounds much much worse to me but then I don't really know. If a person can pretty much buy everything their character might want for 10 to 15 dollars a month then the set up isn't that different.


LOL, we get that at DR too. Most GMs, AGMS, and Hosts are volunteers. Most of the money goes to onsite staff and infrastructure.

I would really like to hear from people who have played other "pay to play" games and especially from people who have tried both.
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Old 10-04-2002, 02:49 AM   #5
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I've been playing Dragonrealms (p2p) since December of 1996. In that time period I've taken some considerable breaks and played other muds. Kaos HQ was the best out of all of them, may it rest in peace. All of these muds kept me entertained for the most of a month, having the best stuff within a few hours of playing and capping the levels within a month really does make you want to quit.

As far as price tiers in a p2p, it has worked out well in DR. The only price tier in DR prime gets you access to a few hunting areas, all that I can think of have an area that has the exact same mobs in them. Everyonce in awhile there is a merchant that has a few standard items, nothing that is better then a regular merchant.

If I had to pay for levels, items, and access to certain cities though... that's way too much. Games that make you pay by the hour of a few blocks of hours is too much too. Personally I could rack up a significant bill in a short period of time. Unlimited usage fees are the way to go.

I search everyonce in awhile for a good free MUD and haven't found anything yet. Even tried one of those graphical games, Dark Age of Camelot.... failed the test horribly. Two months and I had nearly capped a character. So point me in a good direction, at the very least I'm curious. None of the MUDs on the top 10 list that are non-simutronics looked interesting.

Majebrad
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Old 10-04-2002, 07:27 AM   #6
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I used to think free games couldn't possibly offer what p2p offers. Here were my reasons:
p2p means professional quality, professional code, professional service, as opposed to a bunch of college kids coding for kicks and not really understanding the business end of a business at all.

p2p means less risk of twinkage, because twinks won't pay to be twinks when they can be twinks for free somewhere else.

p2p means *much* more dedication in the player base, because they are investing in their game time.

I used to think that. I don't anymore.

GSIII has an extremely complex base code. Unfortunately it has been broken from day 1 and rather than rewrite, the staff has patched and bandaided over. So much for professional quality and professional code.

GSIII has *some* staff members who treat their paying customers like crap, and *some* staff members who favor certain players over others. Communication between staff members is sketchy at best, and so when one tells a player "no," another could tell the player "yes" the next day. So much for professional staff.

GSIII is a RP-encouraged game. RP is not required. And so it's rife with players who absolutely refuse to roleplay, who get nasty with people who want to roleplay, who disrupt the roleplay of others, intentionally. So much for the twinkage factor.

Inferno has an extraordinary code system. Professional quality code? You betcha.
Inferno has *some* staff members who favor certain players over others, and then insist that they're not, and though they don't trash their customers, I know of several situations in which their subtle castagations have made players uneasy about seeking the assistance of the staff. Professional staff? Heh - not really, though a far cry from Gemstone.

Inferno is RP-required. Unfortunately the staff teeter-totters on what constitutes "appropriate" roleplay with regards to taking OOC knowledge into the game. They say you shouldn't do it, yet when a half dozen people complain about someone disrupting game play with OOC mind-games, they hedge and haw, and the problem is resolved by players giving up and either quitting the game or rerolling their characters to "show up" in an area where the offending party doesn't live.

So much for professional customer service.

Armageddon is free. Its combat system is a modified auto-combat, but it's still an auto-combat. Repetitive room descriptions, which don't take much effort or creativity to duplicate. So on that end of things, it is amateur in comparison to the p2p's I've played. Now here's the big however:

This free game, Armageddon, has customer service quality above and beyond anything I've seen in the p2p's. Professional? Heck I'm guessing they're department heads in whatever jobs they have outside the game world. Extremely professional in their approach to customer service, listening to their players' concerns, implementing changes offered by the players, explaining why other changes aren't going to happen, in a way that makes the player feel good about the rejected idea.

As an RP-required/intensive game, their code supporting roleplay blows anything I've ever seen away, including Inferno's, which has the standard p2p talk, act, and list of verbs.

So comparing the p2p's I've played with the free game I'm playing now, I conclude, based only on this limited scope, that there is nothing a p2p offers that I can't find somewhere else for free, and in fact there are things in at least one free game that I can't find in a p2p.
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Old 10-04-2002, 10:34 AM   #7
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Old 10-04-2002, 11:01 AM   #8
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Dulan, please refrain from posts like the one I deleted.

Furthermore, I could be wrong, but so far all I've seen are advertisements and makeshift bashing of other MUDs. If it keeps on that path, I'll be moving it to the advertisements thread, as advertisements belong elsewhere.
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Old 10-04-2002, 11:45 AM   #9
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What, Orion?

You have to admit, MY post was FAR more fitting for this board then this current trend of mis-placed DR advertisements.

While the staff may have a clue, the players of DR definitely DO NOT.

-D
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Old 10-04-2002, 12:41 PM   #10
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Old 10-04-2002, 01:04 PM   #11
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No, there aren't any that graphical MUDs that can equal the depth of text MUDs currently, but there are certainly graphical MUDs that rise above the irritating teenagers-using-haxor-speak-and-talking-about-lame-gangster-rap. You just have to look beyond the huge corporate products. Check out the revived Meridian 59 () or Underlight (). My apologies if this sounds like an advertisement, but it's not. I'm not involved with either of those products, and haven't played them beyond just checking them out for research purposes. The graphics are pretty crap, but the gameplay is far superior to the biggest graphical products like Lineage or Everquest. (Of course, Lineage's graphics and game design are beyond awful, but it still manages to be the most popular MUD in the world).

--matt
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Old 10-04-2002, 02:02 PM   #12
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I'm sorry if this thread is misplaced in some way. I'm trying to get a sense of what is different between P2P and free. I am working on the assumption that they have different pros and cons not that one is inherently better than the other. I take bitter criticisms of any muds with a great big grain of salt because I have seen first hand how condemning disgruntled customers can be.

Reading the reviews most games seem to be pretty much alike.
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Old 10-04-2002, 04:53 PM   #13
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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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Old 10-04-2002, 05:45 PM   #14
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If the original founders of MUDs (Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle) wanted MUDs to be free, it sure is curious that MUD I went commercial in 1984, and that Bartle still continues to run commercial MUDs (Trubshaw is, sadly, no longer with us.) Let's try not to forget that most of the early MUDs charged multiple dollars per hour to play.

And DIKU as our roots? Diku wasn't even released until 1990, when MUDs were already 12 years old.

--matt
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Old 10-04-2002, 06:10 PM   #15
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The only thing I've noticed significantly different between p2p and free games is the complexity of the code. I've tried dozens of free games and have never seen any system nearly as intricately designed as those that charge for playtime.

This doesn't necessarily make for a "better" game. But it does set the pay to plays aside as being uniquely different from free games.

Other than the fact that you have to pay for the p2p's, I'd say the code - game mechanics, combat mechanics, even crafting mechanics - are the only significant differences.

But if your idea of a quality game is hard-core roleplay, you can get that for free without all the fancy doodads and 100 verbs.
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Old 10-04-2002, 07:17 PM   #16
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It's also worth noting that DikuII is a commercial codebase.
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Old 10-04-2002, 09:19 PM   #17
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