I couldn't help but notice the argument on the boards, and I just wanted to say a few things that came to me offhand after reading through it (uh, most of it; I'm only human).

The debate over how Iron Reams' muds were classified (free, or pay-to-play, or pay-for-perks, whatever it is) in the database was the bit that jumped out to me.

I think they ought to at least denote the fact that money changes hands in certain muds, even if it's not a requirement. I can see that you wouldn't want to freak out potential players by having the word 'pay' smack them in the face when they're looking your spot over, but it'd still be polite to let them know what's going on, for players who would opt for another mud because of it.

Paying for perks does affect the gameplay environment, it can't be contested. Some folks seem to be a bit more graceful about it, but it's still a factor all the same. And it's a sour ache to realize you've been working at a mud for a few days now and there was some feature or downside that means you've spent all that time for nothing. Some of us (me) are a bit slow on the uptake and can speak from personal experience.

I'm not sure how you'd go about it. It'd probably be a pickle to indicate which muds do what without making a scarlet letter-type deal in the player's eyes. Maybe you could use a nice phrase like 'business-oriented' or 'commercial', something like that. But I'd appreciate it, just to make the shopping a bit easier, keep me from getting my hopes up.

All I'll say in this thread is this:
1. Money can affect gameplay in any MUD. There are few to no MUDs in which it can be said that money cannot affect gameplay. That the money is being paid to an admin or another player is pretty irrelevant. Gameplay is affected either way, and that seemed to be the core of your concern.

2. There are a billion features or lack of features that might be interesting to players. The ability to pay to compensate for a insufficient free time is one of them. So is having or not having Geomancers. I totally understand that you personally might prefer to see one of those as a searchable field vs. another one, but that's just a personal opinion, with all due respect. I've seen a lot of claims by those who like to attack us that lots of players would like to see a listing that designates games where payments might allow one to skip tedium, but they're also never able to demonstrate that it's anyone but a handful of people who do care.

In any case, thanks for your post and your reasonable attitude.

--matt

Sorry to disappoint you, Hephos, but the labelling Commercial/Non-Commercial has already been suggested (and supported) by a pretty large number of members.

It was however rejected by one member, for reasons that are still not clear to the rest of us.

In fact this is what the last few mega threads are all about.

I think there is a large difference between donating money to keep the mud up to the benefit of all and being able to get stats etc to buff your char up with cash. I would play a mud where paying could do things for you, like it could get you a house or a larger locker to store items, or other nice things that wouldnt really make you strong or weak. Even a mud that had a monthly fee just to keep everyone on the same grounds and keep the game running.

I get tired of logging onto muds and the instant my char is done it asks me to read help "donate" or "contribute", where I am depressed to find that someone with a larger wallet than me has the potential to blow my char away with that fat wallet.

I very much wish the muds where seperated by some of these factors, perhaps there would be a filter like there is now for rank that would let you see (ranked) only certian types of muds such as pay to play, pay for perks, completely free (no perks or pay to play).

Even if i was a millionare I wouldnt play a game where I could pay to get further along. It is even more confusing to me when I find these features in an rp game. Oocly you can buff your char with money which they ICly then have, just dosent make sense.

So yeah, I really wish they where seperated, save me alot of time. I mean damn if you are cool with it you are cool with it, why should those of us that dont like it have to filter through?

The glaring contradiction is that the threads regarding how TMS should label games are the largest in the history of the TMS forums. (Except a couple "game"-type threads where each post is often one line, the longest and second-longest threads are on this topic.) While there's a few recurring faces like me, as there are in any thread, there's an awful lot of other participants. Variants on the topics have dominated discussion for months.

On the contrary, no one ever posts about your favored straw man, Geomancers. The difference between "business model" and "geomancers?" in a search engine is obvious enough.

Please take your "geomancer defense", take it out back, and put it down. Old Yeller is sick, and it's the merciful thing to do.

If you mean me, then I'm baffled. This isn't my site and I don't make the decisions.

If you mean Synozeer, then sure, it's his site and he's the only member of it that has to reject a suggestion.

--matt

The_logos @2 Mar. 20 2006,13:38
Why on earh would you think that I meant you?
Obviously you would be in favour of such a sensible suggestion.

Well, I just thought the distinction would be helpful. A lot of people I've met, for example, prefer to play games with a certain codebase, and others aren't sure what you're talking about. (I'm somewhere in the middle.) So people may have some foibles over it.

And after thinking about it a little further, a notation of the fact that you're business-oriented (or whatever) isn't necessarily a bad thing, really. It just means that the owners of a particular mud have some actual incentive to keep their mud up to date and moving. No, that sort of environment and what it entails isn't for everybody (I don't care for it much, myself), but I've seen enough muds that opened and plopped over the space of a few months to appreciate stability.

I completely agree with a "commercial" and "non-commercial" distinction provided that there's a uniform and objective standard applied. The trouble is that defining commercial vs. non-commercial gets difficult at the threshold between the two.

Iron Realms - Commerical (obviously)
<some MUD that doesn't take money at all from players, doesn't sell t-shirts, etc> - Non-commercial

But how do you define MUDs that take payments from players or that sell t-shirts and such? Are they commercial or non-commercial? If they claim the payments only go to server stuff, do we require verified accounting statements to prove that not a penny of profit is made?

I mean, to the IRS, if you're an individual and you're taking payments from players, you probably (I am not an accountant and more to the point I'm not your accountant) have just made a profit off your mud (making you perhaps commercial) because you may not be able to deduct something like a server expense since you're not running a business.

It's a lot more complicated than just saying "commercial" and "non-commercial" in other words. In some cases (like Iron Realms) it's obvious. In others, it's a lot less obvious. When it's less obvious, which category do you put them in? Who decides ultimately, and how can you decide without seeing the flow of money through the organization or person?

--matt

Certain aspects certainly are, but then, I've never played a MUD that didn't have tedious aspects to it, right up to and including WoW.

(That's kind of off-topic for this thread though.)
--matt

Well, there's no point in beating this thing to death, but I suppose an administrator could go as far as to put the commercial end of the deal into a few different categories, depending on what sort of goods the mud offers and whether it directly affects the game's environment. Or just ask the person submitting the mud's information if any sort of payment for that sort of thing goes down, and leave the coffee mug and t-shirt type business up to the mud to advertise, since it's not really relevant to the gameplay itself.

But I didn't think all this jazz wasn't enough for anybody to raise their hackles over.

Well, in our case, Carrion Fields (the company) isn't an individual, and we are legally required to report what we do with its money. If audited, the government would see exactly what we say: All money donated pays for equipment and/or upkeep (bandwidth, whatever fees are involved, etc.... I don't handle this end of the game much). Some of that money comes from players, and some comes from the staff, but not a cent goes to salary/etc.

I could see an issue with your more "mom-n-pop" games which haven't formed a business, however, where there's no legal paper trail. However, TMS isn't an accounting firm, and some common-sense guidelines (discussed elsewhere at length) should suffice for the purpose of guiding players to the type of game they prefer.

You know, it wouldn't actually matter if some went to salary. A salary expense is no different from a bandwidth or server expense, providing you're paying the proper taxes. (As a small diversion, this is why I always think it's dodgy to accuse Medievia of turning a profit....we have no idea what their salary expenses are, and they could well be no greater than their revenues.)

--matt

Well, with all due respect, I think it's probably more appropriate to use the word 'commercial' as the rest of the world does rather than to invent new meanings.

Antira wrote:
Two problems with this:
1. Money can affect gameplay in virtually any MUD, whether the admins accept money or not. If you don't believe me, look at the ads right here on TMS for gold-farmer companies. World of Warcraft certainly doesn't sell gold, but purchased gold has a HUGE effect on the world. Now, obviously WoW is commercial regardless because of their subscription, but imagine if they ditched the monthly fee (like Shadowbane has for instance). Money would still have a massive effect on gameplay and there's nothing Blizzard can really do about it.

What you seem to be wanting to say is that commercial is based on the attitude of the admin: Does the admin welcome or oppose money affecting gameplay? But this is pretty irrelevant. Blizzard adamantly opposes gold sales, and yet, again, it has a huge effect on the game. Just listen to the way people complain about gold farmers on the forums for instance.

2. If affecting gameplay is what makes something commercial (I can't say I've ever heard that definition of commercial used anywhere), then are you telling me that is non-commercial? Neopets is most definitely commercial (which is why Viacom bought them for $160 million) and they don't charge their players for anything.

--matt

O_o Matt, one thing... Neopets actually does offer Neopets premium, and have for quite some time... And guess what, you have to PAY for it, so yes, for aditional perks, neopets does take money from some of its players.

Anyway... the comercial or non-comerical in my opinion is That whether the admins running the mud will take money in exchange for things such as more lesson, or skills, etc. rather then giving it to some other player in exchange for ingame currency

It doesn't take long once you head to Iron Realms or some other pay-for-perks site to find out they are indeed pay for perks. I never saw them as somehow hiding those facts.

I notice it gets brought up that a lot of people being interested in something means that the admins of the site, game, etc ought to get crackin' and do the thing being demanded. While I on the one side don't quite understand why admins don't do that, especially admins with a profit motive to grow their user base, at the same time I know that there are a lot of reasons that play into an admins decision to implement or not to implement certain features, chief among them often being, "how much more time am I going to have to spend enforcing this?"

This mud site seems to more or less run itself in its current model. I don't know how much money it brings in from adds, but it seems likely that it doesn't pull any massive profits. I could easily be wrong about that.

I dunno. Just... ideas floating around in my head for folks to consider.

I think the idea of a "commercial" vs a "non-commercial" tag on a mud's listing is a good idea. I'm not certain those are the proper terms to be using though. IMO any mud that accepts money from its player base for subscription or a pay-for-perks system should have this tag on them. The sale of coffee mugs, tee shirts, and what ever other items they may wish really doesn't matter to me. Its what my money, or someone elses money can do for them in game. Many of the MU* listing websites (TMS, TMC, MM, etc) have a flag on the MU* listing page that reads something like "pay-to-play" or the like. Would it be so hard to add in a "pay-for-perks" option right below it instead of flagging it or adding an extra icon or something? I think a lot of MU* owners would mark that rather then try to hide it. If they don't we can always flame them right?

Because to shut them down you have to attack your own customers. It is a segment of the players that drive the demand for buying gold/items in games. Blizzard, for instance, is well-known for their public dislike of RMT (real-money trades) in WoW. They could crack down a LOT harder than they are now, but what's the upside for them? They aren't really being hurt by RMT, and given that they have 6 million users, the players who are vocally against it apparently aren't hurting their business (most people I have talked to who are vocally against it continue to play WoW regardless). It costs money and lost subscription revenue to shut down RMT, without much upside for Blizzard. Thus, they occasionally make a big PR thing out of banning a few thousand accounts for gold farming, which are all, no doubt, re-opened under a new credit card the next week.

--matt

Sounds like a little hessitancy based on fear to me. I wonder how "niche" the market really is for games where real effort is made to shut down cheats? Sites like that one could be shut down just on the merits of that service you were referencing earlier in the Diku thread, Logos.

Straight up, one of the several reasons I have not been terribly tempted to play those games, the whole set of graphic mmorpg's, is that almost from the get go they developed a reputation for being impotent against cheats, and frankly I have no desire to compete against people who are cheating.

The games can be played fine just for the enjoyment of the graphics and game play I am sure, but there needs to be some way to play the games for people who really are interested in head to head competition before a certain part of the game market is going to be interested. Maybe I represent a fairly tiny minority on that concern though. Like you say, even the people who complain still play. But, what if they had a choice? Some competitor who took it more seriously?

I really think in the long run it would be a good move for someone to put out an mmorpg that does indeed actively try to shut those down that cheat the game for real cash profit.

1) Every game can be affected by money changing hands. I bet that most decently successful games (commercial or not) have had quite a bit of character's bought and sold, items bought and sold, etc. which was done completely between individuals.

2) Even selling merchandise like coffee mugs and t-shirts can affect gameplay. You don't think people who buy a lot of merchandise to help support a mud expect a little appreciation (aka: favorable treatment) when a difficult situation arises?

3) What exactly is the point of raising this exact same issue every few weeks? Are you guys just bored?

They aren't doing anything illegal. There is no way to "easily" get the sites shut down, for that reason. Also, those logos are most likely considered fair use.

Considering the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on third party RMT just in the US, odds are the % of players of those games buying (or selling) gold, items, and characters is a lot more significant than an outsider would think.

Hmm... Trademark? I don't know the difference. Surely putting trademarked names on there.. but no...

I don't know. What a bummer. I do know that the motive behind the constant nattering on of in game perks for money is it makes it no longer a game in any real sense. Imagine monopoly where you could buy monopoly money with real money... who would play?

It just makes the competition aspect something between tainted and fully null.

There's bound to be some way to control it via rules and whatnot. Like your game, Thresh, you have rules about cheating the quests... how has that worked out? How do you enforce them?

The t-shirt coffee-mug means you're commericial argument always amuses and annoys me. Selling perks and selling tshirts are not the same thing. Selling perks makes you commercial, selling tshirts usually means that you buy a bunch of tshirts and put your logo on them and hope you sell enough to defray the costs of the shirts and maybe even server fees. And if you sell a ton of t-shirts that wouldn't make you a commercial mud, though it might make you a clothing shop.

How do you figure? There are tons of internet sites that make tons of money PURELY through the sale of merchandise related to their "real product."

Penny Arcade, PvP, Homestarrunner, and tons more I am not even aware of.

Selling merchandise related to your "real product" can be just as lucrative of a method as charging directly for your content.

Furthermore, it creates the same feeling among many of the buyers - they are a paying customer and expect to be treated like one.

Question answered on the original post.

Not that you are not a commercial enterprise, but if you sell clothes and they just happen to be a based on some mud's theme, you are still selling clothes, not the mud, assuming the mud is free.

I mean, no one argues Homestar is not a commercial web site, but the cartoons themselves are free, so you'd not call them "free to view". The cartoons are free, period. The merchandise is for profit. The cartoons function as advertising more or less.

There is even fair use when it comes to trademarks. The key is whether or not a reasonable person would be confused into thinking the user in question is the actual holder of the trademark. That is certainly not the case on gold seller/buyer sites.

Well the problem there is that most of the gold/item/character buying is done to eliminate the idiotic and excessively painful "grind" that exists in the big, graphical MMOs. For example, it should come as no surprise that people don't think it is fun or exciting to grind out 1,000 gold in WoW just so they can have a faster mount (which in turn gives no real advantage other than reducing the tedium of inane travel times).

Sure, there is some degree of competitive advantage from buying gold, items, etc. but most of that stuff can also be obtained in game. Does it make any more sense for the "catassers" (a term I am borrowing from a professor named Edward Castranova who studies virtual worlds) who play 10+ hours a day to be the ones with all the advantages?


It works somewhat well in Threshold, but that is because it is a smaller community with an enormous amount of community enforcement. Despite this, there is still a significant amount of cheating on quests, and this is in a game where quests have NO BENEFIT. Yes, people cheat on them even though they have no rewards of any kind other than the sense of accomplishment from solving them. Yes, the contradiction of that is not lost on me. I always boggle at why anyone would cheat on a Threshold quest when they have zero reward.

Not really. Much of the merchandise has cartoons on it as well.

You are trying to make a distinction that is tenuous at best.

The point is, selling merchandise is no less a commercialization of your MUD, comic, internet site, etc. than charging for the content directly. They are just different business models that different sites use for a variety of financial, business, marketing, or personal reasons.

Many sites who use a merchanise revenue model take in a TON more money than sites that charge directly for content. It would be unwise and inaccurate to think the merchandise-based models are any less commercial or any less connected financially to the content they create to bring people to the site.

Put it this way:

1) The IRS doesn't view them differently.

2) Many (if not most or all) customers do not view it differently (they still feel they are a paying customer of the site, MUD, game, etc.).

3) Many owner/operators do not view it differently (they still operate as a business and they still know that their merchandise gets sold by providing content that brings people to the site and makes them want the merchandise).

If the IRS, customers, and business owers all treat these models the same, is it really reasonable to claim they are significantly different?

LOL!

Hrm, good point.

I forget where but I was talking with Kavir or someone about that. I think it was in "advanced combat systems".

Combining the strategic feel of gaining power over time with the tactical feel of PvP has some challenges, the only cure for which I see is something like a base gain just for logging in and playing for x minutes as week, plus some sort of bonus for whatever you feel is worth giving the bonus for. For rp muds, x number of words typed in the presence of other active pc's might work. Typical hack and slashers might give bonuses for killing x points worth of mobs. There definitely needs to be something to keep catassers from dominating as they pretty much have for ages on muds, or video games in general.

I guess if I roll back my prejudices, I have to say though that in any competative game, such as golf for example, the prize often goes to the one who puts countless hours in, so there's some precedent to catassing I suppose.

Makes me ponder the development of the video game competitions that are beginning to be viable sourves of income for some of the best players. Those tend to be tactical sim games and the like with no leveling requirements. Unreal Tournament I think I saw on G4 for example.

They are definitely commercial sites either way.

I just see a very real difference between paying for competative advantage in a game and paying for a mug with Homestar on it, for example, from the customer's point of view.

The official design for WoW for example is a monthly subscription.

I think they were on to this feeling on the part of players, and perhaps just underestimated the willingness of some to sell what they can make in the game and the willingness of many to pay for those perks. It still feels like cheating to me though.

"The strategy: start a virtual world in a
game of truly massive scale, so that millions can use it at any time. Make the game free.
Allow people to use their credit cards to make transactions. Then wait for the society and
markets to develop, and invite Earth retailers to open 3D stores in the virtual space. At
that point, your Lara Croft lookalike avatar will be able to follow up her tough day of
adventuring with a run into the nearby virtual JC Penney -- to buy her owner a new suit,
for real money. The commercial potential of the new virtual worlds is impressive, and
makes them well worth a first look. "



More similar to the Homestar business model. Basically, the virtual world turns into advertising/marketing for the actual product.

I hope that never happens, otherwise half the world would waste away in an imaginary world. Not that it doesn't happen now, but an entirely self-sufficient virtual world is a little ridiculous.

Shane - one thing that has been discussed at length in the larger threads on this subject is the fact that Matt(the_logos) has insinuated that if Syno created two seperate lists(distinguishing IRE games from "100% Free MUDs"), that Matt would stop sending IRE traffic to the site and cease paying for advertising. Syno makes money off of this site, and between IRE's high traffic and aggressive advertising campaign, he seems to be willing to bend to such weight-throwing.

This subject comes up again and again, from new posters and old posters, and no argument yet has been brought up as to why adding the ability to add this search addition to the website should not be done.

Yes, it would require Syno being very specific with the site's definition and seperation of the two lists. However, that is not more than a few minutes of work and careful wording. I don't think that's too much to ask, and apparently, so do a whole lot of the active forum users here.

Hmm.

Well, that's a little hardball-esque I suppose, but on the other hand if Matt feels the distinction would make advertising here worthless, certainly he has the right to stop using the site if he wants.

I have to say though that without going to the extreme of making two entirely separate lists, one could have a tag that goes alongside the logos of the various muds to tell if they were commercial or not. That way the pay-for-perks or free-to-play crowd, however they choose to define themselves, could still get the exposure they want and the shoppers could have the distinctions quite clearly signalled at a glance on the rankings. If the distinction bothers Matt and others when it is not applied to muds who sell off-game perks like shirts or whatnot, three designations, or even four, would work. I am thinking here pay-to-play (recurring time based fees), pay for perks (pay for in game benefits), marketing-based-charge (for things you can buy like coffee mugs and whatnot), and free.

Marketing-based-charge is an awkward tagline, but you know some other name would work, and you could have simple little icons for each to show on the lists, and maybe even the potential for multiple tags. Maybe a mud is both pay-for-perks and marketing-based, for example, so they would have a little dollar sign with swords crossed in the background (pay for in game benefits) and then one with a little gift wrapped present (pay for stuff from a website associated, marketing etc). Pay per time period could be a flat out dollar sign and free could be a dollar sign with the red circle and hashmark thingy on it (no pay).

I really, honestly do believe though that the simple fact that the commercial muds advertise as "free-to-play" instead of just "free" like most muds do that are proud of their heritage as entirely non-commercial is enough for most people to make the distinction, though I do feel bad for the fellow who started this thread, as apparently he did not.

I picked up on it rather quickly when I visited their sites.

I'm not sure I see the functional difference between this and being a couch potato, and at least it is interactive.

Real Life™ version 1.0 will always have certain advantages, I think, to anything the comptuer has to offer entertainment and socialization-wize though.

Those alternatives, as well as many others, have been discussed in length. Tags, lists, search options, MUD profile additions - nada. It is simply an idea called for in various forms by many, that will not succeed until something changes Syno's mind about buttering up his best customer.

I disagree Threshold that being a t-shirt customer gives most rational human beings the idea that when they buy a tshirt that they're entitled to anything more than a tshirt. I don't even expect a thank you. Just a tshirt.

Then clearly you have only been a player, and not an admin.

I guarantee you that it is indeed quite common for people's expectations and demands to increase dramatically the moment they send a single penny to you for any reason - whether its merchandise, a donation, or a payment. And honestly, it isn't even an unreasonable expectation. It is quite logical.

As an admin, I still haven't noticed that from our players. I think I've had one player in total try to play that card on me, and it was because he was being banned from our website and thought it mattered. Other than that, it doesn't get mentioned, and since I'm the one handling the receipts you'd think they'd go to me.

I also disagree that it's a logical expectation that buying a T-shirt or whatever entitles you to special treatment in other arenas unrelated to the purchase. I mean, I don't demand that Banana Republic employees go fetch me a soda.

That might change if we had a hefty fee like Threshold does, however, but the small change we deal in doesn't seem to carry those problems.

I have been an admin, for a mud that did sell shirts, though through a link to cafe press. I have no idea who did or did not buy the products or if anyone did.

Threshold, May 07 2006,00:20
I think this is one of the examples of the different cultures between a free mud and a commercial one that gives out perks for money.

A player in a free mud would normally assume that by buying a T-shirt from the website, he'd be doing exactly that; buying a T-shirt, no more, no less.
Why? Because nobody ever got any in game advantages for buying T-shirts in a free mud. It just never happens, so it's not expected.

On the other hand a player in a commercial mud would assume that when buying a perk, he'd not only be buying the actual perk, he'd also be buying better treatment from the Admin, in case he got into a conflict with another player, who was not a paying customer.
Why? Because in commercial muds that use the pay-for-perks system, this is how things work. The players that never pay any money for perks may be allowed to play the game 'for free', but they will also be regarded as second rate citizens.

And in case you think I make this up to be mean, here is a quote directly from 'the horse's mouth';

I give you Matthew Mihaly, 17th Feb 2000 on Mud-dev:
See what I mean?

By the way, as for the specific services he mentions, I've seen several free muds where players can buy exactly those things, but of course from in-game currency, not real money.

In other words, the VRML crash of the 90s. Making 3d virtual shopping malls is a terrible idea. There's a reason that Amazon, Ebay, etc use a web interface rather than a 3d interface. It's far, far more efficient to be able to click around than have to actually waste time traveling between 'links' (whether that link is a store or a product in a store, etc).

Randy Farmer (one of the pioneers in graphical virtual worlds back in the late 80s at Lucasarts) has something about that from the Roadmap to the Metaverse conference () this weekend:

He reprints something he wrote way back in 1986 as the precursors to VRML and whatnot were starting to be tossed around:
--matt

I have to agree with everyone else when I say I disagree that a t-shirt sale would elicit such a response. If I found out (as in, had proof and not just pure rumor) Armageddon's Imms were favouring one player over another because that player had bought merchandise, I would be understandably angry and expect the Higher staff members to do something about it.

If you honestly think favouritism is an acceptable and logical consequence of buying t-shirts, I'm just damn glad I don't play on your mud.

Having the distinction between the two has been and always be a good idea. The majority of us have asked for it. Although I'm sure one person will deny this.

But as Don has pointed out many times, it will never happen unless logos signs off on it. Rather sad how it appears that one person controls a website that means so much the community...

Not in Medievia. In fact many players we have purged due to discipline reasons try to bring up the fact that they donated and think they should be treated differently. We treat and discipline everyone the same, regardless of how much money they have sent us.

I'm really tired of hearing this argument. Synozeer makes the decisions around here, not Matt. I know that Synozeer has other sites to run and that revenue from TMS is not the deciding factor on whether he can eat dinner tonight or not. If he wanted to make more money off his advertisers here, he could for sure, but he doesn't. To insinuate, over and over, that if Matt pulled his support here that the site would fold or shut down or whatever is ridiculous. In addition, I highly doubt Matt would pull IRE from here. He's told us that this site has brought his games thousands of players. Why would he choose to get rid of that?