Top Mud Sites Forum - View Single Post

Spoke · 01-16-2006, 01:11 AM

So, it would be fair to say that for as long as there is a credit market, these games are indeed "free to play". But, if for some reason everybody at once decided they hated the idea of buying credits and everybody stopped buying credits at once and there was no credit market, well, no problem there either, the game would still be "free to play" (for as long as it remained open).

There is a problem with using words to differenciate games on this site by using meanings to those words that are different from the common usage, or that had added meaning to them. We have all seen 20+ pages discussions on the DIKU license, its poor wording vs what it means in a moral sense, why would we want to adopt as a standard a distinction between commercial and non-commercial given by an endlessly challenged license?

What this creates though, is misinformation to those potential players who are not familiar with this site in particular, they would be forced to research among hundreds of discussion pages what do we actually mean by commercial if they wanted accurate information, and at the end, nobody would probably care to find out if TMS-commercial differs on anything from <myworld>-commercial. Does this seem familiar? oh yeah, it is the same problem we are suposedly having now, with the definition of free.

I know admins of a couple of MUDs that are free to play, but they allow players to donate money for maintenance costs. Both of them, when faced with the end of the fiscal year, declare the donations as income, and pay taxes on them. Not being a lawyer or accountant I would fail to explain you why it has to be so, but what I understood is that it would probably be more expensive to try to present the MUD as a non-lucrative entity. So, at the end, they are, legally, getting money for keeping a service open, they go and spend this money on hardware, connection fees, etc, but, so, are they trully a non-commercial enterprice? what difference does it make if they did or did not give their players a pin saying "! 83 1337 |)0n470r"

01-16-2006, 01:11 AM	#110
Spoke Member Join Date: Oct 2003 Posts: 101	So, it would be fair to say that for as long as there is a credit market, these games are indeed "free to play". But, if for some reason everybody at once decided they hated the idea of buying credits and everybody stopped buying credits at once and there was no credit market, well, no problem there either, the game would still be "free to play" (for as long as it remained open). There is a problem with using words to differenciate games on this site by using meanings to those words that are different from the common usage, or that had added meaning to them. We have all seen 20+ pages discussions on the DIKU license, its poor wording vs what it means in a moral sense, why would we want to adopt as a standard a distinction between commercial and non-commercial given by an endlessly challenged license? What this creates though, is misinformation to those potential players who are not familiar with this site in particular, they would be forced to research among hundreds of discussion pages what do we actually mean by commercial if they wanted accurate information, and at the end, nobody would probably care to find out if TMS-commercial differs on anything from <myworld>-commercial. Does this seem familiar? oh yeah, it is the same problem we are suposedly having now, with the definition of free. I know admins of a couple of MUDs that are free to play, but they allow players to donate money for maintenance costs. Both of them, when faced with the end of the fiscal year, declare the donations as income, and pay taxes on them. Not being a lawyer or accountant I would fail to explain you why it has to be so, but what I understood is that it would probably be more expensive to try to present the MUD as a non-lucrative entity. So, at the end, they are, legally, getting money for keeping a service open, they go and spend this money on hardware, connection fees, etc, but, so, are they trully a non-commercial enterprice? what difference does it make if they did or did not give their players a pin saying "! 83 1337 \|)0n470r"