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I'm talking about costs for the players though. The players (as a whole) have to pay money in order to be competitive. The fact that some of them will pay for others does not, in my opinion, make the game free.
To apply the same logic to your example, we'd be talking about a mud hosting service that advertised its hosting as "100% free" - but then you realised that in order to have sufficient resources to run your mud for more than a couple of players, you'd need to either pay the hosting provider, or get the admin of another mud to pay it for you (perhaps in exchange for doing coding or building work on their mud).
I recall a situation a bit like that in the past, actually. A mud hosting provider gave a "free" hosting connection to a mud run by someone I knew, in return for sending traffic to their site. After the mud had gone through all the trouble of setting everything up (including shipping a computer over to act as their dedicated server) the provider stated that unless they sent at least a million hits per month, they'd have to pay. Such traffic was simply not possible for the mud in question, which left them in a rather awkward situation.
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