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Ultimately, the people running a pay-for-perks system have every incentive to make it:
1) Appear to newbies to be irrelevant fluff.
2) Appear to experienced, invested players to be essential.
To draw people in, you want them to believe that they can play forever, never pay, and not be a second-class citizen. However, once players have put in hours, built up characters, and begun to calibrate themselves to what is challenging inside a game, you want them to realize that their credit card can make any of those challenges irrelevant.
If it was so simple to avoid payment and compete on a level playing field, why would anyone buy any of their products? The answer is obvious: RL money buys you advantages you wouldn't otherwise have, and that means that any competitive/merit achievements on the MUD (be it the best equipment, most powerful RP positions, or adventures through the coolest sections) will be slanted towards the players with the biggest pocketbooks.
Now, players can feel free to choose that environment, and administrators can offer anything they want, but:
1) Please stop pretending the spent money is irrelevant. If it was, you couldn't pay salaries.
2) Please stop advertising the game as "free". It's like a "free" chess tournament where the bishops cost you $20 each.
("But I can name a guy who won a game without any bishops! And you can choose to play with no bishops for free! You just need to manage your pawn resources a little more wisely!")
I do like the idea of subscription systems of the kind Traithe proposed, however. You beta the product, and it's clear up front that if you don't pay, your experience is going to be limited in a known fashion. If you do pay, you're on a level playing field.
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