[Lasher]

Technically right but I'd like to keep it as simple as possible.

In practice, do you know of any MUDs that outright require a payment to play but then you can't buy anything else?

My thought there is "pay to play" overrides everything else - if you don't mind paying to have to play a MUD period, you probably aren't too concerned with filtering "freemium" MUDs out of your search. Definitely open to being proved wrong here, just trying to keep it simple..

Cool - there's a new business idea for TMS - Offering "Professional Internet Mud Provider" certification. We could even run a shadow company selling cram guides and bootcamps while publicly decrying them.

Sorry, couldn't resist