[MUD-Dev] Buying benefits

[Kevin Littlejohn]

"Corey Crawford" wrote

> Now, Achaea actually allows you to buy items (weapons, armor) and
> I think Matt has the idea right when he limits these items to
> *buy-only* (that's right, isn't it?). To me, this would be more of
> a status thing as long as you could get a similar blade (although
> by another name) from playing and not just with cash.

It struck me after my last email that a potential difference between
muds selling stuff and CCG's selling cards is that in a CCG you're
not buying "the next biggest armour", you're buying cards that'll
open up alternate modes of play.  Traditionally in muds buying
equipment means buying the uber-gear, whereas perhaps we should be
looking at it in terms of buying access to alternate ways to play
that don't necessarily make you _better_, so much as allow you to
experiment more and customise more.

An idea, off the top of my head, would be to allow free play of a
mud, but charge a subscription for joining a guild of some sort -
that would provide status symbols (guild colours, particular
equipment to wear, whatever), and resources to help you pursue a
particular style of play, but nothing you couldn't get out in the
world by yourself - except for the "I'm a member of guild blah".
Don't know whether that's viable or not, but I thought I'd pitch it
out there for others to think about, in case it leads somewhere
useful ;)

The other thing I thought of is that maybe being able to earn what
can be bought is a bad thing - perhaps you can _only_ get certain
things in-game if you pay for them, maybe that'd help drop the
negative impression others have of people "buying their way to the
top", as you say above.

KevinL
--
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Specialising in proxy servers and traffic measuring/billing.
http://www.obsidian.com.au/           darius at obsidian.com.au


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