Pay to Play MUSHing?

[Apos]

@Ide @GamerNGeek I think you guys might be overlooking the challenges inherent in monetizing a MUSH vs a MUD, the latter I think is very easy and straight forward, while the former is extremely difficult. There's a marked difference in the service provided and game between the two.

Okay, so if you try to monetize a MUSH, you have two options, you can go for a Subscription model, and/or you can go for a micro-transaction model which has just been shown to be vastly superior for massively multiplayer games due to the far higher upper end players are willing to spend. That's why virtually every MMO has gone f2p with micro-transactions. But what exactly do they charge for?

Well, for subscriptions, that's very simple, they charge for access to their game, with the understanding there will be a level of staff support to something that's otherwise presented as is. A MUSH could definitely follow a sub like that, if they presented themselves as a superior product, sure. But when you get to micro-transactions, which in my opinion is way more important than subscription models, that's where it falls apart.

Microtransactions in MUDs, MMOs, MOBAs all charge for largely the same thing. Some kind of modification for the service that is similar to what you could get if you invest more time in it, or a stylistic difference from similarly available things. IE unique appearance skins, items, and the like. These are all fully automated things. Once the designers invest the time into creating them, it's a flip of a switch. There is no resources whatsoever taken from the game, and even pay to win style games typically have a truly minimal effect on the world.

The same wouldn't be even remotely true for a MUSH.

Extremely little in MUSHes are truly automated. VERY little. Look at WoD mushes. I mean no disrespect when I say that, but they are tabletop simulators with extremely little coded systems, because they are usually way more about narrative and the interaction between people. Most have extremely little to separate their sandbox from a chatroom except for the format. So the single resource you can really give people are the time of GMs, and if you are monetizing that, you are talking about putting a price on human labor, and that gets VERY VERY expensive very fast. How much do any hotlines cost to pay them? -That's- what you'd be trying to do in microtransactions, and you'd be talking about a minimum of ten bucks an hour for a premium service. It's an entire order of magnitude difference from micro-transactions in MUDs

tl;dr, a MUSH needs to become more like a MUD to be financially viable.

[Ide]

@Apos, you're telling me people wouldn't pay to get an extra dot on their sheet faster than the other guy?

[ThugHeaven]

@Ide said:

@Apos, you're telling me people wouldn't pay to get an extra dot on their sheet faster than the other guy?

I'm not answering for Apos. I think people would pay for an extra dot, the problem is most people won't. It will create a disparity that the game itself just can't overcome. The people that won't pay will simply play somewhere else. That will leave the small group that did pay, who will inevitably demand more since they are paying. I don't think the mu*ing community is big enough to support the kind business model a pay to play game needs.

[Apos]

@Ide said:

@Apos, you're telling me people wouldn't pay to get an extra dot on their sheet faster than the other guy?

If you create micro-transactions for character mods, you still have a huge problem with them actually doing something with it. If it was a total sandbox with no GMs at all, and only PRP plots, it would work great, but what happens when the dude that dropped 500 dollars to have a thousand XP WoD character wants to have GM attention? Then it still comes back to trying to provide a service that requires GM man hours rather than automation, and that's a fundamental core game difference that makes it way harder.

On a very small scale, maybe, but as it increases massive numbers I think it either needs heavy automation (a MUD) or to change the game behavior that everyone relates with a MUSH.

@ThugHeaven said:

I'm not answering for Apos. I think people would pay for an extra dot, the problem is most people won't. It will create a disparity that the game itself just can't overcome. The people that won't pay will simply play somewhere else. That will leave the small group that did pay, who will inevitably demand more since they are paying. I don't think the mu*ing community is big enough to support the kind business model a pay to play game needs.

Micro transactions are actually super interesting. I forget the exact numbers, but it's something like only 2% of customers use them heavily, but they use them to a point where it just blows subscription models out of the water. So for financial viability you need to have either a large percentage of people that would go with a sub, or a really tiny percentage that have almost no upper boundary in what they spend. In that 2% of MMO players, there's a shocking amount of people that don't think much about plunking down thousands of dollars even if the other 98% wouldn't give a dime. It's funny that the industry never expected that, which is why they all started as subscription then they went to micro transactions once they realized, 'holy shit there's a few loons out there that are loaded!'.

But in a MUD, what a character can do is fundamentally limited by the code of the game. They can get items, they can kill all the monsters in the game, but they can't tactically nuke the game and make it end in an apocalypse. A MUSH, by its nature, is freeform. Sure they might pay through the nose to have characters, but they are still dealing with a GM to use that character who then has to make stories to suit them, which has the horrifying implication that basically every time the player wants to do something it's a customer service encounter where you are having an employee tell a customer they can't do something if it would impact other players in a way that would hit your bottom line. And if someone thinks they can manage that, man, hats off to them and I would probably pay money myself just to see it.

[ThugHeaven]

@Apos

That's kind of why I was saying it wouldn't work. What would I be paying for in a mush? With a micro-transaction, I'd be paying for some fairly unique doodad that differentiates me from other players. In a mush, I don't need a doodad because I can describe myself anyway I want.

The strength of a mush and to a much more limited extent an RPI mud, is its only limited by your imagination. The downfall of a mush and even an RPI mud is, if nobody is doing anything be it players or staff, the game becomes boring. A lot of fingerpointing can happen on both ends, but it's a simple truth.

I don't see pay to play or micro transactions fixing that. I don't see micro transactions fixing anything really, only creating more problems. It's not so much a "waaaa, I'm poor" issue. I gasp play Second Life and put money into my account, just to feed my ridiculous shopping habit. But I also have a store and am a creator of content.

My issue is with story and actual rp. It seems this is more and more of an issue lately in the mu* community as the focus is more and more on code and doodads....that I have to imagine anyway, and not on the actual storyline. Then it becomes an issue of who has the best doodads while rp is shitty. Ok, all the good rp'ers are going to leave and the game is going to be left with shitty rp'ers with cool doodads.

But again, I'd wish anybody making a paytoplay mu* luck. But I sure as hell won't be playing, simply because I can do it elsewhere with a better result. I play mu*s to use my imagination.

There's a reason pay to play is also called pay to win though.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

Intellectual property always strikes me as the elephant in the room whenever anyone talks about pay-for-play MUSHing. Whatever Nymeria thinks, very few people are going to give a shit about your online game if you aren't making money off it. But the second you want to profit off something based off an existing property, the author/gaming company/show-runner/etc. is going to be obligated to care.

With an original work it's probably viable, though I'm not sure what a game could offer me that I'd pay for. I enjoy RP games because of the other players and storytellers, and those aren't things you can really guarantee for me with a monthly fee. If anything, sub-standard RP or inactive GMs would become far more aggravating if I was forking over micro-payments.

[TNP]

You could probably get around any problems with a button to the charity donation page and having players make the donation in the name of X Mush with the email address to confirm it. That way there's no money changing hands except directly to the charity.

[mietze]

I also wonder if volunteer non staff support (player STs) would dry up on a p2p place. It might be an interesting experiment. I could see it going either way, depending on structure.

[Kosh]

@Packrat This is true. He hasn't done this in some time though.

If I recall correctly (and I have been on and off his various games since Otherspace first started).. It started on Chiarosuro (original fantasy themed game) where players could pay for added benefits such as in game currency, etc...

He also published several books of Otherspace story arcs as well, I don't know to what success those may or may not have had.

The latest, which I don't think goes anymore since Otherspace is not active at all, was various contribution levels in return for ships, RP events, custom in game things.

Other than Otherspace (and it's various games) I don't know what other MUSHes have done it. That said, regardless, it isn't really a 'for profit' venture given the size of the community and how much you would bring it - it would mostly be 1-10$ chunks.

Personally, sure, I'd contribute monetarily to a game. Bonus if I got something, but at the end of the day I do it because I believe in the community and gaming.

[Apos]

@mietze said:

I also wonder if volunteer non staff support (player STs) would dry up on a p2p place. It might be an interesting experiment. I could see it going either way, depending on structure.

There's a close real world example that happened, and is probably the closest equivalent I can think of for a support GM staff going p2p.

So way more than a decade ago, Everquest the MMO opened which also happened to be inspired by dikumuds. If anyone remembered the original design, it actually had a lot of striking similarities in command formats to dikumud, and wound up being sued for it, but won out. Anyways, they had a completely volunteer 'lore' staff of unpaid GMs who were supposed to make GM events to flesh out the lore for the game, and run server events for the player base of tens of thousands of players.

It was incredibly popular, whenever some of the lore GMs would pop on, the zones would come close to crashing since a couple hundred players would show up to check it out. The company saw how wildly popular this was, and went, 'Aha, we already charge a monthly subscription of 10 dollars a month, let's launch a premium server called Stormhammer and charge 30 bucks a month'. And then told all these volunteers that they loved what they were doing, but they would have to do it on this special premium server instead.

So... the entire volunteer staff all quit. And the premium server didn't really have a whole lot premium about it, but the company just never really told them why. And that was that.

[Sunny]

I was not joking when I said that if someone doesn't see the inherit 'why this is an awful idea' in the concept of a pay to play mush, they have absolutely no business running a mush of any sort, let alone one where money is involved.

It shows a complete lack of understanding the basic problems involved in running a game, and not enough understanding of human behavior to see how adding money to those problems makes them a terror. And again, if you start making money off of someone else's intellectual property without licensing, you're in serious trouble.

I'm pretty sure that this is a lot like....

"Hey, should I light myself on fire?"

[Gingerlily]

I am fairly close with people who run a Pay to Play (actually Pay for Perks, its a much more lucrative model) MUD that they were able to make into their sole means of income and turn into a game development company that eventually created non text games. For profit. They made their business very, very successful, but the 'staff as customer service' model there was really nothing like the discussions of staff as customer service here. When it is legitimate customer service, paying customers, thousands of dollars at stake things get very, very complicated in terms of how and why and in what manner stories can be impacted. I loved my experience there, but I would not put myself in their shoes. Ever. Just running factions in that kind of situation was loaded.

Secondly when I choose the charities I am going to give my money to each year I tend to want to choose them myself. Organizations that are meaningful to me that I have researched. It is possible but not likely that I and a group of 30-50-whatever gamers would have like-minded views on what organizations we feel are the most deserving of our hard earned money...I tend to give to local groups whose benefits are seen in my community, not larger organizations.

[Ghost]

I think Three-Eyed Crow hit the nail on the head.

The moment your p2p Mu* starts making money, and is using either an intellectual property OR dice system that are not open source, you open your game up to all kinds of trouble ranging from actionable cease-and-desist letters to lawsuits. If the IP owners allow a p2p game to exist, it could set a legal precedent that would remove their protections if someone decided to make an MMORPG using their IP. They MUST act or risk losing protection of their IP.

Having said that, I also think about the number of Mu* I've been on and some of the self-obsessed, batshit crazy staff I have met. Sure, I'm sure Mal and Inara from SerenityMush seemed okay at first...and then months later I was getting calls from Mal begging me to login and entertain his RL wife.

I wouldn't trust 60-70% of any musher I've come across with my personal phone number let alone to believe that any money I paid for a mush would be used they way they promised. People are needy and greedy and the Mu* community is loaded with people who are at-home shut ins with warped concepts of the way actual humans communicate with each other. Rational, mature adults are in the minority. So would I roll the dice to pay for a Mu* only to find the owner of the Mu* was using the cash to cover his rent so he could stay home all day and harass women for TS? Fuck no.

[Glitch]

I think @Apos made the best argument in that it is definitely a matter of scale. I'd read the same statistic they had and went to look it up and found the article. Only 2.2% ever paid anything and only 10% of that paid anything substantial. The busiest MUSH is Shangrila, which averaged 461 connections over the last 30 days and half of those are likely alts. Even if every last one of them was a unique connection and playerbase was extrapolated out to 10 times that (unlikely, even after years of play, total approved characters on TR only ever reached about 4-5 times the number of connected characters) you'd have about 101 people that have paid some sort of money. Only 10 of those would be paying any substantial amount more than that.

I doubt any 10 mushers are going to be able to support my salary expectations in an on-going manner. Maybe a MUD could make it work, with enough scale, but it'd still be an outlier and, I think, unlikely.

As to the original question, I'd never professionally tie myself to an endeavor like running a MU with money involved, let alone money that I wasn't going to see. Most people start MUs for fun because the commitment lasts only as long as their fun does. It'd take a lot to give up that particular out.

[Ghost]

Jesus, just think about the threats of small-claims lawyers contacting you for the month you played (though didn't pay for) because staff forgot to freeze your character.

Fuck that.

[Apos]

@Glitch Yeah, it was the costs in labor that made it look unrealistic to me. Sure if someone had an all volunteer staff, why not? But if people are talking about employing full time staff of multiple programmers, that is getting into a low ball estimate of a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in salary costs, and that bar seems super hard for a game of hundreds of people to leap over. Thousands maybe, but not hundreds.

[Shayd]

@mietze : Yes, I worked as the Director of Quality Assurance & Customer Service for Skotos Tech, which ran Castle Marrach. They relocated me from New Jersey to the Bay Area in 2001, and paid me $66K to do this job for them at the time, and they had some relatively impressive employees, coders, a dude who wrote for old Infocom text games like Hitchhiker's Guide, and a dude who was a marketing director for TSR back in the day. The company now owns, I think, RPG.net, and Shannon Appelcline worked for them. They also helped bail out Chaosium at one point when they needed it.

As for the game itself...well, it wasn't a direct comparison to MU*'s for various reasons, cuz it was custom coded and had some strange elements to it. However, checking out skotos.net, it appears to be still around, still has players, has an active facebook group with 146 members, and the like. So I can't really say much about it. Hell, they even have my old articles from that day & age, Mummer's Dance, still archived on the site, so how could I really complain? I don't know whether they pay people to run it anymore, though, or have gone volunteer.

Incidentally...for all of those who either love or hate Custodius/Jaden/whatever-else...he's kinda my doing. I'd befriended him @ Castle Marrach in real life (hell, he was basically my neighbor), and I introduced him to the world of MU*ing. Sorry to those who were traumatized by him; I didn't know at the time. Out of game, he's not a bad guy.

[Coin]

@Shayd said:

Out of game, he's not a bad guy.

He's probably still a bad guy. He just doesn't feel like it's safe to unleash his inner asshole without the protection of internet anonymity and distance.

[Shayd]

I beg to differ, but then again, I've known him for years and years. Though recently I asked him not to play on a game I was enjoying because though I like him, he tends to ruin the experience for me.

[ThatGuyThere]

@Shayd
Wow Custodious is the biggest shitdick I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with online. That really puts your defense of other folks in other threads into perspective.