Re: starmourn, space/ground mud
Ok, let me disclaim this entire post by stating that I work on Starmourn as a coder. I am not being paid to write this post, but I do want to make that affiliation known before people assume I'm marketing or whatever.
While IRE games are traditionally pretty pay-to-win-ish, Starmourn , at present at least, has quite a bit less of that going on.
While there is certainly PVP combat, and your combat does get better when you learn new abilities, which takes lessons, which you can buy, there are quite a few more things to do. You can definitely build up a strong character in a lot of ways without spending a dime, although paying supports the game and allows for new stuff to get added way quicker.
There's pretty regular RP events, as well as things like hacking, commerce, spaceship combat, trade skills etc outside of PVP combat which is all quite doable, and the game does not actually have a paywall, you can play for free just fine, although most players do tend to at least buy a thing or two to support the game's creators if nothing else. Paying mostly gets you credits which you can either convert into lessons or use to buy promo items like cute pets, fancy interactive items and such. To my knowledge you can't actually buy better combat gear or the like, but I might be wrong on that, I never looked into it.
It's true that some things aren't accessible at present, though. Most things are, but ship combat is hard right now. We're working on that, and I will certainly announce it when we have more to say on that topic.
I absolutely agree that pay-to-win games are no fun, but like another post pointed out, I do get why MUDs almost have to do things like this in order to stay afloat. Heck, Alter Aeon has credits you can buy for extra practices and such as well. Building games like this is hard, maintaining them is hard and expanding them is hard. I've paid for MUDs in the past and probably will again for the same reason I pay for audiogames. Even if I think a game's price might be a bit much, if it means the developer can keep making games, I consider it more of a donation than anything else when I get their game. Given that MUDs give me many, many more hours of fun than any audiogame ever has, I don't mind shelling out a couple bucks on hem now and again.
Lol I've played Avalon: the Legend Lives and even been subscribed to it for a while. Want a pay-to-win game with a paywall? Go give that one a try :-)
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