Mu* and history and time

Kestrel

@bear_necessities said:

I was a volunteer on IRE! Ask me anything lol I never had an issue as a volunteer, except for other players. I also knew Matt Mihaly and some of his team. They were nice people (at least to me) and I never heard any complaints from the paid staff. But I’m sure it happened, and I’m sure that some paid staff and volunteers had bad experiences, if only because it was really the wild west era of MUDing and in general some people are terrible to other people online.

I do think the model was predatory, but I believe that about any micro-transaction sort of situation. I spent a considerable amount of money on IRE games and never got anywhere, mostly because I didn’t understand how to make triggers.

I was also IRE staff. The team I was in had more backstabbing and politics than Game of Thrones. I wasn’t too heavily involved, because I was 18 and real life was still new and exciting and full of promise that didn’t depend on the whims of pretend-Gods online. But for instance I watched multiple “volunteers” being cajoled into essentially working a full-time job at that company, unpaid, expected to be on-call all day, all for the promise of a dangled carrot of maybe, just maybe, if you keep up all this hard work, we might consider you for a paid position. And the older I’ve gotten, and the more I’ve looked back, the more I’ve realised how incredibly fucked up and completely disgusting that was.

I mean they pick these volunteers from a crop of the most dedicated/addicted players who have generally spent a lot of money on this game, invested their identity into it, are desperate for approval, and then keep milking that need through the false promise that there’s a chance that if they keep buying in like that, and in fact even harder since they’re not even players/customers anymore, but staff with duties, then they might eventually end up recouping their investment, turning their addiction/hobby into their dream job. Take into account the wealth disparity that some of these hopeful volunteers weren’t American, but earning below the American equivalent of minimum wage in their countries, and they really believed an IRE Producer’s salary could be their golden ticket.

Then there’s the whole ego aspect of being in this parasocial position where other players refer to you as a God, and I know because I was one. It wasn’t just IC, I had a full-on fanclub who would get excited anytime I dropped even a single syllable their way. That kind of power-dynamic weirded me out and made me intensely uncomfortable, but what concerned me even more was to see other Gods so readily leaning into it, in-game and off-game too.

Whole thing was unhealthy for everyone involved IMO, and since I have friends still involved with IRE, I know it’s not completely a thing of the past.

Faraday

@bear_necessities said:

You either paid up front for a set number of hours or were billed after the fact for usage.

I figured that part, I was wondering about the logistics of how they got paid. The infrastructure for shopping online was still in its infancy then.

Pavel

@Faraday Cheque or money order (or cash) sent through the mail, most likely. Along with a unique identifier, like a username or account number.

Faraday

@Pavel Yeah that’s why I was curious. Sending in a check every month to pay an hourly MUD bill seems wild to me

bear_necessities

@Faraday You weren’t paying for the MUD, not really. On AOL, you were paying for the hours you used to dial up. The games themselves were free. I believe the same thing for Gemstone on GEnie, you were paying for GEnie and not for Gemstone itself.

@kestrel you had a different experience than I did. No one ever promised me a paid position with IRE, or dangled it in front of me. I did spend a lot of money on the game but I was pretty young, stupid, and didn’t have any parental oversight. I don’t know how much money I spent, but I didn’t have a job so it couldn’t have been that much, it just felt like a lot of money for someone who didn’t really have any. I was also a God (Cassiopeia), I think on Aetolia but it might’ve been Imperian. Maybe I wasn’t a great one, I surely didn’t have a fanclub.

I’m not saying that IRE MUDs weren’t toxic or the things you are saying didn’t happen though. I dealt with a ton of toxicity as a player and was admittedly pretty toxic myself back then. I have a lot of bad memories, but a lot of good ones too. And all in all, it was 20+ years ago now and I’d like to think I grew from it. I’m not discounting your experience, just telling my own. I think the things you are expressing aren’t exclusive to IRE though.

Muscle Car

Huh, kinda heartening to realize there was at least one exploitative online RP experience I didn’t get mauled by. Saluting you vets of that era.

Faraday

@bear_necessities said:

ou weren’t paying for the MUD, not really. On AOL, you were paying for the hours you used to dial up. The games themselves were free. I believe the same thing for Gemstone on GEnie, you were paying for GEnie and not for Gemstone itself.

That isn’t what the article says. It specifically says that there were commercial MUDs that made money off people connected to them, and that when AOL became a monthly instead of hourly fee their business model collapsed. (implied: because accessing the internet suddenly became easier and cheaper and hourly fees felt excessive) If people were only paying AOL, none of that makes any sense.

There were also pay-for-access BBS systems that people dialed into directly. Pavel is probably right that people just mailed a check or sent cash. Light research suggests that some of the larger studios possibly invested in some early online payment portals.

Pavel

From what I have managed to glean cheque and money order were popular, but some services also accepted AMEX and VISA after a time (Toth, 2011, Section 63). Though Mostellor (1999) seems to suggest that services like CompuServe would tack on the hourly fee as part of the user’s subscription in some way, though I could be misreading.

Adjusted for inflation those prices are… ridiculous. Gemstone III during peak hours would be ~$46USD/hr and British Legends(MUD1) would be ~$33USD/hr. I love you, Faraday, but I’m not paying you over five hundred bucks a month for a casual twenty hours of pretendy funtimes.

References
Mostellor, T. (1999, May 16). Genie and CompuServe offer die-hard adventure fans wide new on-line worlds. Richard A. Bartle. Mud.Co.Uk. https://mud.co.uk/richard/pcmjun90.htm

Toth, V. T. (2011, December 31). News archive 1997-2011. Mud2.Com. https://www.mud2.com/CMS/about/news/13-news-archive-1997-2011

Faraday

@Pavel said:

Adjusted for inflation those prices are… ridiculous. Gemstone III during peak hours would be ~$46USD/hr and British Legends(MUD1) would be ~$33USD/hr. I love you, Faraday, but I’m not paying you over five hundred bucks a month for a casual twenty hours of pretendy funtimes.

Thanks for the sources! And yeah, those prices seem crazy, but keep in mind that with AOL at the time you were also paying $3-4/hour just to check your email and access early internet forums, on top of whatever you were paying your phone company. People just weren’t online as much. I remember having to meter usage carefully until I got basically unlimited access through the university computer labs.

MisterBoring

@Faraday said:

And yeah, those prices seem crazy, but keep in mind that with AOL at the time you were also paying $3-4/hour just to check your email and access early internet forums, on top of whatever you were paying your phone company.

Looking through my archive of old CDROMs, I can also confirm from a few AOL CDs I kept for my collection that AOL had an unlimited plan as well that was $20 a month.