CoffeeMUD player-accounts as we use them in the Galactic Milieu, which currently allows each player-account to have up to ten characters, up to five of which can be online simultaneously.

Never understood CoffeeMUD - recall your LFM site caling the 5 active characters simultaneously "workers" and it being a form of "CPU-mining"... but I won't make this about that. Just making notes for myself.

That is so you can have five 24/7 "worker" characters "CPU mining" cryptocurrency (in effect) and still have five "adventurer" characters you can use when you are at the keyboard.

Ah, should've read further. I have no idea how one "CPU mining" cryptocurrency occurs in CoffeeMUD... I wish I did.

The maximum character "level" is set to the default of level 91, which as it turns out makes for extremely productive "artisan" characters.

Five level 91 artisans using Master Mining (for example) can churn out a very large amount of mined material; or a level 91 jeweller can turn raw mined diamond into much more valuable "beautiful huge rose cut diamonds" at quite a rate; and so on.

I get that the point is that the 50% mining raw material and the other 5 having some sort of profession and craft can create a lot of "value" quickly - much like how we keep Tenebrix alive and out of nowhere 25 TBX generate because we're there for the heartbeat to produce new blocks without anyone else joining us... Dilution is relative to participation. If there were 80 billion people on Earth we would expect BTC to have 210 Million coin max supply kinda deal. The answer is - get more players, or end some of these operations and put the assets on Horizon to sell in that marketplace when people come back for the OG blockchain/metaverse game tokenized items. =P My 2 devcoins. Then again I am still not expert level and understanding you. Sometimes you talking about GM and MUD makes me feel like you're also alluding to cpu mining, pow, minting of coins, etc.

One idea that has been pondered for several years now is using one real-world year subscriptions and setting the yearly price of the subscription to approximately half the value of what five level 91 master artisans can produce in a real world year.

50% tax? You really are Canadian/lived in Canada too long!

Using a subscription model rather than indefinite-duration "ownership" of an account seems a good way to avoid the potential pitfalls of possibly leading people to expect to pass an account down in their family from generation to generation "forever" without further cost beyond some initial price to "buy" an account.

Sure - so long as their "cryptocurrency" or HORIZON tokenized item/deeds/NFT or other blockchain items go with no matter whether they renew their subscription or not. Even the land deed should be allowed to be sold by someone who no longer plays. You can sell a house after you moved across the country these days - why not allow those deeds to lands on in-game planets able to be sold for "cryptocurrency" by the retired player so those who join can come in with whatever they wish to purchase?

There is bound to be some reasonable limit to how many fully-active player-accounts a single CoffeeMUD server can handle; so player-accounts are a limited resource that involves an ongoing cost to run.

We are in 2023 and have blockchain peer to peer serverless possibilities to host a MUD 'server' like operation don't we? If we must continue using MUD it is text-only? Can't be that hard to host even from a home single server computer in one's mom's basement no?

The "civilisations" pay for hosting per real-world month based on the number of "square miles" FreeCiv shows their civilisation as controlling, so by assigning the CoffeeMUD player-accounts to civilisations we intrinsically have a revenue stream accounted monthly with which to provision Coffee-MUD servers.

What is this revenue stream paid in monthly?

So another option could be to come up with some method of calculating how many player-accounts each civilisation "is entitled to" and leave it to the civilisations to decide who to give them out to and why and at what cost or in reward for what activities and so on.

Thus at this point in the deliberations it seems reasonable to "open up the floor" as it were to further discussion...

I'm lost sorry Mark. I will defer to others who have a better idea what kind of thing we're talking about now because its vague to me.

...So do please go ahead and give us your thoughts on the matter. :)