To delve a bit deeper, I'd say that PvP is dependant equally on three factors.

1. Credits
2. System
3. Knowledge - Of PK in general and of your system

To a lesser extent, reflexes, or hand-eye coordination. The 'twitch' factor.

The best PKers, and I mean the ones who are almost never beaten 1 on 1 and are legends in their respective games, possess all three. They have a full set of artifacts to enhance their offensive and defensive capabilities, they have an extremely elaborate system that allows them to swiftly defend against and counter any single skill or combination of skills in the game as best as possible, and they have a flawless knowledge of how that system works; how it will react in any given situation, what every single alias and hotkey does, and when to use them. Reflexes are also important, because in the heat of combat you'll be slamming in commands at a very high rate. A good IRE fight is the spammiest thing you'll ever see, and it can be hard to analyze all the things popping up.

You can buy a million credits and still die. You can buy a perfected system and still die. If you master one or two of these three elements you'll be a contender. Although someone with few artifacts will die 1 vs 1 against someone with a lot of them, assuming they are of a roughly equal skill level, they will still put up quite a fight. In Lusternia, at least, almost all important PvP occurs in fairly large group battles, and even without credits you'll still be able to kill the weaker enemies, soften their most powerful fighters, and support your allies with healing and buff magic.

Well, the other posters seem to disagree with you, so I'll pin it up to "opinion". Obviously the perks would have to be good enough to buy, or it wouldn't be a viable business model.

Your definition is flawed though. With that definition, every mud could advertise itself as 'free' - you don't have to pay the monthly fee for Gemstone IV if your gf agrees to foot the bill, for example. The same is true of other computer games - if a friend buys you a copy of Halo 2 as a birthday present, then you've not paid anything for it...but that doesn't mean those games are 'free'! Someone still has to pay the monthly fee for Gemstone, someone still has to buy Halo 2 - and someone still has to pay for those credits.

It's one thing to argue that you can play the game for free, but quite another to claim that all aspects of it are free. The credits enter gameplay through the expenditure of money, therefore they are not a free resource, and therefore aspects of gameplay which require them are not 'free'.

Heh, sorry bud. I'm done. I've got other stuff to do, and you're not bothering to see my points. I had hoped to change some misconceptions you seem to have, but I'm tired of trying.

As an aside, I challenge you to find something, MUD or anything else, where nobody has ever paid anything along the line to get it (air and sometimes water were my trivial examples that fit, but are obviously not valid to prove your point).

Carrion Fields is not 'free to run', because someone has to pay for the server and bandwidth. They can get someone else to foot the bill or get the players to send donations to the hosting provider - but even if the owners themselves end up paying nothing, the mud hosting service is still not 'free'.

However it is completely 'free to play'. As a customer, there are no aspects of the game which are unlocked with real-life money.

Wow, I suddenly see the legendary the_logos "cronies"... In short, I agree with everything KaVir posted. There's technically no free way to unlock everything in the game. The credits players are selling did not fall out of the sky, although I'd love it if they did, they do not. So, how DO you define your game as a free to play Mud (free to play not free to host/create) when it is not possible to unlock everything without someone paying IRE?

Heres yet another example, of how buying credits give you a large advantage over those who haven't bought them... I have a friend, who has been granted 75 credits for being there when the game was in open beta testing... I am now an equal level to him, a little higher actually. Yet he is still 200% of my might. He has transcended a skill, (meaning he has mastered it) and is working on a second one... I however, have not transed a skill yet, and I have put all lessons into pretty much one skill. If you dont know the difference between a player who has transed a skill and one who has not, its a big difference in ability to gain exp. Soon I'll probably have put more hours into the game too.

My point in these are to stress how much pay for perks does in reality surpass skill. You can exaggerate it and say that someone who doesnt know how to play the game and has bought perks is not better than someone who has played the game for years, but thats just folly to even compare.