Orion,

First, to make sure there are no misunderstandings - I am not staff on any game. I am not a staff member of a PtP. I have been staff on free games and enjoyed the game and players in the past. I now play both free games and one PtP with investments into the characters and player bases of both types of games. With that information known (and with it, any biases I might have laid out)....

I do not want to see $$$ in front of game listings on the actual ranking page. I would never have gone to the game I have ended up spending most of my time at for nearly a year if it had a $$$ in front of the name. Not because I refuse to pay, but because I would have skipped right by its website and looked for a free game. After all, why pay if you can find what you want for free, right? And chances are, I would have found a free game I enjoyed well enough. But instead, I clicked on the website of a PtP.

The game I play has a very impressive website with amazing background and a detailed manual. I clicked the website button, I found a great site that completely drew me in, despite the fact I knew it was PtP within a few moments of hanging out at the site. I made the decision to pay for that game. But had I seen the dollar sign from the get go, I probably would have kept cruising the list looking for something free and missed ever seeing the excellent site.

Having or not having a dollar sign isn’t just about folks who CAN’T pay or REFUSE to pay. It also will draw away folks who aren’t really partial one way or the other, but out of habit will head to the free stuff first. If $$$ is added, it should be only one of many things that are told on the rankings page, among them: level of rp enforcement, years the game has been around, level of pk, class or classless style game, general theme, codebase, etc. There are a lot of details that draw folks to and from games.

(For those of you who want to notice, all of those things listed, including whether it is PtP, are variable. It would be quite difficult to create one simple set of icons to tell us if a game is any of the above. How many coders who have a heavily modified ROM game would want the generic ROM icon? How about a PK mud that puts everyone into the system, but has all sorts of checks and balances? Would they want the hardcore pk icon or would they want the “limited” pk icon that doesn’t represent what they have?)

Sapphar