[Atyreus]

The current system (pay-to-play vs. free-to-play) creates flame fodder because people feel that certain business models should be labeled as something other than what they currently are (just for the record, I've personally have never had a problem with IRE or similarly financed games declaring themselves to be free to play). The two-option system you propose is going to create flame fodder for a very similar reason: the same people who felt that there was something not quite right about, say, an IRE game being grouped in the same free-to-play category as their own we-don't-solicit-but-will-accept-the-occasional-donation-to-upgrade-the-server mud can certainly be relied on to not be happy about being included yet again with the very muds that run business models that are significantly distinct from their own.

Your proposal realigns the field a little bit, but completely fails to acknowledge the distinctions that those advocating a change have been clamoring for.

By that reasoning, however, we should do away with letting mud admins author their own information pages and should just let a select group of auditors do the work instead.

Players are just as capable as those who support the two-option system of looking at muds in the "payment/donations accepted, not rewarded in-game" category and concluding that the possibility exists that donors might be rewarded in some way (whether consciously or not) by the game's admins. Like your proposed system, the four-option method gives them the information you seem to think is so vital - that payment is accepted in some form from players - and allows them to avoid such games if they are the sort to assume that all such payments are probably rewarded no matter what the admin claims.

Yes, I'd probably be annoyed if I logged into a game that claimed that they didn't provide in-game rewards for donations, only to find out that they actually did. I might also be annoyed if they claimed to be full PK and I logged in and found all sorts of PK restrictions in place, or if they claimed to have a bajillion rooms and I logged in and found out there were maybe only a couple thousand, or if they claimed to be running a custom codebase but were running a thinly-disguised LP mudlib instead. I still wouldn't support limiting the information available in any of the relevant search fields just because it might make the veracity of the information volunteered a bit more easily verifiable, particularly not when the amount of information available to me drops significantly.

I'm not sure how the two-option method is supposed to be less ambiguous than the four-option method. Yes, it tells me a mud accepts payment in some form from players (as does the four-option method), but it completely leaves open the next couple of questions that would come naturally to most consumers: (1) Is a payment required? and (2) What, if anything, do I get in exchange for said payment?