[crossfire] Metaserver policy, was Re: Crossfire+/Crossfire2 Versioning and Metaserver

[mwedel at sonic.net]

 I basically came up with those rules fairly quickly.

 My thought on #4 - no fee for players, is to prevent confusion.  If a
random person downloaded the client, fired it up, and connect to a server
only to find out he had to pay, he may or may not try additional servers.
 Thus, a player could be lost.

 This can easily be fixed  by including those notes in the metaserver
area.  However, best I recall, only the gtk2 client actually displays all
those notes because for the other clients, they just display a short list
in the text info window, and the notes field is too long.

 Extra fields could be added to denote pay just to be clear.

 The point about the content is perhaps more valid.  One could certainly
assume right now that content is free.  For maps, this is trickier, as it
would be difficult in many places to grab map data just from the client
(you could more or less grab visual details, but would have a harder time
figuring out all the workings underneath it).

 But images are trickier - one could rightfully assume that any image they
see is GPL.  And given the client can cache these images, a person could
then assume that any image they have in that cache is also GPL.  So a
server using non GPL images could be confusing to players.

 That would be more concern to me than some map changes or server changes.
  What the server does/how it runs isn't as big a concern - right now
with just different settings available, the server itself could behave a
bit different, yet still be standard crossfire server, code wise.  Making
some code changes might be a smaller issue than those details.

 If a server is radically different, code wise or map wise, probably good
to know that, just so new players sort of know what the experience is -
this is also relevant because there are various how-to guides, and many
describe the starting maps, etc, and if what they actually start playing
has no resemblance, that could be pretty frustrating.