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

[Andrew Fuchs]

On Sat, 2007-04-14 at 07:29 -0700, mwedel at sonic.net wrote:
>  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.

Agreed, if we end up allowing paid subscription servers, definitely add
a column that would contain an icon to indicate pay servers.

>  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).

IIRC, there where a few servers that had their own maps (exclusive to
that server).  Also, giving away a map is equivalent to giving away a
spoiler, which some people wouldn't want to do.

>  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.

IMO, it is easier for most people to just grab the images from svn,
instead of from the client cache.

>  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.

You also have different map sets, etc.  It would be nice to have the
metaserver show this also.  What should the regular map set be referred
to if this is done?