[Dr. McKay]

Originally Posted by napalm00 I'd reply that players are not customers and even if they were forcing a customer to watch whatever seconds of ads is unfair at best. Don't run servers in the first place if you can't pay for them, or just man up and work hard to make some kind of awesome donations system that your players will love. Also, server owners can be female too.

It's unfair to expose players to advertisements in exchange for the free service that they're providing?

Tell me something, are you a "customer" of Google? Yet you use it for free and are shown ads? Should Google just run a search engine "out of the kindness of their hearts"? No? Why are server operators any different?

Now, my servers don't use Pinion, and haven't since they started with their forced-wait-times policy. I personally don't like Pinion and I can't imagine why I'd voluntarily wait 45 seconds before entering the game.

But I'm a server administrator, and regardless of the policy the server is implementing, I stand by it absolutely (short of slowhacking). The clients chose to connect to the server, and they will follow the server's rules, as long as those rules are legal and honest. No matter how annoying something the server does may be, I just can't stand behind someone bypassing the server's systems. Today, Pinion is annoying. Tomorrow, SMAC is annoying.