I want MudGamers to be a site that puts players in touch with games, and as such  I don't think that listing games that are in heavy development and/or largely stock is particularly useful. Games still under development can use the forums for promotion/staff advertising etc while leaving the main listing for games that are playable.

While the site is in alpha I am trusting game administrators to judge for themselves if their game is appropriate to be listed on MudGamers but at some point I will take a look at the listings to see if any pruning needs to be done. It is a balancing act between trying to maintain a useful game list and not having to spend all my time vetting games. I hope that game administrators will be responsible enough to realise that a large number of incomplete or stock games cluttering the listing will only harm the MudGamers community – after all we want to attract new players and we want them to have a selection of great games to choose from, not hundreds of clones.

I am happy to support developing games, however my main priority is to provide a resource to players who are looking for games to play, and as such I feel the main listing should only contain games that are playable and original.

That said I'm happy to consider a separate category for games that are not yet playable or original. What do others think? Will a development category help keep the main listings to a higher standard? What different categories would you all like to see?

Do you think creating a section specifically for developing games would help keep those off the main list? Or do you think people would still perceive some kind of benefit to deliberately 'mislisting' their games? I am hoping that people will read the criteria for submission and act accordingly, am I being far too naive in that belief?

I haven't looked in detail at every submission so far, but it seems the majority of games listed are reasonably established so I would think they should meet the criteria.

Do people think there is a problem with stock games being listed? (No need to name and shame, just curious what people think 'in general').

I don't want an elitist site where I get to decide which games are 'good enough' to be listed – instead I am hoping that the tags, game comments, ratings and forums are all tools that will help players filter out games they are not interested in playing.

Fire said:

Is there a way we could flag those with flash on the main listing, so that it would be easier for me and others to find the ones we can play without firing up our own clients?

The 'Today's Picks' section of the front page should show a random selection of Flash enabled games (as you can see currently there are only 3). The 'Play Now' tab on the top menu will also list only Flash enabled games.

I didn't to mean imply there was anything wrong in an elitist approach – it's really more that I want to avoid the administrative committments maintaining that kind of list requires. Recruiting some help with auditing is certainly an option, but I expect that would end up being more work than simply doing it myself!

I won't be offering any kind of free banner rotation for games as that would work against the aims of the site. What I want to do is create a community where people come to MudGamers to play games rather than simply come here to find a game they like and never come back. I want to encourage players to join the community and play games on the site so there is no real value to me in promoting traffic to individual game websites. The same principle applies to paid advertising – if games wish to pay for advertising I would much prefer to promote them within the site (through preferential listing, featured spots, etc) rather than with banners linking away from the site.