Rado would have to elaborate on precisely what he mean by "fair play" and what is currently limiting it from being realized, however I think social behaviour can affect netrek health. It is common now in pickup to see stacking. Team A has 2 or 3 elite players, team B has none. A quick geno ensues. Newbies are getting tooled. You can argue either way this is good or bad. Good because they are facing tougher opponents which should help their long-term progression of learning. Bad because some newbies will be turned off and not find it very fun and stop playing. Since there is no data we can only speculate and make an argument either way. I think the idea of automatic balancing has been put forward in the past. To balance numerically would be fairly trivial but balancing based on clue would not be as straight forward. This is where persistent status would help. Clued players could or even just those that demonstrated they are no longer newbies would have a status field set, then have the netrek server check every X minutes (could be sysdef'd) and automaticallu balance, or balance when one team is down by Y planets. Status could be determined automatically based on stats or for a more reliable method it could be voted on by a pool of clued players or manually selected by the server god. If we had ID registration it would be much easier and could have same ID for multiple servers. Could be cool for stats also. Say you login to a web form with your ID and password and it lists your registered characters and stats for each server. Zach