If you look at the Player List sorted by join date, it's what you might expect, the longer a person is here, the more likely s/he is going to upgrade to non-pawn status. This is still quite a young site. With 200 members, starting last October, that's about 30 members per month, right? Of the people who joined during the first 3 months (last year), there is a higher percentage of members than the site average.

I would also expect that Fencer could do (or has done) a few database queries to see what the average number of moves a person of each level makes on this site. I would expect that most pawns make lots of moves when they get here, but only a few of them stick around and keep making lots of moves per day. My guess would be that 70-90% of the pawns just try the site for a while and then abandon it for the most part.

Of course, these are just guesses.

I like the current free evaluation system, and 20 games seems like a good limit. One thing that Fencer, et al., could possibly do is to target the pawns who are making lots of moves with a little stronger marketing campaign. It could be something as subtle as placing the "Support Us" link on a more prominent place on the page. If the site used advertisements, it could be "ad-free" for pawns up to a certain bandwidth, with more and more obnoxious ads filling the page as the bandwidth got higher. Of course, paying members would be ad-free no matter what.

Just a few ideas from a rather newbie to the site (who is getting quite hooked on it quickly).