mctrivia: Unless Fencer makes a different image for each game, or if you have a really stupid browser, adding an image a 1000 times to a page will only count for one download of the image. Which, after the first time, will be in cache anyway.

Noone complains about the overhead of the image marking online players - yet that suffers from the same "problem". Heck, if one would use the same image as for online players, the only increase in traffic would be the extra 'IMG' tags in the HTML page.

Furthermore, a single simple image is a huge traffic problem, smilies should be abandoned. The images are much larger, and what's worse, a typical boards page has many different smilies. But no, there are no complains about traffic if someone makes a 35k smiley; instead, it is welcomed and added to the collection.

Now, as I said, I'm not interested at all in such an image (not caring about in-game chats - the medium is too awkward and slow), but I don't buy the 'traffic' argument.