Way to keep Planeshift free

[Cyonamie]

no one lieks to click adds, and no one appriciates 900 adds popping up on the website, what do we do? u can open a donation system, where u could donate say ever a dollar(equal to 100clicks!) and u only do that once, thats convinient and its easy, and it only costs a buck.

[kyalin]

I sure dont really wanna pay.  My parents go insane when its paying for something online

[Tearlach t'an Ailech fin Leros]

The best thing would be if you could domate in your country currency, and to mail it with regular snail mail.
Another thing would be that you could check how much someone donated, and that you get some sort of status, (not affecting anything of course, except bragging rights   ).

[paxx]

I know this is a bit screwed up, but what about bonus exp for paying customers??? Or get X exp for 10 dollars??

Some people would do it just look at e-bay.

Another possibility would be a one time charge, after 30 days of gaming, or be limited to 3 hours per day unless you paid the one time fee.

While it would be cool that is free the only other way would be to sell the server side software with customizable stuff and tools, as such anyone wanting to run their little RPG does it with this as a server, and you guys run this game as is for free, but you must support the people that buy the server software for their MUDs?it?s an idea at least, I would pay 20-60 bucks for a good easily customizable graphical mud. Never Winter Nights was being built on this premise, it is held up in legal issues. Of course you don?t have the name recognition but with some extra work you can make it so it works on a similar premise, even make it with a turn based option or something, have pleanty of GM options and such?you might want to look at the D20 license and see if you can use it, but I figure if done right you could raise a few hundred thousand dollars to keep it free, but an official organization would have to be formed and some support for users available.

Just an idea.  

Paxx

[Mark von Wagner]

The best suggestion I\'ve seen was that playing is free, but you could pay $5 for gilded armor, or a jeweled sword hilt, or other showy extras that don\'t affect gameplay but give you something to brag about.

[Link]

Originally posted by Buechler
Trust me If you make Banner Ads mandatory to click they\'ll work.    Once the full Planeshift game is ready to download their may be thousands of accounts; and if they all clicked the banner ads 3 times a day, there\'d be NO problem.

Another option is to get cheap servers only holding 100 players at the most, from friends.  

The Main Goal= To have Planeshift free

1. Ads Generate Barely anything
2. Almost all ad companys it is against the rules to make it mandatory to click
3. a ad click only counts ONCE per day.

[malverian]

Sometimes the ignorance of people on this board amazes me.

Planeshift is open source, it is GPL, if the main planeshift server was to start \'charging\' or \'putting banners\' or other things that the users of the game dislike, anyone can run their own server and modify it to their needs.

However, you\'d likely need to create your own maps and player models, as the artists for Planeshift don\'t want their work being used without permission.

I feel that the best route for Planeshift is to take an Openprojects.net approach to distributing server load. Many linux users have amazingly fat pipes and computers and would be willing to donate their bandwidth for free if they enjoy the game. This also gives them benefits such as faster connection (since it\'s on their computer, etc).

The servers would all be controlled by a \'central\' node. Distributed networks are the way of the future, this would cut down on cost, increase stability, and make it so the entire Planeshift world is still tied together as one (if desired).

[paxx]

The open node is likely the best rout, though some central control would be nice?if not I would be able to make a private node and make super characters for me and my friends and then load up to other nodes.

But if later there where an open library of maps and art and all the other fun stuff, as well as good tools, with some control for ?plane shift official portals? then it could be widely distributed and maintained, some servers could come on at non-business hours and deal with large quantities of bandwidth?this could work quite well.

It all comes down to what level of control is wanted. If it needs to be central one main server or 5 for that matter all supplied by on group then they would have to charge, if it is allowed to be decentralized then it would be easily maintained. But have loose standards and varying quality.    

[KillsTheWeak]

Um ok thats one solution, which i will refer to as the windows solution, sense thats how most freesoftware is offered on windows Well us linux users are a bunch of hippies that like to help eachother out and not pay for things, so heres my stab at it.

So here is my linux style solution

How this works, is each zone is dependent on someone donation a server to hold 100 or so people. Now to make someone actually want to donate a server, there will be a mapmaker which can place monsters from the planeshift database. Therefore each server makes there own zone. Each server would have to check the server database to make sure the next server is up. All character files will be stored on one server, and read and written when needed. I believe this would result in a huge world, which would be less laggy cause characters would be spread out

[DruegaR]

Please Please PLEASE dont make us pay to play !!!

[David_HD]

Or maybe look for an actually sponsership type deal where they basically pay for everything (which really shouldn\'t amount to much on a corporate scale) in exchange for a mega-big ad on the front page and a major request to everyone who uses PS to buy their product. I\'d change my choice of softdrink if one company were keeping PS running...

[JeroMiya]

One way you can reduce your costs is to detect broadband clients, and use some of the extra bandwidth from these clients to serve other clients. That opens up a whole can of invertebrates, but it works for gnutella and SETI, why not PS?

Jeremy Bell
-WolverineSoft Project Coordinator
http://www.umich.edu/~wsoft

[Link]

Those broadband hosts would be to easy to modify their client and give their friends or themselves extra shtuff.

[Marduk]

okay this is just getting kinda gay.  If people feel generous, they could donate some money... paying to get purty armor is an ok idea i guess.  I\'d be willing to pay them some $$ to help out, but not to play.

[Shanky]

Marduk, a few tips for these forums, 1) dont bring back posts that have been dead for quite some time. 2) Refrain from saying anything derogatory towards any group that could be seen as bigotry (in this case, the word \"gay\" was not appropriate) this is a nondescrimintory community, let\'s try to keep it that way.