Ok well good news
I got pretty much all of what is needed to get the suite online done today.
the only thing missing is a guild creation area, however until I decide what system I want to use for people setting up guilds I will put up a forum, in which a guild leader cna post their guild details and chater - I will note that these will have to be of a reasonable length (not just one liners) and then get 5 other people to sign under you to say they also want to be in the guild.
This will eventually change to an automated system when I get change to write it.
Also for now once you are in a guild there will not be a way to leave it until again I get time to add it, so I dont recomend making joke guilds \"to see what happens\".
Lastly I will note that to start off with at least all planeshift members will count as \"paying\" status. Doesn\'t really mean that much in effect as I have no payment system implemented (and as I have said probably wont be using one for planeshift) - however the game requires members to be paying or non paying.
For those that are curious the differences as they stand right now are:
Paying members Non paying
Unlimited chars Only 1 char
Inbox for 100 message Inbox for 5 messages
Able to host or join open events only able to join open - or to host guild events (if an officer)
A couple of other things that may get added to limit non paying members are fequency/number of message board posts. Number of picutures allowed in character/user profiles. or limited use of other advanced features as I release them (such as only being able to be a buyer when the forsale advert area comes out)
For now my plan is for planeshift members to count as paying - unless hosting costs force me to switch to non paying (since the limitations on them will limit bandwidth and those that do prefer to pay would cover hosting costs)
If I can get this released for a couple of games (as is my plan) planeshift accounts should be covered for by revenue from the other games.
If the worst did come to the worst I will note the figure I was looking at is around $10US per year for an account - but as I said, non paying members will still have access anyway.
Dont worry about this too much, things are still up in the air, and a good portion on what I want is not finished yet anyway.
(I hate dragging this out but I would feel really guilty if I didn\'t mention it and then asked for donations to help host it down the line, as I am not in a situation to be able to cover web hosting costs. right now I get it for free and as long as bandwidth does not rocket it will hopefully stay that way)
So over the next day or 2 I\'ll be setting up a domain for the site and opening up the signups.
things may look a touch crude on the sign up pages, but I hope you will bear with me.
simm