It\'ll be very difficult to determine where donations go. The hosting cost for Planeshift is not a concern to us because we run many other things on the server hosting Planeshift, so even if we didn\'t host Planeshift we would still incur the same costs. Naturally this would limit us to exactly how many people the server can host at its peak, but Planeshift is using very little resources in terms of bandwidth and CPU at the moment, so there is a lot of room for expansion on the current server.
Hosting costs aside, the amount of coding that goes on is probably worth a lot more, and the devs are putting in a lot of time and not getting any direct financial benefit out of it. Since Planeshift is in some sense a worldwide effort I don\'t think it has the capability of turning Pay-to-Play unless there is some serious coordination.
I can imagine though that should there be some form of avenue for players to donate in the future that it would probably be used to purchase more resources (maybe hosting additional servers in other regions? specialized software?) whose benefits will be returned to players anyway.
I think the key point here is that almost all of Planeshift is under the GPL compared to other free-to-play systems which allow developers to implement paid systems at a later date because the software is closed-source. The GPL effectively prevents developers from changing their minds at a later date at the cost of the players.
