Worried

[cmhitman]

please just check out the decentralized network post.
I think that explains in enough detail how it\'d work.
look for the posts by me. duh. you\'ll find it

[Vengeance]

Well the fact is that no one on the PS dev team really understands how it will all work out either.  We want it to be free and no one wants to be paid for working on it.  We are just doing it because we think it is fun to work on it.

However, servers and bandwidth DO cost money.  Bandwidth in particular worries me.  Let\'s do an example:

Person uses their cable modem to play and uses 56Kbps on their connection, playing 3 hrs a day, 6 days a week for a year.

56 * 3600secs * 3hrs * 6days * 52wks = 188697600Kbits, or 23.5 GB of transfer per person per year.

Webmasters.com is a pretty cheap hosting place, and they charge $6/GB of bandwidth, so that one player is going to cost $141/yr just to connect.  If we have lots of users, we can probably get volume discounts, but it is still going to be way more money than we are going to get off of donations.

I think on the team though, we just feel like it will all work out and we just need to not agonize about it and build the freakin game.  :-)

- Venge

[Devyn]

Originally posted by cmhitman
Naw lets not give \'em any ideas like that. We wanna
keep the game totaly free. That would support a sort of
segregation between players. Like only people who
pay get to save there character \'n shit. I feel that\'s
stupid because the whole feel of an mmorpg is the fact
of all the people playing and when you set up a system
where people who pay get special privilages over the freebie then your not being fair.

The main MMORPG i play has put in a thing called \"Charter Memberships\" where you send in some money and get a special coupon that you can use on any weapon to make it twice as strong. Also you get a house (you can choose a custom floor plan and everything) and you\'re able to get a name change.

IF Planeshift remains free you\'re going to have alot of server trouble, this would make players really annoyed and you\'ll start getting flames about servers on the boards, people will leave, and it could make Planeshift look bad...

Putting say, 3 advertisements at the login screen, and when you click all 3 then you are allowed to play your characters...this would mean everytime someone would log in Planeshift would get money. With the charter memberships the PS team could raise enough money to get a better server and with the advertisements they would get a enough cash to keep that server running...

I also like Dumb Woob\'s idea about custom names for weapons and armor and things, which could be offered to Charter members.  

[Kada-El]

Thought I\'d resurect this old post about the pricing of PS. Some good points and ideas were discussed and it is directly relevant to this thread.

PS funding

[Tearlach t'an Ailech fin Leros]

Direct connect uses a peer to peer system which involves hubs, if we could make the planeshift system so that we have one strong computer in the middle and the others helping it, could work if anyone knew how to program it. On the other hand would this make alot of worlds and you wouldn\'t know which you connect to, hubs with a lot of lowend computers and 56k modems would get lots of lag and it would make people with better computers want to log in on the same hub so they won\'t risk any lag.
And I think that the middle computer needs to be a server.