Keeping Arcane funded

#1

Hi guys,

I would like to bring up the topic of keeping the server funded and donations. jugglingman and I put a lot of time and effort into maintaining, updating and running the server, and on top of that we are faced with the monthly costs we must pay to keep the server up.

We have decided we would like to implement some sort of incentive for donations - A reward of some sort that would encourage users to donate, in order to lessen the financial burden on our shoulders. We ask for your understanding - Arcane is a lot of work to run, and we’re really hoping the community will respect our decision.

Before we do anything, I wanted to make a thread and get feedback from everybody, so please let me know if you’ve got a problem with anything (or if you’ve got any suggestions).

Now, of course, we will always stick to our values and remain a ‘legit’ server - meaning we won’t offer any unfair advantages or ‘illegitimate’ elements of the game like /give or /fly.

Here are some of the things we are considering offering, please feel free to give us your honest thoughts:

Player Heads

The player head plugin is a harmless bit of fun we’re considering adding. Donors would have a small chance of obtaining a player’s head in PvP (or, we’d allow players to donate a dollar or two in exchange for a few heads.) We might ask for $10 for access to this plugin.

An extra /sethome

Considering we’ve already got one sethome, I don’t see the harm in allowing players to have two (or more?). In my eyes it’s a win-win situation. The server is benefited and the players save traveling time. A sethome might be $10.

Chat colors

I really like the chat to look nice and simple, and giving donors a different color text is a little much I think. It would give our currently white chat some variety, though. Not sure on this one.

CoreProtect Inspector Tool - The ability to see who placed and destroyed blocks (and when they did it) simply by clicking on them with the inspector command enabled. You can also see what items were placed into and taken out of chests, hoppers, etc.

This would come with a fairly hefty price tag, as it’s not something we would want a lot of people having access to. It’s possible to abuse, and could cause issues I think.

Unbans

This is a controversial one. I think allowing players to donate for an unban isn’t an awful idea, because it demonstrates that the person is willing to rejoin the server as a cooperative member of the community. It’s similar to a speeding ticket in a way - Say a player does something bad and is banned. They may make up for their wrongdoing by helping to keep the server up and running.

Thanks for reading!

#2

Like I said, Servers do not run on rainbows and sunshine. If you guys have to do this to keep the lights on, go for it. I only question the unban one because I feel like that could be open to some abuse.

Also I see no point in regular players using the CoreProtect thing. Save that one for mods and admins.

#3

My name is Mihalop and I support this 100% :slight_smile:

#4

I support this, so long as the chat color isn’t too crazy in variety. I think having a few set colors to chose from it best, should it happen.

Also, so long as people never lose any perks they gained from donating, this is sensible to me.

#5

For the chat just do custom tags (where the mod and donor thing goes)

#6

I’m ok with most of the ideas, except two:

Extra /sethome :
It seems like a HUGE advantage to me, /sethome is the most utilized feature on the server. Plus, this is still very un-vanilla. Having 2 /sethome makes it even more un-vanilla…

Chat Colors :
Give them tags, not chat color !

–

Other ideas :

Advertise more, but intelligently, for donations :
In the “Message of the Day”, put a link to a thread detailing why Arcane needs funding, and how to help Arcane, as well as the perks of doing so.

Have a Donator’s Hall of Fame built in Spawn :
Everyone who donated has his head, his IGN and the amount he donated kept there on a wall. 6th, 5th and 4th get a separate pedestal. Top 3 donators get their name, head and amount donated on a statue of the type I have at the Opera-Arena (so not too big, and not a player-statue, but representing a warrior or something) !
I feel this is a very Vanilla way of celebrating those who donated :slight_smile:

If possible: Have the donators be able to place, for themselves, 2 or 3 “locations” on the Dynmap

#7

I understand that while this is a vanilla server, I’m OK with having 2 sethomes because it doesn’t really give players too much of an advantage over others. It’s not like they constant buffs on or x-ray. Also, remember that we could just spawn back to spawn and use the nether highway. My point is that why spend all that time running to you second house via nether highway (which would need to be expanded anyway to fit the larger map) when you could just use /home. You get to the same place regardless, just one being quicker than the other.

#8

I also agree with DClem but I have another suggestion.

  • Nicknames
    Bam.
#9

[quote=“Encyclo”]I also agree with DClem but I have another suggestion.

  • Nicknames
    Bam.[/quote]
    Nicknames are stupid imo, unless you make it the same name instead of something completely different.
#10

Well than…

#11

“Extra /sethome :
It seems like a HUGE advantage to me, /sethome is the most utilized feature on the server. Plus, this is still very un-vanilla. Having 2 /sethome makes it even more un-vanilla…” - DClem

Why is un-vanilla assumed to be a bad thing? It seems to me that /home and /spawn allow us to have a sense of community on a server that is large enough to make that difficult otherwise. Having an easy method of meeting other players without interrupting what you were just doing encourages trade of material and services, and is the main way to meet other players (besides the occasional community projects). Seems like a good thing to me.

More on topic though, I’m trying to think of how one could exploit an extra /sethome, especially ways that might appear unfair. Obviously it would be a convenience for players with more than one base. It might be exploited to have, say, a second how at a farm, so that any time you were afk you could be at a farm instantly… but that’s not going to give more benefit over what /spawning and running to the farm would give. 5 potatoes and 2 minutes of saved time per use, perhaps.
Worse would be a donor using /sethome every few minutes while mining, giving them an advantage on saving their gear after a bad death? That’s a bit more significant an advantage, as it reduces the chance of losing gear, and saves the time of walking to far away mining spots. But it doesn’t make a player more efficient at mining; they have to mine blocks just like everyone else does.

Chat colors are something I wouldn’t mind, as long as they were limited to an unobtrusive set of colors. Bright distracting colors will make people annoyed at donors everytime they speak, rather than eager to get colored chat themselves.

The Player Head idea isn’t a bad one, although I think the drop rate should be 100%, if it is used. Seems to me that the perk would either be used to trade head with friends, or as trophies. If trading with friends, then having to murder eachother repeatedly to trade would be more annoying than anything. If used as a trophy, having less than 100% drop chance would mean you have to beat the person more than once (possibly). and if you absolutely tromped them, they’re unlikely to give you a second chance. Not to mention, non-donors would have no reason to participate… could get annoying if donors are going around requesting duels when the other participant has nothing to gain. It’s not something I’d personally use, but neither is it something that would bother me to have included, so go for it.

The inspector tool… would only be useful in a public area, on someone else’s land, or if you’d just been griefed. In the first two cases, it’s a fun thing to play around with. However, it’s giving access to moderation tools to non-moderators… I feel it’s begging for someone to ‘backseat mod’. I wouldn’t include this for donors.

Unbans: As long as there is an active group of moderators, charging for unbans or charging to be immediately unbanned would be fine with me. The main potential issue would be unbanned users griefing out of anger or intentionally undermining the server in some other way, but active moderation solves both issues.

Occasionally having the daily message mention that the server is funded by players would help inform any players who don’t know, but I feel that “Donor” tags also do that. I doubt using it to ask for donations outright would be particularly effective though.

Donor’s Hall is a good idea, in my opinion. Although I’m not sure spawn will exist if we drop the local framerate further with even more signs xD

#12

A couple things that popped into my head earlier In regards to this… (I’m on my phone, with no access to the computer at the moment, and forum software is wonky on mobile, so I’m gunna try to keep this short)

[ul][li]First off: Allow people to make donations in the name of a community. Now you may want to limit that to people that have been playing a while, or those that are “registered” to that community/are on a roster in the Communities forum[color=#FF0000]*[/color]. Then, if a Community gets to X dollars donated (and you could either do this By A Member of [Community], or do it so they have to Name the Community[color=#FF0000]**[/color]), the community gets a perk or two, such as:
[/li]
[li]A Marker on the Dynmap. Again, this is more focused on a Community, not just an individual’s home. We only have Spawn as a Marker at the moment, so I think we could stand to have a couple more.
[/li]
[li]For the “Donor Hall of Fame” you could count communities as another metric, and have the Top 3 donating communities listed as well.
[/li]
[li]As for Unbans: I’d say go ahead with it, but cautiously. Don’t do it if they did mass scale griefing, or were incredibly flagrant with assholishness. And don’t do it if you can’t keep an eye on them at all.
In any case, I’d say it’ll be OK if you do it for first-time offendees. Especially if they weren’t assholes in-game.
[/li]
[li]Lastly: Have you ever considered using Patreon? I’m not sure how much it costs to run the server(s) for Arcane, but with the donation goal you’ve been saying of ~$50, I’m willing to bet you could set up a page for the server and a fair number of people here would be willing to do a dollar or two a month. And that adds up rather quickly.
As an example for what you could do: if someone set it up so they were donating $5/mo, they would get the [color=#0000FF][Donor][/color] tag (since it currently goes out at $10 / 2mo ).
An example of what one person is doing with that site. (Bear in mind this example is someone that’s making a mod, not operating a server.)[/li][/ul]

I’ll comment on the other stuff later. This has been a bitch and a half typing it on my phone, so gunna stop now.

[size=70][color=#FF0000]*[/color]: I say this because I can think of one or two ways it could be abused, if not watched carefully.
[color=#FF0000]**[/color]: As for this, what I kinda meant is that you could track it one of two ways. Either any time someone donates, it counts for Them, as well as the Community they are aligned with (if there is one, and only one). OR, you donate, and it either goes toward the community of your choosing, or yourself in the rankings, but not both.[/size]

#13

I like all the ideas except core protect, I think that should stay a mod thing and above, and could lead to some sort of abuse. but mainly good ideas…and I will have an agent head on my wall…LOL!

#14

So we’ve actually decided against extra sethomes for the time being. We will be going ahead and adding unbans (only in certain situations) for $10 right away.

I’ll also be adding player heads sometime soon.

#15

We are now allowing one extra sethome for $10! View this thread:
http://arcane-minecraft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=711 for more info.

#16

I was going to ask “If they are unbanned, and they do something stupid again and get banned again, repeat etc, can we stop them from getting new unbans?” But then I realized its not to hard to undo damage and if they’re stupid enough we should take there money. So + on the unbans.

I think the idea of custom tags would be cool. Either a set system, like with cheaper adjectives (‘the great, the miner, etc’) and cooler ones costing more (‘Witch king’, ‘the destroyer’, ‘God’, etc), or a fee to change your tag to whatever you want.

I also like DClem’s idea about a hall of fame. I’ve thought about making a hall of player statues (same size of the spawn statue), and people could donate to get a spot in the hall.

Final idea- Being able to donate to get a wolf, because they are incredibly rare and pretty much just for looks. I would definitely pay money to get one.

#17

Please god yes.

#18

I don’t like this idea. Arcane’s supposed to be a legitimate server with nothing spawned in, right?

#19

The issue is that wolves only spawn on chunk generation I believe. I also think there is a global server limit, like squids. I spend 20+ hours looking for one, and gridded off/ explored at least 11 different taigas when the border expanded, and I didn’t find any. If this was singleplayer, I would have had a wolf a long time ago. Unfortunately, they aren’t like cats and don’t spawn in after chunk generation (not completely true, you have to completely remove all of the mobs from the surrounding 17 chunks I think, and since other passive mobs will spawn in before you can finish clearing, its pretty much impossible). At any rate, they are much more rare on here than in Vanilla. Besides, heads would not be vanilla either by your definition, but I think since they are pretty much purely cosmetic (as are wolves) they should be allowed.

#20

Wolves just spawn really rarely just like any other passive mobs do.