Agreed, didn't think of the legal implications. Perhaps a perk based donation reward for in-game item(s) that have no basis on combat? Not sure how else to motivate people to contribute.Originally Posted by Celthon
Agreed, didn't think of the legal implications. Perhaps a perk based donation reward for in-game item(s) that have no basis on combat? Not sure how else to motivate people to contribute.
Thanks for the update. Try to donate what I can
Staff needs to admit some fault in this situation. Lack of communication, unjust heavy-handed bans, unpopular changes that drove people away... ie LD buffing nerf, Solo mission nerf, Promised group XP etc...
Trim the fat. This is not a paid environment. Axe live chat and maybe set up a discord style support like you had on IRC. Trim everything you can to save a few bucks. Asking people to donate for unjust and under utilized "wants" is wrong.
Unban everyone and restart with a clean slate. Remove the forums/discord/game bans being tied together.
Spend more time advertising. People that are coming back to relive a pastime are much more willing to donate. Put feelers out to tech sites that cover games about doing a review, maybe do an interview.
Finally... Launch 1.0 as it sits. Fix/adjust what's left after. Send a mass email letting people know 1.0 launched and everyone is unbanned. Make the point no more wipes will happen. I would bet there are 1000s of people that refuse to play due to wipes.
Last edited by oMek; 06-09-2023 at 08:40 AM.
Interesting idea...I like it. If 1.0 were to launch today I would def start playing regularly and setup a donation subscription to match my play. I personally have been waiting for 1.0 to start playing again / get back into this game. If the financial situation is one such that this project may actually end, I think this is the best chance of keeping it alive. I'd rather have an incomplete / buggy 1.0 that's alive than no SWGEMU at all.
Last edited by n310mf; 06-09-2023 at 07:05 PM.
I have been thinking about this as well around launching 1.0 and then launching chapters to add any further content, similarly to how SOE did it in the early stages. Although we would have to put up with more bugs, certain things not operational as they should be. Ultimately, it is up to the dev team when they feel a stable/complete and wipe free (as possible) 1.0 is ready to launch but it might be good to put out a poll and see the community interest in how we transition into a 1.0 server.
Its amazing we can have these conversations, really shows how far we have come in the past 17 years or so!
Praxi Starwalker
Bria Server
'RFR' - Rebel Force Recon
'SOH' -Soldiers of Honour
I like that idea and I'd come back the second it launched.
Great response, support just launching 1.0 and start making positive changes and content. Relight the spark for the game.
Finalizer
Elesio Ora - M.Fencer
Leose Ora - M.Smuggler
Bring back all the same ole' ppl dominating all the same ole' uber spawns with their same ole' legendary weapons for ever and ever????? No thanks....
Wipe all items, get rid of ADKs.... let us keep the rest.... i'd be good with that...
There is 100's of reasons for ppl not donating and quitting for they're own reasons But ill only go into my reasons. To began with this is more CU than pre cu which i can deal with . IN PRE CU Creatures etc could not go through walls . Put back in dizzy tapes. Put back in ADK'S and make these things bio linked . I have always thought that the game should be harder but not in the way its headed atm. Let the players get leet but over time as thats the personal goal of every player, the hidden resorses changes is the only thing thats done right use that as an example. I would add an ADK TO every 6 months to rewards or so or every 180 days of log in. You will wind up in the end with leet players and donateing players to play if these kind of things happen, and if not you are going to wind up with a failed server. just my $.02
All I know is, if the devs and other core members of the staff could single-handedly foot the bill, I'd presume they wouldn't even ask for donations at all, and the entirety of SWGEmu would be free forever. Unless my logic is flawed, the fact that there is a donation feature implies such is false, and therefore, the long-term and ongoing trends of failing to meet such costs would have worrying implications.
Those implications result in less people playing, which results in less people paying, and it can create a death spiral.
Given realistic-ish confines and the rules of how modern society is forced to operate, there are 2 theoretical fixes to triage such a situation: gain more money or spend less money.
Gain more money means more people donating, and that does not seem realistic...especially while staying true to the vision of the game (see also: my discussion about "the rat"). It's doubly true when rules specifically prevent new people from joining in. "Oh, you don't have this ancient CD which might as well be an archeological find more fitting for a literal museum? Well that's too flaming bad, you are forbidden from joining our community!" The technological capability of sharing the game files is not hard...it's the legality that's stifling any hope for community growth, particularly because there will be no new "legally authorized CDs" manufactured, and that puts a hard-cap onto potential new member numbers (one that shrinks as more discs are broken, lost, or forgotten). Even if it's not a "legal" issue and that's a bunch of bonk, the staff rules clearly disapprove and disavow of someone copy-pasting the SWG game contents to any friends or family members...again, capping just how many new people can potentially join. This is important because it's safe to presume we're getting the most out of our current community as-is, which is estimated to be an average of approximately $0.50 per person (literally $0.43...Source - https://www.swgemu.com/forums/showthread.php?t=255347 ). That is hardly a notch away from my own personal standard operating procedures designed specifically around the $0 budget. Yet even the "DIY" approach of fully hand-building your own infrastructure (even assuming the skills, sweat, and tears were viable) still costs a notable lump cost up front for raw resources, so I can not advise that for a strict $0 budget (you need Super Hobo levels of skill and permission to go into a scrapyard, haul loads of junk for raw resources, and transform that into actually working parts and pieces). The maintaining of this game is apparently a hobby, not a job, so it's time to start treating it like a hobby.
The other path, spend less money...I'm looking at a couple ideas for that. First, the game right now is said to be able to handle 3,000 people online at a time (source: SWGEmu launcher), yet as of this writing, at about 8:40 PM on a Sunday (specifically U.S. Eastern Time, so 5:40 PM Pacific Time at the USA's west coast), it's at 254 "currently online". Unless the staff know something I don't, it might be possible to shrink the cap from 3,000 people down to 1,000 which will mean less resources and thus less costs to maintain and upkeep SWGEmu. Second, "museum mode" for single-player...there are cloud storage systems out there which permit gigabytes for free costing you $0 just to drop a big packet out there and forget about it, and it'd let people play SWGEmu forever (just with the one giant asterisk that it's no MMO). I spoke to a couple staff people about that, with letting people get local builds, and they seem only willing to share that for people who are able and willing to contribute to the code of SWGEmu, so...y'know, if instead of sharing that with Linux experts only, have just about anyone access it, that could also drive numbers to a healthier direction. If the money situation is as desperate as it would be for me, I'm just saying, it's hard to beat $0 (because I have experience, albeit limited experience, creating on $0 budgets), especially if the goal of preserving the game is more important than any other concerns as far as this community can extrapolate. I would drool to see something like a "SteamDB" site for SWGemu, with the full metrics of player counts (such as all-time high, the peak of the past 24 hours, past 7 days, and so forth) because my pure gut feeling will say you are consistently looking at around 10% of server capacity (even with bots and alts) and the rest of that free space is just unneeded bloat. I'm not just talking "Finalizer" here, this goes SQUARED for Nova! Nova's numbers are normally single digit at a time, MAYBE double digit. (And we don't see much presence from staff in-game because they do all "the real work" on local builds far removed from the community's eyes, plus one of their God powers includes invisibility - or at least I believe that's one of the God powers.) All that to say, Nova in particular can (or maybe even should) have a smaller hard-cap for allowed players online simultaneously, for if that has the same 3,000 deal as Finalizer, that's a larger amount of waste. Going from Equinix to Amazon hurt on a 4-digit order of magnitude (Personally, with having barely been INSIDE Amazon, I swear they're Czerka Corporation: Real Life Edition), but at this point, that's only going from bad to worse (more specifically, just looking at the trends of "grand total", it's still bleeding out on the old provider, but it's the difference between "years" or "months" until reserves are bled dry), yet without researching such providers, there may or may not be a more cost-effective infrastructure solution. Lastly, a small thing I noticed, WHY THE KRA'TA do you pay for Slack?! I could've sworn that was a FREE program! Isn't Discord good enough for team coordination? You don't even need to pay for Discord; all that does is give you larger file uploads and more universal use of cute emotes. For in following the second option, "Trimming the Fat" is the name of the game.
Finally, there's ALWAYS a "third option", and this is the one that people can not help but default to: change nothing. We have the data for what that looks like, and it's quite thoroughly "in the red" across the board. Just project that trend to the near future (and long-term future as well), so that'll tell you how "the third option" will play out. Only question then is, how long can status-quo be upheld until the staff decide it's no longer sustainable? Or is all the "in the red" just smoke-and-mirrors and it's *always* going to be sustainable through sheer magic and cheat codes? And that chart with all the "in the red" and the nearly literal "bottom line" marked "Grand Total"...below even that, we see "PayPal Balance" which is at about $5,000 but the trends project a roughly -$1,000 monthly cost (I'm approximating for simplicity of Math, plus recent month numbers indicate I'm using conservative best-case estimates), implying we have a rough mathematical answer to the question I just asked. ETA is about 6 months (one half-year of Real Time) before this mess gets serious. Even with Jamie taking a year long break, I'll see how you're doing in December. (1 update to my calculation, because this detail matters...the final month of the chart was posted in April, yet with discussions going on as of June, that means there's at least 1 additional month of that negative trend, arguably 2 depending on when SWGEmu gets billed in the month. Assuming my predictions through the power of MATH are "close enough" accurate, the ETA is actually October, 4 months from me writing this!)
The original post says May has set Finalizer to 1/2 RAM and CPU, which is not reflected in the data. That by itself would mostly set about a net-zero against the Amazon change, so we're back to bleeding down through years instead of months. Meaning the situation is bad, but not alarmingly dire.
In short, just like I've said before, I won't sugarcoat it, this could very well be a no-win situation. However, with that said, there are still ways to mitigate the overall situation...unless, again, the staff know something I do not.
Last edited by Jay Forerunner; 06-12-2023 at 02:22 AM. Reason: Lots of detail...remember, either gain more money or spend less money.
The way things are going on this server i feel that its being headed in the direction to make it a cash game (pay to win game ) We were promised pre cu. What happened ? if u want my donations give me pre CU. I am and was an AS in pre cu and i see the debunk headed in the said direction
Many games have a subscription and provide something of in game worth for that sub. GTA5 just did it. for $10 I get 500k. I pay $10 for my elder Scrolls and get some Crowns to buy cosmetics. This game came out before micro transactions so there wasn't a lot of extra fluff added. I think if there was some sort of credit sink, and it has to be cosmetic, like a Barc speeder or a jetpack. You could have those for sale and charge say 50 million. With a credit sink you can introduce a 500k per month for a $5 donation. Sell a starter pack. Newb armor, basic weapon and 150k for $5. Thats not going to make anyone win but sure as hell will add some quality of life for me. Its not 2003 and I'm in my 40's with a baby. I don't have time to no life this shiz anymore.
There are some paintings, some items that people collect to decorate houses with that could all become store stuff.
Last edited by Reiver; 06-15-2023 at 10:34 PM.
This would be illegal.
I took the approach for months and months of communicating openly with the community on the forums and on Discord. Usually just ended with threads so toxic they were locked. We discussed changes and future server ideas with community members many times, you can say "just do x, y and z" but not fully realizing just how time consuming that is alone, also how dealing with some folks can straight up kill the staffs determination to do this voluntarily. Also, we did implement group xp. The full list of changes on Finalizer can be found here: https://www.swgemu.com/forums/showthread.php?t=254610
I can spend a free few hours heads down and crank out fixes or implementations but make it 2 hours of trying to communicate and deflect the banter and 1hr on actual development, nothing gets done. Now I know immediately folks will say "Community Manager", thats not really the answer when no one has gone through the steps to just leap into a PR position that could sink the whole ship if not handled properly. Even just recently I took the time to writeup multiple posts about the accuracy changes and "put myself in the shoes" of those complaining and guess what, the thread just continued to go on about how the game is hard and people want to do it how they want to do it and almost all replies just completely ignore multiple staff replies.
The systems that are in place now for Support and LiveChat are the most effective with the time folks have to give. Handing stuff through Discord would not work when account or issue tracking.
Unban everyone and start fresh did not work out well for Finalizer. Crying, angry posts, staff allegations etc. Guess what, a ton of clean slate folks reoffended, as expected. The rules are the rules, folks fail to follow or want to just ride the line to troll and create a bad community enviroment just have to face the fact that actions have consequences.
Now onto the 1.0 chatter, in the larger picture we are there with some bugs here and there. Mantis needs a clean up and then there is deciding and getting in place what comes next or else you end up in the same position. Community expecting content and such, without proper workflow in place to effectively create and release said content. We are always still progressing, JTL has made definite progress but still has a lot to go.
This also walks us into advertising, if you draw everyone on and don't have the content prepared to release to keep them interested, history just repeats itself.
In the end we need folks to be patient and understand we are at the point where changes will happen, its just not a snap your fingers and it happens sort of thing.
Hakry
Developer
Hakry@SWGEmu.com | Code Commits
SWGEmu is a non-profit, open source community project.
SWGEmu FAQ | Install SWGEmu | Report Bugs
We have never ever offered any bonuses or items for donations. They keep the project alive and allow the project to continue forward.
We did promise pre-cu at 14.1 available publicly https://github.com/swgemu/Core3 and we have delivered on that promise. The Core3 repository is available at vanilla 14.1 pre-cu.
Hakry
Developer
Hakry@SWGEmu.com | Code Commits
SWGEmu is a non-profit, open source community project.
SWGEmu FAQ | Install SWGEmu | Report Bugs
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
