Phoenix and stuff.. - Phoenix Freeshard

Hi, I want to raise an issue that has come up in a lot of discussion I had about Uthgard and Genesis/Phoenix (or whatever this will be called after the next guy does a hostile takeover).

Point being: Uthgard has a benevolent dictator also covering all financial obligation of the project beyond any limitation.

So they have a rich fuck hosting a server.. that seems to be a good premise! Genesis was taking donation to cover server costs; and to my recollection they also did cover the cost during the time where there was a healthy population.

To address the elephant in the room: Some folks seem to think you will "rely on donations" or rather "take money for benefits" or the like. Could you please address how you want to handle that spectrum of issues. I want to acknowledge that there is a wide range of free-shards for other games that openly trade in-game benefits for real-money donations to keep servers healthy. I have seen examples where it broke the game and others where it actually kept the project alive beyond EOL.

Given that financial obligations are a make or break issue in today's world, could you elaborate on the ways Phoenix will be held up, concerning the subsistence of hosting and traffic and how it would compare to the way Genesis and Uthgard handle(d) these issues.

Thank you very much!

Thu 3 May 2018 5:38 AM by

gruenesschaf

There will be no in-game benefit for donating.

The primary / EU host is Hetzner, https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ex. We're going with the EX51-SSD for the game server, any one of the listed servers would be sufficient but with 64 gb ram we can pretty much preload everything on startup and not ever hit the database outside the save interval and some things like market explorer searches or some social window queries, with so much preloading an ssd also makes sense to keep our restart times low (currently about 30 - 40 seconds).

If there are players who would like to support this project financially, we will consider having another game server in Canada (hosted with ovh) and then restarting twice a day to switch to the CA server for the US prime time and to have a backup server to reduce downtime in case one of them goes up in flames.

Tue 8 May 2018 2:41 PM by Gnarrg

First of all, overall fantastic job with your server, guidelines, communication.

I too think in order to secure the long-term health of the project a transparent, sustainable finance mechanism could be worth considering.

Small in-game benefits (optical changes to characters, highlighted character name, better support) for a small monthly subscription (2-5 USD/month?) would be a model. Nothing that would lead to pay-to-win of course, but just enough to add a little benefit for the many out there who would like to contribute financially for a great product.

Tue 8 May 2018 2:57 PM by Tree

People really never understand...
You can not "donate" and in turn get something of value for it. That is called "selling", not donating.
A freeshard can not "sell" anything or what do you think how long it will take for broadsword to sue the team behind the project?

Of course some transparency and various backers for running server costs would be welcome.

Wed 9 May 2018 5:22 AM by Ceen

I payed 2 $, give me GoV Skin!