Donation Rewards

[Baalzamon]

We need to have donations coming in for this game, and we need to get some advertising going, which costs money. SMR 1.5 has been designed for a massive playerbase, so lets work on getting it.

For rewards for people who donate, (which we do need to do), we should have different "packages"

Package 1: $5 a month
A blue star next to name on CPL as well as when you click on their name, to say that they have donated in the past month
A notes section on "Trader" page (yes, add this in as a donation perk rather then standard for everyone)
Option to save combat logs (yes, add this as a donation perk rather then standard)
Ability to name your ship

Package 2: $10 a month
All of package 1
A silver star instead of blue
Option to have your race's image next to your ship
Option to name your ship with html

Package 3: $15 a month
Packages 1&2
A gold star instead of silver
Have another option or two for the layout of the screen (look at the ones that kiky, freon, azool, others did)


The packages don't present game play advantages, and would show the community that people are helping out, and that we're getting stuff done. This would bring in money that we could use to advertise, bringing in the playerbase that this game was designed for.

Thoughts?

[canff]

hmmm last time they asked for money i asked everyone and talked people into it saying we were going to get a upgrade for the server and that never did happen... so where is that money...hard to give when you see the game going down hill ... when you can't even play with 25 people on cpl as it gets to slow to move...

did we get droped to a slower server? whats up... is all this new code that slow... we can't grow if we can't play with more then 25 people on heck 16 and it is slow..

[Baalzamon]

we bought a new server for the initial release of 1.5 On the very first day, the high activity, coupled with AJAX, and NPCs wandering around hit the server so fast and so hard that it died on that very first day, causing Azool to revert us so that 1.5 is running on the same server as beta (you may have noticed in the couple weeks game was down that beta was down as well).

The donation drive that we had more recently was, in fact, for a new server. The thing is, SMR is hosted by FeM, and so Spock had to send them a proposition of some sort to support the new server. Thats as far as I know, and I might only be partially correct. Whether he heard from FeM or not is unknown to me.

[canff]

all i know is that the game is slower then ever... on any server... and that needs to be fixed before anything else... you can add all the code and fun crap you want no good if you can't play.... right now you can't do large ops... with out 4hs set to do it ...we may need a new host....or drop the ajax. and npc... or what ever is makeing this lag...

[Page]

all i know is that the game is slower then ever... on any server... and that needs to be fixed before anything else... you can add all the code and fun crap you want no good if you can't play.... right now you can't do large ops... with out 4hs set to do it ...we may need a new host....or drop the ajax. and npc... or what ever is makeing this lag...

I agree 100%, I constantly try to reduce the lag, but it just seems to get worse somehow. Processor wise it should be faster than ever, so I guess it may be something with disc access/database, but I've still tried to minimise database access. I'll ask Spock about any progress on new server when I see him next.

[Kahless_]

4h OP's rock - i remember the days when me and Smor used to race to uno's during OPs. 25 minutes was the fastest time we managed i think.

I can't say i've noticed the game refreshing any slower than the last few rounds, but i guess i am just used to slow loads.