Organized Crazy Addicts

_z_e_n_

I've been playing UT for a few months now and I love it!

But I'm tired of having an anonymous skin. Like Batman I want to strike fear into the hearts of my enemies!! Ahem...or something like that...

Ok guys here goes...

For reasons clearly stated in other threads OCA won't provide the facility to use our own custom skins. Fair enough I think we can all agree. The skins would have to be tested (which takes time) and everyone would suffer having to download them.

But, and here's the great bit, why don't you charge people cold hard cash for this facility? Set yourself up with a PayPal account, we'd all pay you for the priviledge of using our own skins and everyone is a winner. You (OCA) start to recoup some of the money you've already invested and we get to use our own skins.

There would be conditions of course. The skins would have to be approved for use - tested by OCA. And you may not choose to release any more than a set number each month (20ish), to keep download times bearable.

You (OCA) are missing a legitimate opportunity to cover your admin charges ($$$)- and we are all denying ourselves the opportunity of blowing the heads of new and interesting skins every month.

So if you accept this idea in principal, how much would you charge? £20 a skin? $40? You decide.

Of course you can always decide you don't want the money.

If you think this idea is a winner I'll design myself a skin!

See you tonight,

_z_e_n_

Razz

LeeBe · Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2003 3:28 pm Post subject:

hmm not a bad suggestion zen. Although £20 seems a bit much. I'd think £5 per skin per month would be better.

And it would in all honesty be up to Punt. as its his server and he takes all the charges on the head (minus the odd donation)

But I can see a few problems.

What if the servers down? would <whoever> want it for an extra day? week?

How would we be able to keep the skin to whoever payed for it? everyone has to download it anyway.

What if you cant get into the server cos its constantly full? would <whoever> want a refund?

Tempus · Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2003 6:37 pm Post subject:

sry but personally i dont like the idea, you say maybe 20 skins-ish imagine the emount of downloading there would be...
20 skins at 3meg each, roughly? is that a correct estimate? thats a 60 meg download.....

Its going to stop the server from gaining new players, im on a 512k connection, when i first started playing OCA i was going to give up on all the downloading as it was i got fedup, but spidy alrdy had everything and i knew there wasnt much more.

same for the dj server (sorry folks) i played there once got really fedup with the downloading, but waited, so many skins, it took forever, i baught a new hd ysday, and im not going to bother with the dj server now unless i am left with no choice, the emount of downloading has put me off.

and for fairness, well what about the kids who play on OCA? who have no means to pay for a privelge like this? or just the people in genral who could not afford this?

to be honest things as they are, are the fairest way there is. Only OCA members, and i think people who have done extra work for OCA (which is few) like who ever it is (wayzor??) working on the voice pack.

_z_e_n_ · Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2003 11:06 am Post subject:

Administering a server is hard work. Punt must have put in hours (or days!) of time and effort.

Accepting cash for uploading skins is an honourable method of getting some money back. It's honourable because you aren't demanding money, you simply provide a service that people can buy if they want.

It's good of you to consider children and poor people Tempus, but if you don't want to upload a skin then you don't have to. You can always play in someone elses! (See below) And 20 skins a months is less than one a day. But if that twists your melon, how about 4 a month...which is one a week! The numbers I came up with were examples....just how much downloading can you stomach? In fact, 4 a month would mean that only the very best skins got on the server.

There would be no control over who uses your skin, except for common courtesy. But I think i'd be honoured, not pissed off, if someone chose to play in a skin I designed. Obviously clans will be more protective of their uniforms - and rightly so.

£20 may seem a lot. But it's to cover the admin cost...after all it has to worth puntloos' time and effort or he won't go for the idea. PM is so utterly amazing that I'd pay double that to have '_Z_E_N_' on my back!

It's not exactly fair at the moment is it? We all play for free and puntloos does all the work - for nothing. Even at £20 a skin with 4 skins a months punt makes C£1000 a year. Which I think he's more than earned.

God damn poxy Novell course instructor is back. Gotta go...

Tempus · Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2003 9:27 pm Post subject:

puntloos · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2003 11:43 am Post subject: Hmm

Heh a weird discussion. To be sure the idea is worth considering, but Im really not sure how to go about this, if at all.

Now I don't consider allowing people to get access to extra features by paying unfair, its the way most internet business work. Hehe most do not turn a profit and until I've paid off the entire server the same goes for me Wink

To be fair I didnt buy the server for UT, so its not like I expected it to make money in any way, but on the other hand the majority of CPU time and network usage actually is used by UT soo...

Plus you aren't missing anything of the core functionality of the server. In fact, as we said there is no way we can offer cool skins for everyone.

Anyway I don't want this extra feature to impact the regular players in an unfair amount, so what I should do first of all is assess how many downloads from 'vanilla UT' we have anyway. Someone who installs bare-ass UT will have a 10Mb download on his hands to join the PM SNP server.

Now a skin is somewhere between 300k and 1.5Mb compressed. ( Embarassed

mine is the biggest one somehow.. oh not somehow, its cause I have an animated skin Wink

)

Basically I think 3Mb total "subscriber" skin size is the limit. Everybody having to download 3Mb a month of new stuff doesn't sound like that big of a stretch to me. Now how to go about pricing.. well Ill try not to be a money grubber so I'll let you decide on the two options I can think of

1/ Just set a fixed price. I really have no idea what to set this to. No idea what the demand is. E20 per month seems on the high side, but on the other hand do we want to 'bother' other players with the downloads for E5-10 a month?

2/ The second option is an auction of sorts. We can just set a lower limit price (say E5) and people can bid for the 'slots' where they just mail me saying how much they're willing to spend on having their skin on for a month.

Now #1 is straightforward, #2.. well it has the advantage for users that even small players and children can prolly afford a skin - most teens I know (haha ok I know 2) get E15 a week and theyre 16 so E7.50 should be doable for them.

And it has the advantage for me that I might get more out of it Wink

It does have the disadvantage that I prolly have to check out a lot of skins, but well, with a few basic rules that shouldn't be too big of a deal.

Oh and option #3 is putting up 50% of 'slots' up for auction, and 50% can be bought at higher prices Smile

But still what do the other people think? How much meggage extra skin would you consider acceptable? 0? 1? 2? 3? 4? I realise less is better of course but yaknow, seriously as both zen and tempus indicated, people are interested in having their own skin for a bit.

And to add to this:

roba · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2003 12:21 pm Post subject:

IMO 2 or 3 paid skins slots is maximum. And not per month, but total, just to have 2-3 paid slots and every month make auction and sell them, with the right for renewal at same pricel for current slot user.

But TBH I dont think ppl will pay for this, yeah I know z_e_n wants to, but who else? 20 euro is not low price, even 5 euro is a lot. You can get complete webhosting for 5 euro/month.

Also I am not sure if its good idea at all. When ppl pay something, they usually want to guarantee some level of service. Than running server wont be favour, it will become duty.

LeeBe · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2003 12:39 pm Post subject:

Roba's right, it would become a duty (see my above post) with downtime and such.

Also the amount of downloads. I dont know if im the only one but I usually have to download more than 3mb in maps every day (this and other servers) some maps, Spacebeacon, is 17mb Shocked

It usually doesnt take long with redirect working probably less than a minute to get a 3mb file and im on 512k. soo we talking <1minute every month?

Personally I wouldnt use it. As it is I dont use the clan skin. Too much hassle when server hopping. But some people might, like Roba said, who would use it? as it is theres only zen, I dont think there would be any (many) more.

puntloos · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2003 12:57 pm Post subject:

puntloos · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2003 1:10 pm Post subject:

roba · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2003 1:20 pm Post subject:

puntloos · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2003 3:39 pm Post subject:

roba · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2003 4:51 pm Post subject:

Tempus · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2003 7:56 pm Post subject: Re: Hmm

puntloos · Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2003 2:43 pm Post subject: