I really like RainbowChin's suggestion. It simplified all this somewhat confusing talk into something easily understood. I get Mojang and other legal things are at work to cause the changes. I Love the Empire! I love supporting you all as much and as often as I can. I have 4 family members (including myself) that all have accounts and play here. To have paid supporter status for all 4 accounts is a bit pricy and usually doesn't work for our budget. We try to keep at least one account as an active supporter. Is there any possibilities in the future of a family supporter package? I also understand you all have an overhead and costs that need to be met as well. I know for me, I love the perks a membership gives me. I am not one who cares as much for the cosmetics. I personally am most interested in a package that offers me the least amount of changes to what I currently have as a supporter. This is why I really liked RainbowChin's suggestion. It allows players to purchase what they want. Just cosmetics, Just supporter or Both! I like Utopia being open for all players to visit. I also greatly enjoy the quiet atmosphere that is created by requiring a supporter status to have a homestead there. I hope this can remain the same. I greatly appreciate all of you at the Empire for bringing ideas to the players and getting our input whenever possible. It really helps the Empire stand out from other servers. It helps us as players feel like a bigger part of the community we all love.
YES! very unclear. Even if it is removed from BungeeCord and classified as a different server - Vault/rupees/Xp/etc. All cause potential problems. Definitely intentional. RIGHT NOW, we have to focus on what to give our paying members; but in a months time - we want to switch back to general community development work.
I like the idea of a family plan package deal or a plan for people with alt accounts. The most important perk I would like to see bundled in a family plan is the protection from derelict.
Here is another idea for fundraising. You could make an item like a flower with the lore of "Donator's Flower" or a Thank you for donating book with some history of EMC that you only receive for making a one time donation, maybe even just a dollar or two. A lot of EMC players really love collectables so you might be able to raise some money, especially if the items were sold limited time only and maybe only sold once or twice a year. The item could be soulbound or otherwise set so that it could not be used in game, therefore it would have no game affecting perks. I don't think this would violate the EULA and might be a way to boost revenue.
hmm, thinking about it, can do something like "Add another player to your subscription", to do multiple people over 1 subscription, and that would then also give a discount per name added. 1st = 20 2nd = 17.5 3rd = 15 4th = 12.5 5th= 10 giving a 25$ discount.
The concept was discount for multiple in general, say 5% as I described above, so yes it would also be able to apply to Supporter only too, and even cosmetic.
I could forsee people in game trying to get a group of people together to take advantage of this- without being family. I guess it's not such a big deal but I can see people scamming in the game over people not paying their share with family plans.
This was my first thought. The only way I can think of to eliminate this is to limit the number of accounts you can add on. I think Aikar mentioned 5 accounts in his post. If it was capped there then you'd limit the number of people who could do this. Keep in mind too that those people would have to keep getting along with the person with the main account, otherwise they could be removed at any time. Limiting accounts to certain IPs had occured to me, but there are problems with that too... people who don't have static IPs, families who don't live under the same roof, people connecting while on vacation, etc etc. IP tracking might be able to be used to determine whether it seems like many people are taking advantage and the discount could be adjusted accordingly or eliminated in the future depending on results.
You could just allow friends grouping together, but RL scamming is your own risk and not staff's involvement at all.
it would be simple to only check that the 2 accounts have both logged in from same IP recently. If your buying supporter for your family.... its not hard to get everyone to login from the same IP real quick to register it. It wouldn't need to 'lock' it to after the subscription starts. while even friends working together to get a discount wouldnt be too bad either, theres too much risk of people complaining "they didnt pay me for their share, can i get refund or drop them off my sub?"
I think of a couple of exceptions to this. Some families are spread out, so you would be limiting it to those who were close enough to at least be in one location for an initial log-on. For example, the kid who's at college or the military husband. This still wouldn't prevent friends who lived in close proximity to do the same thing. But what about people who have a falling out. When their friend that allowed them on their supporter account boots them off.... Then you might have a larger incidence (or unforseeable fluctuation) in loss of supporter subscriptions. I could see people even quitting EMC over something like this. Preventing this from happening at all might be the better choice?
That really isn't a bad thing. I feel like a group of local friends who are going to get supporter together with a discount would be better for the server overall rather than them gravitating towards what they could see as a better deal on another server. Any system is going to have its flaws. Some will be too lenient about the requirements, some will be too strict. In reality the only true way to get a near perfect system would be to require legal proof of relation status. And I say near perfect because I suspect that there will be countries that don't have such a system. What we want is a system that is too strict. That will prevent abuse, but since the admin are in fact human, they can try to make up for the strictness. If a military spouse needs the discount, I am sure that the admin would be willing to accommodate them. Well that is too bad for them. If they are just going to abandon ship over an internal feud with a friend, then they are going to quit quickly anyway. I have seen that hundreds of times.
