That action doesn't necessarily mean giving away money you don't have, mind you. I've written on the subject before, and I'd like you to read it before continuing this discussion. Now, that article is targetted at people who take free software, change the name and about dialog, and then try to pass it off as their own, or at least is about them. So the examples don't apply, but the gist of it does.
When I last looked at the service, I rejected signing up for it on these grounds, actually. I wasn't interested in having what was essentially a shared hosting service, I've been burned by enough shared web hosting services and I *know* that a gameserver needs more room on a machine than a web site.antix wrote:good question Lucifer, ok, since the servers arn't too expensive, they are not dedicated, but the servers cpu is always in the idle(meaning not overloaded)
and the bandwidth is well taken care of)
So what I'm interested in seeing, then is actual benchmarks when the machine is under load. I'd like to see pings as well, but MBC shows me decent pings. The problem is that MBC isn't very much fun to me, so I don't play there often enough to find out how good your service really is, and I get fairly well bogged down with how much I dislike that particular server to really try it out.
So basically, what I want to see is something that indicates that being in a shared environment won't be a problem.
I would tend to look for something a little more permanent.I could run a test server and login for developers only (just temporary of course)
I would really like to help out the cause.
If it were my game server, I'd want fairly complete control over the software itself. Now, we don't have any way to add third-party code to the server without compiling it in. It would make a really nice service offering for you if we did, because then you could support (and possibly develop and/or host an archive of) third-party scripting in the game. That would make a reasonable compromise to me between your need to pick and choose which version of the server you'll host and my need to be able to choose what the server is capable of doing. And before anybody jumps in with "nobody else does that!", I'd like to remind you all that "everybody's doing it" doesn't mean anything to me, unless you want me to sneer at you. But there are some things you can do. For one, I've been assuming so far that you don't make any money off MBC, and that MBC is your only armagetron server. If that assumption isn't correct, then I'd like to see some sort of record of actual donations you've made, since if that assumption isn't correct then you should have a record of where you've kept to your commitment on the matter.
Another is that when we get the master server setup to be distributed, you could offer to host one. I'm sure the bandwidth and CPU usage on the master server is very small, and even then you'd be sharing it with me and z-man, and possibly Tank as well. (I think swampy was even offering at one point to host one, but I don't remember exactly)
A third would be to offer a free server to the community that's not as disliked as MBC.
I get the impression you guys are funding this venture out of your own pocket, and some simple number-crunching based on what the site tells me tells me that you're not profitable enough to be making a living off it, and I am fully aware of what that situation is like and how it limits you in what you can offer at any point in time. But I'm also fully aware of a number of players who have asked me what I thought of the service, received the standard "I don't know" (because I don't know), and then decided not to go with it because the service was too much of an unknown to them. ANd whenever I've pointed out that MBC was hosted by you guys, the general response has been "then we don't want anything to do with them."
I'll tell you what, MBC has carved out a nasty reputation. Which is a shame because there are some good players over there that are a lot of fun, but tend to get poorly treated on other servers. I'm not trying to knock the guy for running it his way, because I certainly enjoy running my server my way, I'm just saying what I've seen. And to me, that's not a particularly good starting point to try to market to the audience we have here. On the other hand, if you were to be able to offer a server to be run in a manner that is fairly consistent with some of the servers that have carved out good reputations (and there are many), and if you were to be able to let the project here run it, then you'd have a different public face to the players.
I'm not trying to tell you how to run your business, either.
You do what you want to do. You're certainly running a business that I myself have considered starting on my own, but could never put together enough time to justify pursuing it (have to put food on the table first, you know). But I've been around here enough to get the general feel of what people are willing to pay for, what they're not willing to pay for, and how they make their decisions. (Here's a hint, no matter how many tell you they'd donate and/or buy a t-shirt, no one will)
