Thank you, Geniuses!

[smurr]

Just started here, and wanted to thank the staff of this wonderful shard for making the choice not to have a reward system. I've played many other shards, and always wondered why people didn't see that without replicating the economy, you cannot replicate the shard. Injecting hundreds of millions of gold, and thousands of 7x balls into a server will cripple it. When starting from scratch, the game is so much more difficult, and thus more rewarding.

Thanks for taking the path less traveled. I'll try to make a donation ASAP

[Daolin]

make a donation for me too. This shard rocks!

[Derrick]

Thanks guys.
I also do believe that injecting things into the economy would ruin the shard fast, and we never intend to do this.
The flip side of that is of course that it's a lot harder to raise money to cover the costs of the shard. The selfless donations are much appreciated. Info on making a contribution is available here:
http://www.uosecondage.com/Donate.aspx

Welcome to Second Age guys. I'm glad you're enjoying it!

[Kryptonical]

Hey Derrick just a thought but maybe you could make a stickied thread that highlights some of what you do and costs associated with it. not necessarily a "please help donate" but just an overview 30,000 foot view of what some of the costs and time allocated goes into the making of this shard.

May even get people to realize how much work is actually put into this and hopefully get them to donate whatever they can.

p.s. maybe just put a little blurb on the homepage, then link to that donation link? (just ideas)

[Derrick]

Not a bad idea. I've always been really hesitant to push donation too much, as my only goal is to cover costs.
Or costs are really pretty simple, we lease a server in a data-center in Toronto which is a fixed quarterly charge paid in advance. We do google ad-words for advertising when we have a surplus, and we usually buy a banner on Gamesites200, both of which are the way most new players seem to find us.

We recently added the google search engine at the top of forums which provides ads which are another potential source of revenue, but it's likely going to be small. I think in brought in about $1.55 last week

The primary source of funding is 7 or 8 players per month who donate, most regular contributors.
No amount is too little, if you've got even a dollar or two kicking around as change in your paypal account it'd be much appreciated.

Thanks again for the interest!

[Teknix]

a donation day(s) might be an idea to think about....

[Sulta]

After reading this thread I decided to donate...wish I could donate more. I misunderstood when I first started playing UOSA and thought that all donations were going towards advertising...If I would have known from the start that it was also covering server costs also I would have donated as soon as I knew I was going to be playing here long term.

I don't know what I read that made me think that all donations went towards advertising...but maybe I'm not the only one to have that wrong.