Low Overhead Guild Funding - Your thoughts?

[Redrobes]

As a person who creates and charges for an RPG product I think I can say, with some considerable conviction, that putting a price on something will significantly diminish the number of people wanting it. And yet at the same time when there are costs involved its hard to keep going when its costing. Ideally there would be no charge and no costs. But the realms of fantasy are limited to our maps however and the real world does annoyingly get in the way.

Basically on this site there is a spread of people who contribute to those who take everything and it would be good for those who contribute to get something and for those who net take to have to give something. Its very hard to implement tho unless some big corp like google is doing the giving. Younger people are unable to make payments of any sort even if its small change. The best you might be able to do is with mobile phone texts & premium rate call lines but that's very hard or voluntary. Also, credit card and paypal payments are hard to administer too in small volume but is probably the best option for a direct source.

In order to persuade people to give over hard cash I think they do expect hard copies and that a print of a map is definitely the best way forward. most games shops that I have chatted to still say that lead and paint are the main source of RPG revenue not books and modules. A guild shop with print options would be cool. We could have a challenge to make a miniature / wargaming tabletop poster and see if people would buy them for play. What about selling Tee / Polo / Rugby / Football / shirts or Caps or similar logo infested gear for showing off at conventions. If possible you could restrict certain items to people who have submitted a number of maps, have enough rep or have won challenges / awards etc.

I can donate my latest challenge entry which is at poster res. Some of my challenge entries were fairly high res too - enough for printing. Or I can do some poster sized campaign terrain maps or something like that and we split the proceeds between creator, printer costs and hosting subs.

I think you should have a poll which I would hope a lot of cloaked and new members would vote on for what type of physical stuff they want the most assuming it was fair priced. Or even what they currently spend their RPG coin on.

Alternatively would it be possible to host it all on a local server and pay just for a high speed connection to the net instead of the hosting of it too. You will have to see what kind peak IO you would need and whether that was worth it. Or maybe mirror some of the bigger images onto other already connected servers to spread the costs out.

[JoeyD473]

I definately think going with a permanent donation button is a great way to start. If you put up a note in the news section when the hosting bill ocmes up a note in the news (Like torstan said) people will donate at least a little bit.

With a paid subscription you need to offer something fo rit. I think this site is great I check it basically daily (eventhough I rarely post (A happy Lurker I am)) the only thing the site offers of value to me s the forums, and the tutorials. I personally will never pay just to be able to use a message board. As for the tutorials, I believe it is one of the greatest draws to get people here initially, however if you charge for them you won't get many new people to the site.

The cafe press type merchandise is a good idea but I don't think you would get much out of it.

Another idea, though I don't know how low overhead or popular it would be (probably not to popular) , is maybe create somesort of map pack. Maybe once once a year, a pack with all the winning maps from the monthly challenges in a single download for one or two dollars (would obviously require winners permission or new rules to be inserted into the challenges allowing you to do this). Along with this idea maybe something can be worked out with gameprinter for this map pack to be professionally printed and shipped.

[Sigurd]

A donation button has one over-riding advantage. Being optional you have no bad feelings and only gratitude.

Really, who can object to seeing the thing?

Sigurd.

The only real companion advice, I'm sure you follow. Keep the costs as low as possible.


I'd love to see some sort of 'Map to benfit Cartographers Guild' project. I don't know how it would work but for instance if ICE wanted a bundle of maps I'd be ready to work for nothing if I thought the site made some dough.

In some ways splitting the 'pay' for a map collection is depressing. I'd rather only donate some fun work and see the Guild get a few bucks.


Sigurd

[Sagenlicht]

Hmm well I am gonna add my thoughts as well then

I would suggest starting with a perm donation button Arcana and lets see how it will be accepted. I dont think that a yearly fee will be that accepted and in the end will keep new users away.

A perm donation button wont be a long term solution I guess, cause most people will just donate once or at least thats what I would assume.

For a long term incoming something like GP's offer sounds great.

[Robbie]

Well, the people have spoken. Expect to see a trial donation button soon.

I sent an email to GP, but apparently for some reason my phone isn't sending mail, only receiving mail, so he hasn't got it yet...I'll be rectifying that later today.

I REALLY appreciate all your thoughts on this, and I'm definitely glad I asked as opposed to just doing it. All of your membership and participation means a lot to me, and I definitely don't' want to jeopardize it with money issues for sure.

[Sigurd]

One thing that occurs to me.

Its very hard to draw the line at incentives to be a member. There is a magic level of involvement here that is worth protecting but I can see that this thing should be self sustaining for the long term.


Can you track total uploads?


If you could track uploaded material and put a limit on non members you would do a couple of things at once.

1. You'd address the long term costs of the site by affecting bandwidth and storage. I don't know how much but...

2. You could allow anyone to contribute. They would potentially stop contributing after they had to pay for the privilege or they'd need a way to go back and clean up some of their uploads.

3. You could add a carrot to competing in contests. All contest entries (or just the top 10 or something) would have their uploads deducted from their map folder total allowance.

I don't think new members would see the limits to be discouraged. Old members would have a little prod to buy memberships.

I have no clue about the nuts and bolts or what the levels would be. There's no perfect solution but...

What do you think?


Sigurd

[Redrobes]

Wouldn't you want to encourage (quality) uploads and discourage downloads. Its the uploads that drive people to the site generating interest and the potential of ad revenues. Its like a shop limiting you to buying only 10 items.

Is it possible to work out whether its actual image views or the attachment thumbs that's causing the issue. Some very long pages with lots of WIPs like tutorials take a while to load in and must be soaking up the bandwidth. Can you tell vBulletin to show the thumb attachments smaller or compress them more ? Or convert all those large inline thread images to attachments ?

What would be ideal is to have more than two levels of view. The mini thumbnail is too small to appraise somebody's map but then getting the full 2K square one in is also ridiculous most of the time. Ideally you want a smaller thumb - right down at the 128 pixel sort of size, a mid size which is about half a screen and then click for saving to HD sorta size which you could reserve for certain members - paid up, with a high enough submission to download ratio, or have a monthly bandwidth cap.

CGTextures have a daily download limit which works pretty well. Their textures are free which is why I support them and upload mine to the site but if your a paid member then you can go mad and download a lot more. Actually, thinking about it, they have a three tiered image res view too.

What I think Arcana needs to do is to figure out where its all going first of all. Presumably images. So are they inline or click through type ? Maybe up the max allowable size of JPG's and lower PNGs to reserve them for tokens and stuff. Ban BMPs and other uncompressed image types.

You can also tell apache to compress normal html and the web browsers should uncompress it on the fly. Sometimes that is turned off for compatibility with really old web browsers but that would make a difference too.

P.S. Like the new avatar Arcana - but then I liked the old one too.

[Robbie]

actually there's no talk of limiting anything. No need even, we're not hurting on bandwidth or server space at all. The hosting costs that snuck up on me as I said were not unpayable...just unexpected at the time of year. I pay for my hosting in 2 year bursts...all the bandwidth we used for the past 2 years was included in the yearly costs...

The subscription option was only going to allow for extra benefits to subscribers, no additional limitations would ever be imposed on existing members...

BUT...there's not going to be a subscription at this time...the vote has spoken. So no worries.

PS: Thanks for liking the avatar I enjoyed makin it

[Robbie]

The donation system is in place now. There's a donate button on the navbar in blue. The donation system SHOULD add you to a Donors group and the Donor usertitle should be visible. You may need to go to your UserCP and allow for that UserTitle to be visible after donating is confirmed.

If anyone has any problems with the donation system please let me know, and thank you in advance to any potential donors!

[Ascension]

Well crud. I don't have any credit cards nor do I have a bank account so I'm wondering what the alternatives are for me...other than just driving down there and handing ya a wad of cash. No, I don't live in a cave...it's a long story...mainly about making sure that my nieces have a wonderful life free from worry.