..about all these game servers that are using "donations", which is basically charging players for anything that is not able to be made in game. I want to ask Eleon how in the heck can they sit by and have multiplayer servers making money off of players, when virtually no other game allows this, and this game is still in alpha and not even released? Does Eleon actually care about the integrity of their game, and perception? And are they aware that a game that is perceived to be "pay 2 win" is a huge turn-off for a lot of PC gamers? I am just trying to figure out how a game company can even be allowing this to take place. Of course I cannot see the number of people that play this game in single player, but based off multiplayer servers....the player following is surprisingly LOW. Especially when you take the closest game like Empyrion, which is Space Engineers, and look at the numbers they have for multiplayer, which is magnitudes more than this game. I would like to hear an official stance from Eleon about these servers. Personally, it will help me decide on how this community will either flourish in the future, or continue to be a very small niche market.
A server taking donations and providing things for those donations IS NOT automatically pay 2 win. Pay 2 win is more like if a server removed the option for players to craft ammo and made it so you have to pay real money to get your ammo. That is pay 2 win. Look at HWS servers and their donation options, this is how legal donation perks are supposed to work. They are completely above the board. Pay 2 win is already against the terms of service with Eleon. If you truly know of a P2W server then report it.
I played for several months on a Server which actually was "bought" by the Owner to provide us, the Group Members with a chance to play on it even with our own TS Channel. He ASKED us to help him provide the monthly fee he had to pay or that Server. He asked for $1.- per month but was happy with any donation we would be willing to spend. He is a generous guy and he plays alot of stuff and I see no point why that should not be legit to ASK for helping him providing a server FOR US, the Players of the Group. And Yes, there are, most likely, other Server Owners out there who think otherwise. My 2cts
You may be interested in another thread in-depth discussing this. Rather than going over this topic again, consider searching for it.
It's also not cheap to run good servers. The two HWS servers exceed $450 USD/ month. https://forum.empyrion-homeworld.net/t/server-hardware-and-cost/4357 Then also factor in that a good (overworked) admin may be putting in hundreds/thousands of hours of their own personal time just managing the server and helping players. They are 100% within their right to ask for donations to help alleviate their costs. In case you haven't given it a read yet, Eleon actually has Server Monetisation Rules set forth. http://empyriongame.com/server-monetisation-rules/
No one requires donations to play on their servers. However it does cost money to run a server, so I don't think it should be surprising that some of them ask for donations. They are totally voluntary, but their use is necessary for some of the larger servers to stay open, unless they wanted to just find the whole thing out of pocket. No server is pay to win whatsoever.
Just look at WoW... First, you buy the game for 60€.. then you pay monthly 20€ to play what you just bought… If you stop paying, you (have to) stop playing… But that is fine.. coz it is a hughe company.. Right? According to the definition you apply to EGS Servers, this is P2W as well. Because if you do not pay (EVERY month!!), you cannot Play. I have 2700 hrs in empyrion, ingame... This does not count the endless hours i've spent working on the Scenarios. (Though, I admit it is not 2700 hrs, but 500-700 hrs at the very least. -- and it does NOT look/behave nearly as good as i'd like to! -> spending another hundreds of hours work into that… more aint more fun...) Or pre-drawing the ships i've built. Now admin work is (can be) even worse. First you spend hours to set it up, then you have to pay the bills (either your own Energy bill, or those from the Company you've rent the Server from), then… every new Player who has no idea what he's doing is asking the very same Questions again and again and again…. Then you have the game beeing BETA.. which means unstable.. which means lots of fix'ing stuff.. For almost EVERY update, the server needs a manual 'check' just to be sure. You know, there are People.. for example at Blizzard, that do just that, and get payed for it. Here with EGS, Server owners/admins do this in their 'free' time, they do not 'play' in the time they help 'you' (the Player), nor do they get payed. I've seen People doing ALOT less work and asking for thousends of $… All i've seen so far, are server owners asking for voluntary dontations (free choice of amount, anything starting from 1$ and up). This said… Either you start helping the server owners to make their servers better, or give them a donation. Either of which, but they deserve some assistance. Dunno, seems to have hit a nerve of mine… My 2 cent.
A subscription-based server (that is explicitly closed to non-subscribers and that charges each subscriber the same fee) should be just fine. A donation-based server that doesn't treat those that donate materially different from non-donators should also be fine. Where I feel it gets murky is when there are rewards/perks for donations (private planets, and such) that do have an impact on gameplay. I personally still think all such servers should be distinctly labeled in the server browser, as it would make it easy enough to blacklist servers that aren't abiding by the labeling requirements (and trying to masquerade as no-perk donation-based). Everyone has their own line for what kind of received perks in exchange for donations count as P2W or not; it seems simplest to avoid trying to draw that line and instead explicitly highlight servers that give no perks, and let players sort out whether they want to play on servers that do give perks.
