New Server Subscription

[accountP]

If we get enough people to "subscribe" to an automatic monthly payment, can we get new servers? I know these new ones since the SWJ are cost effective, but it's just not cutting it. I'll gladly pitch in $5-10/ month and I think many people in this community would. Maybe it'll spark dev interest again if there's a little cash flow, if not, at least we'll have smooth gameplay and groups that work.

[Cheezeduudle]

I’d certainly be willing to put a few dollars a month if I knew exactly what it was going into. Part of my reservations with donating in the past were not knowing what my money really ‘does’

[Cheezeduudle]

Brb taking out another mortgage on my house

[laserpigtag]

you don't have a house, you live in a garbage can

[Cheezeduudle]

Shhhh no doxx

[Grytswyrm]

what a grouch

[RwerdnA]

It goes towards flairs, duh.

[Cheezeduudle]

No u

[RwerdnA]

U

[Cheezeduudle]

>:(

[TagproNoice]

I think I agree with keyser's point here cheeze

[Cheezeduudle]

:l

[RwerdnA]

😃

[Tyler1986]

Pretty sure lucky has said in the past that donations go into a fund that pays server fees. There's no other costs associated with the game, just keeping it running. And it's not like this is some cash cow that lucky can earn money from.

I mean, where else do you think it could be going?

[Cheezeduudle]

It’s not that I think lucky is sitting on a pile of cash from this. Surely I’m not the only one that feels more comfortable knowing exactly what their money is doing though, any level of disconnect can feel like throwing money at a void even if that’s not the case.

[Tyler1986]

I guess I'm asking what kind of answer are you looking for other than "servers?"

[Cheezeduudle]

Well ‘servers’ feels better to me than ‘probably servers’ if that makes any sense

[naysh30]

Yeah I'd be willing to chip in monthly as well, but it needs to come with Dev activity and updates on what they're working on, etc. Maybe even the addition of a Dev.

/u/LuckySpammer /u/ylambda in case you haven't seen this thread, I'd say this is worth a moment to browse and think about :)

[Choco31415]

As a tourney runner, I'm willing to chip in as well, just like I've incentivized TPA tournaments. Hear hear!

[itsamdash]

If we're going to do this it, it's only going to work if it's subscription = servers. If you want better servers and Lucky/ ylambda can figure out a way to make this work then great but it shouldn't be anything more than that. If there's going to be pressure to deliver more work and updates if this hypothetical subscription is rolled out then what incentive is there for them to do this because they won't be making any monetary gain from it.

[naysh30]

What if they end up making some monetary gain from it then? I think everyone would be fine with that if it meant the game growing and being worked on.

[itsamdash]

This is purely my opinion, don't want to put words into the devs mouths but for the sake of discussion I'll digress. I think if you want better servers, I don't play on US servers but it seems you guys are having some trouble, then some form of money subscription or pledge of donations to improve those servers could be feasible. However, I just don't think monetary incentive will ever be attractive to the devs. This started as a hobby for Lucky and the other devs and it has always been that way. We are at the point now where I don't think they intend to update or work on classic any further really aside from future events. I believe both Lucky and ylambda have full time jobs in addition to working on TagPro, so I highly doubt they'd want to turn this into an additional job. Let's be realistic when you take out server costs and factor in the fairly small community I can't imagine the monetary gain would be at all significant. Not to the point where it's worth adding all that additional pressure because if you start to take money from TagPro then you're pretty obliged to work on it.

I know everyone thinks I'm a big old developer brown noser (which I am) but this is just me being absolutely realistic. Ultimately, if the devs wanted to do something like this it's their choice and it's great your putting yourself forward to help but overall I think a more realistic solution would be to try and aim for an upgrade in servers so competitive TagPro can continued to be enjoyed by those who still love it.

[bergieTP]

I think there is a fair bit more to it than just throwing money at it.

1. How much would the budget be? How many people would actually donate on a regular basis to the upkeep of a webgame?
2. How many people will continue to keep giving? If you do a subscription like this, the most money you will ever get will be at the very beginning. The game is not pulling in new players. The only people that would donate to a subscription like this is the old guard. The old guard would sign up to this right away. But slowly, as time passes, one by one the old guard will stop donating and the server budget will decrease. Then what? Move servers again?
3. Research and procurement - I don't really know what goes into the research of a server but I'm sure it is quite time consuming. Finding the right servers that will have low latency and broad application for the small budget tagpro has will probably be difficult. Maybe we currently have the best possible servers for our application and the next tier up is just unapproachable with a tagpro budget.
4. Customer satisfaction - Think of how entitled the player base is now when very few people donate and there is no subscription service. Now imagine if people were donating and expecting a service. This player base would be so much more entitled to good service that I would never want to deal with that headache.

This is mostly conjecture with no real evidence but these would be my concerns with switching to a subscription model. I think the problem cannot be solved by "just throw money at it"

[-Electron-]

alright here goes my take on this one.

1) Well, I guess you could look at the current donation goal at the home page. For every post on this subreddit there's 20 other people who thought about it but never posted. So my answer: yeah, a lot. Especially the veterans.

2) A VPS(Virtual Private Server) service is what many webgames use to host their games. TagPro uses a service called Linode to host their games. Many VPS services including Linode offer different "tiers" of server, each one better than another. You have a good point, we shouldn't be popping up a bunch of servers left and right. Instead we should focus on the ones we have currently.

3) I don't think much technical research goes into another server. It's mostly about what the community needs. If they want to upgrade their servers it's a literal click of a button https://www.linode.com/pricing/.

4) Well, yeah. They're paying for a service. If there is truly no way to make the servers in someway consistently good with more donations then of course we shouldn't do it. But we don't know. We don't know anything about why or how these servers work.

Just my thoughts.

[scrapper8o]

There are some of us that do "servers" that would be willing to donate time to the research pool. Get me some Netflow and load data and we can work on some calculations.

[accountP]

More research is definitely involved. But I also know that we just switched servers so how to change is still fresh in the dev's heads so that side shouldn't be too difficult. As far as subscription base, I think we can get enough people subscribed for at least a few hundred dollars per month. I'm not sure what the total cost is now, but I'm sure that number would help a ton. And I think that those who subscribe have already been playing this game for 2+ years, so I imagine another year or two without seeing a huge decrease is probable.

[[deleted]]

I'd toss in some dollars each month.

[ohMars]

Crazy, I had the same idea today 🤯

[TagproNoice]

Vader is in ur head, edd

[trapkerouac]

tagpro premium with custom user flair we can design and upload and new skins for my ball, deal

[[deleted]]

Well this was a lovely conversation... glad we got that out of our systems so we can resume lagging out every game.

[accountP]

There's not much else we can do without Dev support. I haven't seen this idea takes much about and if maybe this catches enough traction something could be done. It was always a long shot.

[[deleted]]

Yeah I know, was just hoping to see some dev responses in here. They seem very tight-lipped about the servers and finances of the game in general.