06-26-2014, 06:24 PM
(06-26-2014, 05:56 PM)puggsoy Wrote: If it was a paid account (regularly paid, not one-off) then you wouldn't have to sit through ads since your payment would probably be put towards hosting, which is the very purpose of ads.
I don't find it a necessarily bad idea, but the existence of a "premium" membership could cause people who aren't part of that feel inferior, or vice versa ("premium" members may feel superior) which could give the place a less friendly atmosphere.
A free system of watching a certain amount of ads to download a certain number of sheets is maybe better. But either way, I think what Dazz said about an automated script destroying the server would still be valid, payment/ads or not (correct me if I'm wrong, I don't exactly understand what he means).
You are correct on all fronts. First of all, I'm pretty sure Dazz and I have discussed premium accounts in the past (not in reference to implementing them - just about them in general) and agreed that it wasn't the best way to go about things for exactly the reason you said - it alienates people. From my own perspective, it brings the "pay to win" mentality that I so despise in modern gaming to one of my own projects and that's something that wouldn't sit well with me.
More importantly though, this isn't an issue of revenue - it's an issue of resources. Believe it or not, we actually already have the system you're requesting in place but it's temporary and limited to only those participating in the icon renovation. Even in this limited environment, we've run into some issues with the script failing on larger games. Trying to release a feature that's already problematic to a tiny portion of our user base out to the public only invites disaster.
For the curious, the issue we're seeing with this feature is that the script basically takes too long to build the zip file for very large games. The easy solution is to simply increase the limit for processing time but doing so then adds the risk of overloading the server as more and more people attempt to use long-running scripts. So, short of investing in infrastructure far beyond the scope of this project to handle load balancing, there's simply no feasible way to make this happen.