Monthly Financial Report

[jasonh]

Is it plausible/possible for a transparent monthly report on server costs? I primarily ask this for two reasons:
a) as this is run by donations, it is only fair to those who donate to have a good faith report.
b) the server has experienced lag and other issues since test server was brought online. If the donations will support it, I would have no argument against moving test.

FWIW, I am also completely in favor of Ed/staff recovering costs incurred during the early existence of the server prior to any further investment, for example in a separate test center.

[Cynar]

That's primarily up to Ed. This server is currently supplemented by donations, not run by donations. If more people donated I could see this happening. As it stands we have a small handful of players that regularly donate or who have made a sizable donation.

As far as recovering money, the money I have donated was an investment in the survival of the game on this server. The time and money I have spent here was just for that purpose and I want nothing in return, nor reimbursement.

[BigQEd]

Honestly, no one is forced to donate. You are donating to help keep the server in operation and help us recover costs. There was a long period in which I supported the server out of my own pocket and thankfully in recent months the player base has been gracious enough to donate enough to cover our costs. It is appreciated but we are far from even, from the start.

Think about this... SWGEMU to this day still does not disclose a "balance sheet" (after 10 years in operation) and I highly doubt they ever will, and I can promise you they bring in MUCH more than Awakening. I can only imagine their intake over the years and their costs are very similar to ours. Their expenses would be very similar... servers for operations ... yet they bring in 10x the amount of Awakening.

As for LAG... let's not confuse what causes lag. Our server is actually higher specs than SWGEMU's. You can thank the Public Engine for the odd lag spikes and issues for the most part. We have seen issues that can be directly tracked back to the Public Engine and its restrictions that cost us resources and require constant server tweaks to overcome those issues. If you truly want to resolve said issues, the best thing you can do as a player is post for the release of the Full Engine to private servers.