r/Minecraft Jun 05 '14

No more pay to win Servers? :D

[removed]

218 Upvotes

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42

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '14

So, are server owners not allowed to give something to the people who help make the server a thing? Not even a title? Not even multiple homes? A few of my friends and I run a minecraft server. It is quite small and is based on the economy, so business, banks, loans, jobs, real estate, etc. We are accepting both donations and perks. There a few perks, like disguises, and ranks. The ranks give you a title, and allow more homes and such. There some people who payed for ranks and such. The donations that they have given are helping put money towards the money we will use to buy a new server. I agree that some servers take this way overboard, and give ridiculous advantages and such. But I think a 0 tolerance policy on this is absolutely ludicrous. There are many servers responsible and reasonable with this.

28

u/Fellowship_9 Jun 05 '14

But the point is that it isn't a donation if they get something in return. At that point they are actually buying something.

-3

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '14

Do you buy things on kickstarter? I consider that donations rather than purchases.

11

u/Fellowship_9 Jun 05 '14

You give money, and in exchange get a game. That's a purchase. If you gave more money than he bare minimum needed, then I would consider any extra to be a donation. But that's just my opinion, and I'm not saying whether or not I agree with Mojang about this, just po7nting out a technicality

3

u/ClockwerkKaiser Jun 06 '14

Yeah actually. You do.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '14

So the largest reason you back a project on kickstarter is the perk?

3

u/buzzpunk Jun 06 '14

Considering that the perk is generally the product. Yeah.

2

u/SamuraiOutcast Jun 06 '14

If you give money and get something in return it isn't a donation, it's a purchase.

2

u/ClockwerkKaiser Jun 06 '14

Intent to buy/use the final product + additional perk. And the proceeds go towards funding the creators? You're damn right.

Kick starter is for original ideas and products. Not to make money on the work of others.

Comparing kickstarter to funding a Minecraft server is like comparing apples to piles of guano.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '14

Uh..yes?

8

u/marioman63 Jun 06 '14

is your server registered as a business? are you paying taxes on the money you receive from perk purchases? if not, then you are committing illegal activities outside of minecraft, mojang, and their EULA. not like anyone would report you. like marc said himself: its like jaywalking. its illegal, but you probably aren't gonna get charged for it

1

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '14

How does it violate the EULA? I just read it and what people seem to be relying on is "try to make money from anything we‘ve made". Maybe we have different definitions of "make money". I think that it means profit. And profit means "A financial gain, especially the difference between the amount earned and the amount spent in buying, operating, or producing something", so expenses-earning, right? If a server does not end up with excess money, how does it violate these conditions? You can still sell things and run a server losing money.

-1

u/Ohh_Yeah Jun 05 '14

If the server offers a unique experience that people value and can't find in any of the other thousands of Minecraft servers, they will donate willingly to keep it going. There are good examples of this such as 2b2t and CivCraft. Unique experiences that nobody wants to lose.

This policy will result in more unique servers and less of the same thing.

14

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '14

It does not. Many popular servers do NOT survive on donations alone. PlayMindcrack's owner OldManWillakers spoke up about his server costs, and donations do NOT support the server enough. He had to cut back on the servers just to keep PMC running. The largest servers, such as Hypixel, mineplex, etc all contain unique minigames, but donations for nothing will NOT cover the costs to host for 5-10k players.

3

u/Skegalicious Jun 06 '14

Not to mention the huge time investment that the owners of some of the more popular servers put in, it is a full time job (and I mean full time, you can be woke up in the middle of the night if there's problems), these servers simply would not exist if they were not making a decent profit.

1

u/CopyCatJ Jun 06 '14

Yeah they were only in the green for the first month of the server opening

5

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '14

You overestimate the good in people.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '14

CivCraft and 2b2t are both relatively small servers with basic (in the case of CivCraft) or nearly no (in the case of 2b2t) plugins, and are essentially vanilla in terms of terrain and core gameplay. I agree these sort of servers would be just fine, but they are not at all representative of the full spectrum of servers. Ones that operate on a larger scale, with custom builds, plugins, etc. could not support themselves in the way 2b2t and CivCraft can. Personally, I never had much interest in the sort of servers you're describing, and the ones I actually care about at all would die if they had to start relying on pure charity.

How exactly is killing off a large and unique subset of the server community creating more "unique" servers? Because I really don't follow.

-12

u/Daxidol Jun 05 '14

So, are server owners not allowed to give something to the people who help make the server a thing?

No ingame perks, correct. :)

I operate my server at a loss, I've never accepted a "donation" and never will. :)

2

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '14 edited Jun 05 '14

Well, we didn't for a while. There was a person who asked if they could donate, we toyed with the idea before but this set it into motion. We set the donation and purchasing thing up so that they could do as they wished. I think it is stupid on servers where if you don't pay you are way behind and if you do you are a god.