Incentive Program For Donations Idea
 

Hello all. I was doing some brainstorming with my brother a little while ago and I came up with a really neat idea. First and foremost, we are all lucky to be able to have a place where we can re live our Original EverQuest fantasies. I understand that as an emulator, all property belongs to Sony and therefore can not be profited from. HOWEVER, I thought it would be terrific to maybe implement an incentive program to get people to donate. For example, if a member donates X amount of dollars, he/she may be entitled to a "Title" in game or possibly a random piece of GM Event Gear. I think it would be a great way to light a fire under some people's asses to donate. Some may argue, well you should donate anyway since the reward is playing on this server. I understand that, but unfortunately most people do not think that way. In no means do I think this should turn into being able to purchase mounts or armor as you can in WoW, that's just stupid, but I think it would give people that extra motivation to WANT to donate. Would love to hear people's thoughts on this.

No. The dev's cant give anything back in the game for donations or it just gets messy. Look at all the people that bitched about the pantheon kickstarter and the dev's werent even getting that cash. There will never be a incentive's program to donate because it's not allowed.

Well maybe it could be a random CHANCE that you may be "rewarded." Not something that has to happen all the time. My apologies if it is not allowed, I thought maybe this would be a way around it and a way for the people who put so much into this to be able to live a bit more comfortably.

You don't understand: this server exists in a legal gray area, and a key part of keeping SOE from suing it out of existence is keeping it non-profit (or at least not-for-profit). Giving out rewards for donations could quite literally cause the end of this server.

Besides, your claims to the contrary, plenty of people donate with no reward whatsoever. Just based on how many times I've seen some claim to have donated on this forum I think the devs are doing just fine on the current donation flow.

The people who make this server CANT take any money that is donated for personal gains or they risk being sued by SoE. All the donations they get now are for hardware/server fees. I'm sure if they were spending alot out of their pockets to keep the servers up we would be hearing more about donations.

Yeah, what they said. Nein.

True. I donated $100 yesterday with no incentive. Just wasn't sure if they were allowed to do it. My bad. But I agree, people should be donating without reward.

There are EQ servers out there that do give rewards for donations and have been doing so for some time (such as Shards of Dalaya, which is around 10 years old). As long as players are not required to pay to play I'm not sure what grounds there would be for recourse.

That being said, the reason rewards for donations are opposed on this server is more of a philosophical one rather than a practical one. People want to play mostly-classic EQ without seeing lvl 10s dressed in neon-colored armor riding around on mounts.

I always thought it would be neat for something like the following: (Which is hardly game breaking at all, and yes I know not classic.)

$5.00 a month - 1 exp potion that lasts for 1 hour at double experience. (Account Bound)
$10.00 a month - 2 exp potions that last for 1 hour at double experience. (Account Bound)
$15.00 a month - 3 exp potions that last for 1 hour at double experience. (Account Bound)

No CRAZY in game items, all no longer dropped items are still valuable, etc. You could buy no more than the possible 3 potions a month even if you donated $10,000. It's a slippery slope, which can lead to bad things if they were a company trying to make money, however they are not.

KISS - Keep it Simple Stupid.

To be fair, those servers have like a tenth of the population of P99, if that. Just because SOE hasn't gone after some podunk server with like five actual people boxing 10 accounts each doesn't mean they won't go after more than a thousand actual P99 players, if those players start paying money to someone other than the rightful owner of the Everquest IP.

PS. The idea that the server is only allowed to operate because it doesn't charge comes from none other than Rogean himself:

http://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4095