Well, as you all know we are always looking into ways to get a form of income together so we can help pay for hosting and such. So, we have come up with the idea of RBO Premium Memberships. Currently, with these accounts, you would receive a email address (you@ragnarokbattle.com), access to premium only forums, HTTP downloads, and 20mb of web space (you.ragnarokbattle.com) so that you can host your own files. We are wanting to know how many people think this is a good idea, and would actually pay to have these features. Currently we have the price set at $2.00 a month. Payments can be paid via PayPal or snail mail.

So, what do you think?

I would, if I had a paypal account and money... Too young. I'd do anything to support RBO, as long as I like it here =D

Mh, if it wasn't pay-per-month, I'd do it, just for the nice email/DN and supporting the forum, lol. Not sure about the premium thingy, I think the community is nice and this would split it more or less >_>

Also I don't have a paypal acc, nor do I know if I could create one since I was always thinking you need a credit card to use it (why in the hell would I need a credit card? XD), nor do I know what snail mail is, except it's meant to be a slang for sending the money per mail, which takes ages.

Would normal internet banking work? ._.'
You could limit the bandwith and decrease the space so you can set the price to a single one ^o^

Edit: So, I won't vote for now.

Snail mail is normal mail, since its so damn slow, we call it "snail" mail.

Oh yeah, a "premium-only" forum will seriously piss others that can't afford it... It'll be GunBound all over again... >_< I hate Softnyx for their Cash-only 1-week Power Card...

I'm thinking of buying, tempting you know?

supporting the forums is good...and worse is...I have no pay pal, neither does snail mail appeal to me, whY? cuz i'm in sg, and it'll cost more than 2 bucks...

Well we are looking into other ways of payment, such as Storm Pay, and another ways of payment. Some include Bid Pay, 2co Checkout, and gpay which is suppose to launch soon through Google. Sadly, most online payments must be done with a credit card.

One way I did it before I had a credit card, was I would ask my parents if I could use there and give them cash for it. Which my parents are very trustworthy, so it really depends on your parents with that call.

I don't think that even one person in Europe has a credit card

What about making a bank account, publish the account number and your bank, and everyone can pay then? o.o

If I wanted to do this here, I only gotta catched a kid under 19 abusing it to create a new bank account it's free for children under 19 here x_x Are there no such offers in your country?

Edit: Ok I'd need a young one, because as it gets 19 you have to pay lol

I have a bank account, but I really and not going to post my account number on the internet. You can always use paypal with a bank account.



The staff has a hidden forum that people do not have access to.

That is why I've said:



It's normal for private people with their own sites (whatever) offering stuff for money, creating a new bank account for donations. But I can't talk about this, "All discussion not related to it especially private" (rules).

Altough, it's ok if you can use your bank account with pay-pal



Could you answer easily, if I'd asked you how you can compare an official sub-forum (which is accessible to a percentage of (normal? u_u) users) with a normal mod'n'admin sub-forum (which is not [see above])?

Comming from a forum that has donations to run the site, I can tell you its not very effective. (ads make more money. We only accept donations just to give people special rights.)

Its a pitty that google ad is not a option, because frankly they pay the best. But donations are like, a short term benefit, then you go back to looking for income.

We actually got almost $30.00 a month from donations back before the forums wen't down for the second time. But I guess people got fed up with the forums always going down, as did I. There really was not much I could do about that until my plan expired with the Dedicated Server provider. So, we moved to godaddy and well, have had NO downtime what so ever.

Now as for Google AdSense, they are dead to me. We had about $600.00 in click over a course of a few days, and I went to withdraw the money to pay for the server and IPB and such, and they shut down our account. They can pretty much go F themselves. We came across Yahoo! Which I like 10x more then Google just because they offer a higher click to pay ratio and they have 24x7 Phone support if I need it. But, we have not had that many click because we have not had that many members come back to the forums. We use to have almost 6,000 members before the site went down, and a load of posts and such. But that’s when we hosted the downloads on our own server, we can no longer do that without donations. I invested WAY TO MUCH of my own money out of my own pocket into that. But we did that just because we thought we had that big huge check coming in from google?E We were wrong.

No with Donations, they help pay for hosting for say that month. It helps out. This next check I get from Yahoo has to pay for a IPB license, and the next check after that can be used to pay for our hosting for a year or so. Which I could do it vise versa because I can get hosting 30% off now?E.

Money is a hard thing to come by for the forums, I have been paying for the hosting and all that ever since it left SiteSled and IPB Free. I am not saying it’s a bad thing, but it costs.

Umm if it helps i have a idea.
You make a Topic thing Just for that person that be becomes Premium
and they have full conrol over it and it only like pinning things and kicking people out of it.

I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really like to donate to the forums. But like Synchro, I'm too young to have a PayPal account and worse is I'm in the Philippines so too far away for snail mail.

I couldn't use Snail Mail anyway, since sending money over the mail is very risky, and I think you need to be a certain age to buy other forms of money, like Cheques and Money Order...

Money orders are a good idea. Western Union is all around the world I think.

Didn't try to ask for E-Gold ???
Anybody knows it ???

lets support RBO, RBO philippines is going to be sold this month or so i hope it would grow into a massive mmorpg for kids and all of us kids love this game tee hee me too when it comes in philippines i would buy this thing without hesitation sold only for 150peso,

Well, to put it frankly:

I would support the forums for 2 dollars a month but I wouldn't ask for any of the mumbo jumbo with webspace. I don't do websites, just draw, and I have a nice free printer and a tablet and a scanner and Copic pens, but if we are to switch to a dedicated server again, consider the following:

#1: Dedicated servers cost 140$ a month or so for possibly a 3.0 intel 32, not 64 bit processor, u get maybe 512 or 1 gig of ram if your lucky and the host is willing to pitch in something extra, and probably a decent harddrive for like 40 gigs... (its best to know the seller personally).. Your internet speed will be about a T2 at 10 mbit/s... unless u get T4 which in turn will give you about 100 mbit, but i guess that would be an upgrade for later..

#2: The best way to pull in money in a community like this would be to have some sort of motive aside from RBO... When it comes to users i've seen like 50-60 different members posting actual dialog and not just asking for help over the course of a bout 4 days... meaning people who are new and register end up just downloading and go... <--- not 100 % sure about that one but its what i think i see, hehe. Perhaps a Ragnarok Online Server or something fun and simple might make people more interested for a longer term commitment and, thus pulling in more funds...

#3. Finally, the main problem we see here is we know that about 70% of the people who have posted here are not donating not because thier not rich enough, but because they dont have a credit card or paypal account. As we all know sending money to someone can be a pretty rigorous process, the receiver doesnt want to get screwed and the sender doesn't want to get screwed. So if you made sending money a bit more "friendly" like a picture by picture guide as to how you can support the forums... I am sure that you would get a bit more funding that way... like make sure they ask their parents and stuff and if nothing else works... tell them, "they gave me a game for freeeee" lol... I think that after you excluded the registration process on downloading RBO,most players just get the website and go... they dont really get to know the people here, etc. (I almost did that last time when the website layout was blue... I came here and wanted to spam till i got enough posts to download but it was interesting so i stayed for a while and then got too busy from school).

#4. If there was something you could get people hyped up about, Im pretty sure you'll get a lot more funding.

As for the RO P.Server in #2, its gonna be impossible, since Garrett said something about no discussions about stuff like that... Maybe edit RO's files into a whole different game(EVERY single file, even sprites, maps, scripts, etc.), or something like that... TO ensure its 100% legal and stuff, and probably make THAT an online game... Though, it'll take very long, since RO has already 10k+ sprites, as well as item descriptions, not to mention the # of NPCs..

To be honest, I used to work with RO servers, and as long as its Athena based it should be no problem. Athena wasn't created by Gravity... iRO and the other official servers were all Aegis based. As for that, I can only offer this piece of information but the final choice is always with the administrators so I really dont have much say in it.

hmmm i dont see the harm in it i would if i didit have bills u know

I would donate, since this is favorite place to go when im bored, but im too young to have any credit card or possibly donate

In the states I can get a Celeron with 1 gig of ram, a 80 gig hard drive, and 1000 TBs of OC12 bandwidth for about $100 a month, without a hosting control panel. The problem is the cost, and keeping it online.



The thing with this, is that RO servers are illegal from what I hear. Private RO servers. Plus, that would be getting into a area that I know NOTHING about. I do not really play RO, and never really wanted to. I know a person that runs a private RO server, I could speak with him and see what it takes, and how much money it costs and such. If we did that, we would be getting into more money, so we would have to get funds to start that before actually doing it. I like the idea because we could do both the forums and the RO private server from on machine.



This is one reason we do not make people register and post to get downloads, the spam is amazing. I would be willing to invest in a PO Box to get donations, but I am willing to do that, or maybe even a flash deal LOL that the parents can watch and thus if needed I will send a recept.



I am looking into advertisen more, even though we already get around 7 million hits a week, we need more people coming and joining the community, not just downloading and going.

Awsome!
I can help with RO server... if you decide on that route...

I've done both RO and Lineage *cough cough*
so I am pretty good in that area... (less in Lineage cuz some people I knew set up most of it haha). I used to be pretty fluent in the programming language department, but I am kinda rusty around the edges now... my department is mostly artistic. hehe. (but ill customize auto updaters for sprites and stuff if necessary... dont really like dealing with many codes... 1 year is enough for me XD)

The thing about the spam is understandable... your website is linked on any website that knows anything about RBO... so I guess its a good idea to let them just download without spamming 30 posts or something. I am willing to help with flash or whatever other options you come up with and have a ... somewhat wide variety of skills to offer and should have a decent amount of time available. I wont be as active in a few days like 5 because school starts, and I go to a boarding school so its not exactly handy dandy fun, but I have weekends and like 30 minutes or so a day to help! =D... I'm also pretty used to Macs now so if there is anything in that department I could try as well.

As for hosting costs I also reside in the US (not for long, school is in England T_T): When you say Celeron, is there a more specific speed? I understand that the 1 gig and the 80 gig harddrive and the OC 12 (which essentially gives you like 3 T3's in 1) will be good, but... if I remember correctly, 2 years ago (when I was really into this stuff) the majority of the cost is based upon its processing power. Celerons are about the equivalents of Pentium 2's and Pentium 3 have a substantial edge over Celerons... because of thier CPU cache. I wont go into that but, if you want to get the full effect on a Pentium 2 u'd have to get a Xeon, which would give you enough processing power to host both a RO server and the forums on the same machine... With no lag whatsoever... This would allow you to link your FTP server, with the SQL server that you would use to host RO and thus allowing your forums to be integrated as you said in your post. This will also let you use the auto updater function to create patches so evertime people start RO, they'll have a patchign sequence...

The last option would be if you wanted to create a RBONline not RBoffline... That will take a lOT of work and essentially you'd be breaking copyrights with RBO but i guess since we're in the states... French Bread wont do anythig... international cases are expensive... and as long as you aren't charging anything... it'll be fine. (in fact if French Bread liked it they might ask you to join them hahahah) This option is insanely difficult and you have to have somewhere to use Visual Basic or anything of that sort... I cant help much in this department because I use a Mac and my Windows counterpart is limited in size because i'm on a laptop. There are some guides for someting like this on ONRPG or something...

Whatever you choose, I'll try to help out as much as possible =D Echk... I'm long-winded as usuall T_T

i would really wan to donate.. but im too young for it ... i dun hav credit card...so i cant donate ..

That's the case for most of us... o.O

I would donate $20 right now if I could. My parents would just go like "Wasting Money"... So, I guess I'll have to wait a few more years...

Ooh, I know, you could ask to do chores or something to earn like 5 bucks and donate that through snail mail! Xd I think your parents would like that...

I mean, the use of credit cards are often exaggerated by parents, but... a lot of the stuff they say is true... like if you pay too much for 1 month and dont pay it back, man you get screwed cuz you go into debt for your whole life as the amount grows bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger due to interest, and its compounded monthly so YIKES XD! but, i'm sure if you did some chores or helped around the house or something your parents would be willing to contribute 5 dollars! Garrett said he'd even send a receipt or something haha! and tell them that PAypal is seccuurrree!

Bleh, I get $$ from taking care of little children... Babysitting... $40 last month... o.O

I don't believe they'll let me donate anyway, as I said, "wasting money"... Don't worry, I'll donate when I get older...

quick question. Do you have any idea what the "premium only forums" would consist of? Just curious really. Hopefully now that I "have a job" that "pays me money" I can actually start donating...that is once I figure out how to get the money out of the bank...or rather which bank my money is in...

It would really depend more or less on what the premium members would want to talk about in there. No set topics and pre junk and all that.

Perhaps an option for "snail-mail" payers to pay for multiple months at once?

I have a paypal account so I'd be happy to but I'm just a speculator.

>_> Fourteen is way to young for a credit card. My Parents say that, well my dad does. >> I would donate like, what, $50 Dollars a month if I had I job or a credit card, which I don't. >> It's so annoying, even if I only started playing. >>

My dad = EVIL. I dun get an Allowence either. O.o How evil is that?