Secrets of Asherah Forum

I should have the parts by next Friday, I hope. And hello! OH, and could you start keeping us informed again of various celestial events that we should be watching? I've kind been missing out on some interesting things recently - I don't have time to keep up with it. Nice eclipse a few months ago though...

I, personally, just don't want to see our friendly, wonderful little community die out.  Even if that means no access to the game for the time being, I'm alright with that.  As long as I can keep interacting on some level with you all.

The $120 isn't for hosting, it's a total average monthly expense. I do the actual game hosting. Even if we dropped the hosting out completely, it still only reduces the load by $15 a month.  And hello, Creeper...

To clarify something Avi said, the "not necessary at this point" refers to being online all the time, not to the money! Unfortunately, except for the cost of the electricity (which goes to zero if I have the comp off), I have to pay the rest of those expenses whether the game is online one hour a month or 720 hours a month.

I don't like the way this is boiling down to "Hey, give us money", although Avi has some good points (both in his posts and in our conversations) that argue favorably for going to a subscription structure.  But from the very beginning, B said that the game would always be free. (Of course, "free", as I pointed out above, meant that someone else was subsidizing all the people who played, not that there weren't any expenses involved.)  Am I overly idealistic to hope that we could keep it that way? And if we have "subscriber areas" that are unlocked when you pay your monthly fee, is that going to cause a Ragnarok-style class war that got us a lot of players in the first place?

Would YOU pay $5 or $10 a month to know that anytime you wanted you could get online and walk around a world many of you actually grew up in, and to talk to some of the old people, some of whom go back to 2003? And to be able to share it with your kids? (And know that they aren't going to hear all sorts of bad things - except from you when you hit an invisible wall in the mine for the third time in ten minutes!) We can't make THIS SOA into an absolutely amazing, state of the art game like the kinds that have multimillion dollar development budgets. But we CAN be here for you. And we can continue to develop other game material which will hopefully be fun.

Again, this is NOT a conclusion. I would like to know what you think.

Dias, I'm still reading the links in the links from the links you sent yesterday. There is a LOT there. Very informative.

Well unless things have changed drastically, about 4 years ago we paid about 17.99 or something like that for our hosting. 120$ hosting is probably a pretty nice setup for sure but an FSO server doesn't run very much, unless we all planned on playing some battlefield 4 on our own server we could definitely find something much more cost efficient

I figured I should probably show my face here as well, after quite some time!
It's very nice that you guys... after all this time, are still here to support us

It's true me and Asherah have still been in touch... a lot. We both really WANT to bring the game back online, but for reasons Ash mentioned earlier... It's just... Very difficult
Asherah and me have discussed all of these options over the past few months, but we're both really different in these things and haven't found any solution that we both support and we both feel would bring Asherah back in a stable and reliable way.

We've considered the crowdsourcing option the longest... But the problem is...
Asherah is a small community, and even though the size of it has changed a lot over the years... It's always been relatively small... Crowdsourcing would mean we'd have to step outside of our community, and promote an idea for a game (or a project a LOT of people get really excited about)
This is a very tough thing to manage for a team as small as what we have... Especially considering that we're not specialized into game design... We're more focussed on our community!

So... Back to the real issue... We'd need about $120 every month to keep the game running 24/7...
Ofcourse that's not absolutely necessary at this point, but it's something we'd like to offer in the future...

Any money we could make out of advertising would help take some pressure off, but at this point... there's just too few of us to be interesting for advertising companies...
Our low number of current players also means that Asherah doesn't necessarily have to be online 24/7 at this point. The last time we where online we had certain "peak" moments with 8-12 players online, and a lot of times in which just... noone logged in...
We could look into the option of going online for 1-2 hours a day... an "Asherah hour" if you will... This would drastically cut our costs for now and allow us to go back online... partially... I'm interested in what you guys think about this idea

However, If we want to be able to stay online, we're going to need a lot of help from you guys... Because with just me and Asherah (And me being occupied with a master's study), it's tough to manage a game, make it grow, help new players and fix problems (of all kinds)

The donation thing would also be my ideal solution to the problem, but I don't believe that it'll be a permanent solution... We're dealing with monthly costs, and the best way to manage monthly costs is... With monthly revenue...
If we're still going towards bringing Asherah back, I'd personally like to see if we can adjust the game to support some kind of "Subscription"
Players would pay a monthly fee, and unlock some small extra's, like some new areas, a different chat color in broadcast and some other minor things... Not really game breaking, but nice enough...
If we could get 20-25 players on a monthly subscription at just $5 a month... we'd be out of trouble permanently, and we could keep hosting this game for a loooooonnnnggg time in the future

But yeah, I'd also like to hear what you guys are thinking about these ideas... Considering that I'm just throwing my thoughts on this board
It's good to still hear from you guys, and with support like this from our community... it's impossible to just let Asherah disappear
Thanks!

Well I'm assuming this is the newest forums! I'm not sure if anyone remembers me but I used to go by Creeperboy back in 03 04 ish? Anyways I used to work on my own game KSB (which is FSO) but that was like 4+ years ago. ANNNNyways, I would be more than happy to lend my services such as hosting, coding, mapping, and digging up our old graphics from KSB to put forth towards SOA being fully functioning again just shoot me a message.

Also What happened to Baldon, and Kaneda?

An example of a successful kickstarter would be this:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doublefine/double-fine-adventure

In that example they included quite a few features for people who are willing to fund the kickstarter. They presented what they're offering fairly well, and included some features to attract the funding. They pointed out the game style, and made points to what they wanted to accomplish and the realistic cost of it all.
Also to note is that the person or group have created a fairly notable game before.

There's also alternatives, this website mentions a few:
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/03/03/how-to-fund-your-next-game-hint-its-probably-not-kickstarter/

As for direct cost of servers, http://www.servermonkey.com/refurbished-hp-proliant-dl360-g3-2-port-better.html shows a price for a refurbished HP DL 360 server. By adjusting the components, the cost can be at minimum $134.95 to what I selected, which is:

- 2.8ghz single core xeon CPU (1st Socket)
- 2.8ghz single core xeon CPU (2nd Socket, optional. I chose the second socket to spread the CPU throttle, and also as convenient redundancy.)
-4GB PC-2100 RDIMM (For Secrets of Asherah i'm unsure of RAM usage, I assumed 4GB as a default for a Windows OS (Windows 7 I recommend 4GB)
-36GB 10k RPM 3.5" SCSI Hard Drive (The nice things about SCSI is simple Raid capability)
-36GB 10k RPM 3.5" SCSI Hard Drive (As an instant backup, using Raid means being able to mirror the 1st hard drive and when one fails, the other still operates perfectly fine.)
-Smart Array 5i+ integrated (For the Raid configuration)
-Redundant HP 325 Watt PSU (Includes two power supplies, extra is in case the other fails.)

Price: $219.93

This address link shows the nice design of airflow of the DL 360, and the redundancy of the fans.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/DL360_Inside.jpg

Like I said, I don't want my post to be taken negatively. It's not "goodbye" or "abandon ship!"

I think when presented with challenges the point is not to say, "This won't work" but "How can we make this work?" Options a through g are all completely possible and I'm sure there are a lot of other ideas I haven't thought of. There absolutely always is a way.

And I appreciate your support and of course we can keep working together on things!

Of course, I agree with all of this! I'm glad you have a positive outlook on it.

I can't say I have a solution, but something I was thinking is /yes/ I will contemplate how the current game should be hosted, advertised, or even sold. And personally, I will work on hosting the browser based client in your place, once it's ready if you'd like. I have a decent computer dedicated to hosting my games. Why not host the browser based SoA server? I know it's a thought that is really only relevant to the future, but having some experience in hosting games for a company (my own) I would be more than glad to take that responsibility, especially since a lot of it is my work. Also, this could help with dealing with (when the time comes, that is) who will watch over the server.

I realize that I can't host your original server, but this is one thing that I find feasible and relevant overall.

Still leaves a lot of thought to be done, but this is what comes to mind as of today.

Also, sorry if this is rambly. Still not feeling well, but my consideration is out there.

Like I said, I don't want my post to be taken negatively. It's not "goodbye" or "abandon ship!"

I think when presented with challenges the point is not to say, "This won't work" but "How can we make this work?" Options a through g are all completely possible and I'm sure there are a lot of other ideas I haven't thought of. There absolutely always is a way.

And I appreciate your support and of course we can keep working together on things!

I won't say "You should keep the game going" blah blah if it's at all unrealistic a plan.

What I will say is I will continue my share of the work, despite you being unable to do most of yours in this project. I entirely understand.

That being said, I would still like your direction in my side of the project, Asherah, if you don't think it too redundant at this point. Let me know what you think however you believe necessary. Either way, it's been real.