Yeah. Paying for cool, well-coded items would be the way to go; just don’t make an obvious competitive bias for paying customers.

If ep2 is like ep1, I’d be unwilling to pay a cent for it. Kingdom of Loathing has far more content and players, yet they maintain fine through a donation system. Oh, and they have no ads.

The site would be dead in weeks if any/all new content required pay. Perhaps you’d get fifty people to pay, a very liberal estimate, but this would instantly kill forumwarz domination, and you’d basically never get a new member. At this point, the people who are devoted enough to pay would quit and throw their money at something else.

That, and I donated $15 to keep this game running and I’d be pretty ****ed if I had to keep paying more and more to keep playing/stay competitive.