Like other areas of the site, Domination is due for a serious overhaul. In the past we talked about splitting up domination into cheater’s domination and regular domination for example, so even cheaters could play.

If we partition it that way, making Episode 1 and Episode 2 dominations might be possible too, it just takes some thought.

Honestly it’s not some scheme to get people to pay, it’s just that it’s not a trivial piece of code to split it up. It will take a lot of thought and planning. It’s important to me that people can continue to play forumwarz without paying for a while, otherwise I wouldn’t have re-distributed the forumbuildr forums to give all sorts of > level 10 areas to pwn outside of Episode 2.

As for the whole “other sites don’t ask for money” argument, really any browser game with more than 10k users pretty much has to, otherwise someone rich is running it out of generosity. We just hit 70k user accounts. We get 45 dynamic requests per second, and that flat out costs money to run.

The only difference is that we’re experimenting with charging money for storyline content, as opposed to game upgrades. It may or may not work in the long run — that remains to be seen. But I promise you this, the other browser MMOs are watching this experiment closely.