Evil Trout Posted:

I’m sure we’re spending a little more than we could, but like I said the technical operating costs of the server aren’t hard to make up.

If you can find a way to pay for a salary easier, I’d love to hear it.

Well, on the topic of getting moar money, there are a good many people ****ing about the sole use of PayPal, and that can’t buy BP because of it. I imagine if you found a secondary payment processor, that would be additional money in your wallet; any processing fee the other processors impose on payments would be made irrelevant by the fact that you wouldn’t’ve even had those purchases without them anyway!

More people would buy more BP if they were cheaper, along the lines of $1 = 1bp, or lower. Simple logic of “lower price = more people buying it”. I’d love to buy extra BP, but it provides so little enjoyment for so much cost, it’s not worth it.

Additional BP sinks would also be beneficial. Finding a way to make it so that the “cheater” functions aren’t permanent disqualifiers for multiplayer functions, so people can actually buy them and still be able to enjoy the persistent functionality of the game (dom, incit, forumbuildr, leaderboards). Increasing the value of the Lottery Winner cheat (for the love of god), to at least show that CZ is still paying attention to their business model, which  100,000 shows that CZ hasn’t even looked at the BP “store” since Ep.2 launched (consumer faith, much?).

And improving server performance (less need for additional hardware) would be done by optimizing the backup routine. My guess is that the backup is mangling with the webserver functionality, and when both are running, the backup takes significantly longer to process than it needs to. That causes horrendous headaches between 12am and 1am (PST) that the webserver should just be suspended for. Either that or your backup software isn’t exactly living up to its promise of “without disrupting the server”... because good god I am so sick of “504 Gateway Time-Out” every night. Maybe a simple MySQL export and tar|gzip would fit the purpose? Log in to see images!

Just my $0.03.