Ideas about the Game servers!

[Angel]

Someone might have been thinking about this but I'll give my thought a shot anyway.

I know that there are a big issue with trying to caugh up the money for the the -Alive Keeping- of the game servers, and I know for a fact that not everyone has the money. Me my self can barely keep my "WoW" account alive and after that there still are other bills to pay.

But one idea is, since this is more or less a multi-game community for players of all kinds, why not try and find some sponsors from different game dealers or companies. (Not saying this is easy, only an idea)

Take for exampel your local game-store around the corner. Maybe put some commercial from them up on a page, or trying to make a sweet website on where you can put this advertises

Trying to find more than one sponsor, maybe one sponsor doesn't cut the entire cost for the servers, but it might narrow it down to a smaller sum so it evens out with those who can donate a few coins.

But as I said, this was only an idea, and might already been thought of, but it was worth a shot anyway, and thanks for reading

 

[Ronin Storm]

Let me reply to this one softly and without taking a stance that goes a particular direction just yet.

To my knowledge, sponsorship hasn't ever really been discussed seriously. We've had a look at advertisement support via Google Ads in the past but that didn't go so well and, to be honest, the adverts were a very mixed bag and largely not useful to us.

We've been reliant on donations from different people over the years. Some have given generously in single payments, others have been on subscriptions with THN for months or even years. Currently, we only have one person donating (thank you to him ) but we'd done a good job of building up a pot.

Occasionally we run raffles which appear to be very successful at shaking up funds for our server as people buy plenty of tickets and we offer one or two prizes depending on how many tickets were bought.

One issue we have in seeking sponsorship from local companies is that we're distributed all over the UK and Europe and even further afield so it'd be hard to say to a local computer hardware store, say, that they'd get value from sponsoring us; personally, I buy all my hardware, without exception, online from the cheapest point of sale.

Another issue I have with sponsorship and advertising, in general, is that it gets in the way (sometimes a little, sometimes a lot) of the absolute power for us, as Admins and the community, to choose what we do with our site and our hardware at any given moment.

However, both of those could be worked around, I imagine.

Ultimately, I have no experience drumming up sponsorship so perhaps if someone already knows how to do that then they could share their experience so that we could consider it more seriously?

 

[Angel]

Good reply, and I acually had something like that in mind for the reply. But I also want to state once again that this was only a idea that I had in mind. Only trying to come up with ideas that might help!

 

[Nanor]

We could always rent out server out. It's not really being used to it's limit, is it? I mean we had 2 TF2 servers and a CoD4 server going on it and at the minute only the CoD4 is being used and only on Wednesday evenings. I'm sure there are plenty of clans out there who'd need a server.

 

[Ronin Storm]

That's not a bad idea but the trick, there, will be ensuring that we're neither creating too much work for the server ops (which, let's face it, comes back to being the same people who are already busy on the other things too ) and not opening our infrastructure to abuse (most of our web sites, TeamSpeak, etc, etc are all hosted off Promethius).

It might be doable. I'm not sure of how we'd handle that practically. For that, I'd want Haven's thoughts because I'm not qualified to decide whether our server is safe to provide limited access to external parties for the purposes of admining a games server.

 

[Traxata]

For CoD4 server, I believe that You and I are the two that have direct, ( obviously the other lead admin's have access but rarely bother),
So, if they created a 'ticket' per sé, we could deal with it fairly soon-ish maybe? that would mean that they just get access to the in-game rcon commands, and an ftp slot to upload thing they'd like us to install/ update.

The other pointer, Intel.Fish

We were nudged by our dear friend from the I series that if we sent an e-mail to marketing we could probably get sponsorship from Intel, quite what that would mean I don't know.

We'll have to ask Fish at M festival about it as it was last November we had that discussion

 

[Ronin Storm]

We'll have to ask Fish at M festival about it as it was last November we had that discussion

Just a cautionary note before heading off to do that:

Haven owns the hardware, personally. Donations fund this board, the hosting, and occasional widgets such as the Shoutbox. Before we get into any serious discussion about monies Haven must okay the discussion or it doesn't fly.

That's not to say it's a bad idea, just that it must be okay with Haven.

 

[Haven]

Sponsorship is rarely free, would depend on the terms and how many "we love intel" ads we'd have to host on the server or the forums.

Get us some details and we'll defiantly consider it as the server could do with hosting a couple of active games to justify itself at the moment.

As for running server instances for other people, I'd be fine to do that with the proviso that they don't get shell access to the box (at least until we know them very well). As long as they contribute to keeping things running I've no issue with this but it would have to be an informal agreement.

 

[Traxata]

As I said, I'll ask fish about it again at I34(M Festival)