You might be surprised how profitable gelat shops can be, even when used minimally. The gelat shop I added to Era has generated 563550 gelats as of right now, which is roughly $5,600 USD ($48 for 4400 gelats = about $0.01 per gelat). $5,600 isn't a ton of money, but I'd bet it pays the bandwidth bill. As long as gelat shops are done right (as opposed to how it was done on Zone), they work.
I'm using information from Era staff so I don't know if it's entirely accurate, but from the trend I saw before I was fired, it looks like it probably is.

All this stuff, yea.

Well, developers have to either pay for servers or pay for gold to work on servers...
Once done they then have to go through an annoying application process (whatever that may be) to be able to spend their time dealing with childish superiors and non-existent global support.

In the end you pay to waste your time, which is why Graal doesn't get the updates it needs. There are people here with the talent to do great things for Graal, but why would they pay to deal with all the bull**** when they can go off and work on a real game, make their own, or get a job doing the same thing and get paid?

Just my opinion here, but the whole system is backwards. And despite you trying to say it's not the payment, that goes hand-in-hand with development. So you kinda contradict, but both reasons would be right.

I guess...

I totally lost my point here, I stopped like 40 times while typing this to do other crap, *facepalm*.

Just flame and blah blah, I usually don't check this section of the forums anyway.

Oh and I wanted to say this is like right, and the gelat system if maintained and the items are constantly switched out and redone and worked around and stuff and things then it could be pretty awesome. Like when the potions were first added to the shop on Era, I saw thousands of them pumped out in the first few days because people with gelats wanted to try them, and people without gelats wanted to buy them. But as the price in Era-Cash dyed down so did the sales to just necessity. So if you were to keep changing it up, I'm sure the sales of them will stay up high. Like is it hard to make a potion image and add some random effect. Everyone likes new shiny things.

Ok I'm done, bye.

Honestly, the quality the players on the iPhone servers is dealing with I don't think you need to worry too much about PC Graal not having a quality server to keep them interested. Apparently all they need is an overworld to run around and chat on. This is depressing for me, considering I have high standards... but if it means getting rid of Gold faster then I'm all for it.

The pricing change should attract new PC players - not convert iPhone players (dilution). The quality of the existing content is fine although I anticipate PC users will grow disinterested if it's not updated regularely. As a result users will very likely stop microtransactions.

It feels counter-intuitive, but merging content & developers from poorly performing classic servers into a new or revised "gold" server would help focus development and unify developers. This will not be possible unless you have the interest of community leaders and a means of managing developers to avoid in-fighting. In my "Sprints" document I outlined an incentive program which would appropriately achieve this goal.

And v6 is suddenly going to change the quality of the servers? It was a planned change for v6, so it's going to happen whether there's a good server out there or not.

I also don't see any quality servers surfacing any time soon. Some of them out there have potential, like Delteria and Atlantis, but there's always some server that has potential. That doesn't mean it's going to actually come out, or come out soon enough.

Okay first you show possible uncertainty towards your statement by say ing "It sounds counter-intuitive,"

But working on Gold servers would make no sense since most if not all developers are Classic member players.

@Dusty, I agree with you servers having potential. Problem is no one else will see it until its brought to surface. People want new servers but they just shrug it off as if a god is going to bring it up all of a sudden which is pretty arrogant. :(

I believe you misinterpreted this.
It would be deceptive if I tried to present it any other way.
The new pricing scheme would obsolete the existing subscription (gold) service.

I guess you got a point there, But I think people can tell what you were saying context wise :p

Also maybe gold service's time has come..?
People have wanted classic only for years.

It has been explained to me that there will no longer be subscription levels. This leads me to believe that it will be entirely microtransaction based, which certainly makes the most sense. I'm all for the idea, but the product cannot remain viable if the content stagnates - which is exactly what would happen if only pricing is changed.

I'm suggesting development restructuring to encourage unity and focus among talented developers and an incentive program to build momentum BEFORE pricing changes. It would be a terrible shame if Graal changed their payment system, attracted a bunch of new players, and then permanently lost the interest of a greater majority due to content stagnation.

Oh okay I see. Well a good idea but would you like to establish upon that? You seem to have something in mind and I'd rather not comment until you've fully explained yourself.

If servers suddenly start getting hundreds of players, I think staff would be a little more motivated to actually do stuff. :)

http://www.harvestmkt.com/images/cli...small_4ji3.jpg

Agreed, and I come back to the idea I presented before.

@Stephen
What will motivate us as the developers for servers to unify together and work for other servers? We're all different in how we work and it simply would come to creative difference problems which would also be a disaster. That's pretty much why we have different servers. I know you don't give two ****s so much but these are questions that must be answered before your idea is even considered valid.

Ideally an appropriate incentive program would help developers overlook their differences.

Unfortunately I disagree, Ask a handful of developers "Is there a developer from each server you hate or very much dislike?" and you'll get "Yes, I hate or dislike -insertsomerandomdev-. -Random sentence stating how much they dislike or what happened to made them dislikeable- I wouldn't work with them even If you paid me." Expression or not it only proves my point that prejudice is something we can't work over with simple "incentives" and trying to please every developer will only lead to even more disaster.