I've only taken college undergrad economics classes but it seems that if the prices for some upgrades like being able to place water or tombstone or the survival game packs were cheaper say maybe $5 then the total revenues would increase because they would be more reasonably affordable in the style of essentially a free to play server. any thoughts?
Remember, small donations can be very costly indeed to do. As the act of sending us money charges us to do it, and since five dollars does not exist at any level, I assume what Topicdogg said is correct, we make little, or if any money after the fees are deducted. While some may be high in price, it is all a matter of opinion. Some users can't, or just don't want to donate that much to the server, so lowering prices may be viable, but anything that goes that in-depth would be up to andrew to decided if it is worth it. Also, moved General discussion --> Suggestion.
Many of these suggestions have been made and all have been rejected because the server runs on a very expensive bill every month.
Are you guessing? or can you show a break down of how a $5 donation would cost more than $5 to process, because that doesn't sound right. Plenty of other serves and businesses sell products under $5 without any trouble.
As for the suggestion, the prices are high and the fact is they aren't going to change. If they do change I will be very, very surprised.
I Disagree Some of the money goes to PayPal some goes to running the server if it was $5 then eco city would most likely shut down because they need money to pay the hosting company and they r not just going to run a server with their money and not try to make a profit
also people who also bought donations would feel like they have then been ripped off/scammed beacuse then other people could get them cheaper so say you bought fly for 60$ then it got changed to 40$ or something you would have lost 20$ that you wouldent have to pay now
Look, it's pretty simple. The server needs money to be online 24/7. The more money the server gets, the better. How would you be if you were to host your own server ? Wouldn't you want it to run as fast/smooth as possible ? Therefore lowering the prices in not an option.
Greetings, I am pretty sure Andrew understands enough to set the correct prices to suit his needs. Just because it is lower, doesn;t mean more money. More purchases, sure, but not necessarily more money. I am sure he monitors what sells at what prices and when new features are added as rewards for donations, he takes previous prices (read as profit) into account. Many people complained about the prices to the new SG kits. Except for a promotion or two, he didn;t change them. I am sure if certain donation features were not getting the... traffic he wanted, there would be more "promotions/advertising" for those features. Just the fact that he set the SG ktis at the price point he did, showed he was sure that people would buy enough of them to make that price point worth it. (Maybe he just rolled a dice to get that price, but I think it had to do more with past purchases.) He has changed the ECC dollar value on items in game (ie portals), so it isn't like he doesn;t look at these types of things. ECC is a shining success, and is expanding all the time. I have a feeling the prices are perfectly fine where they are for what they are intended to do.
Some methods of sending money to a PayPal take money away (essentially) and there are only certain methods Andrew can use with PayPal or anything else flailing and wanting to rawr at people. And USD to CAD isn't an even conversion, so $5 USD isn't necessarily $5 CAD. Donation prices (long time ago now, I suppose) used to be lower, but they increased a bit. It never seemed to be a problem. Much as I would like some cheaper donation features (things I personally find should be much easier to access in MC, like water...), it would cause a lot of drama. Many already paid the current price for things, and refunding them if a price went down would... not work, at all. You can always go up, but you cannot always go down. It's like adding salt or sugar to a dough; kind of hard to take it out.
This will never happen because Andrewkm wou d have to refund all of tee extra money so it wouldn't be fair.
I do not think donation prices will get lowered due to the large amount of donators we already have. With this being suggested all the time, it always gets denied as users will get upset over the fact that they could have saved <#> amount of dollars. It most likely will not happen to current donation prices, but possibly in the future. It is all up to andrewkm to decide.
