would not be used in wow raidar and instead pay for new car or even tax avoidance.

Do you have a job, Qilue? Do you get paid for a service of some kind? Do you buy a car with the money for that service, or is your employer to expect you to use all the money you’re paid to do nothing more than make you a better employee?

If Aquilera makes enough off Raidar to buy a car, good for them I say. Who are you to say otherwise?

I mean, really, Qilue, only yesterday you ask for the ability to do a mass mailing, then wonder if you’re going to receive annual accounting reports? <rolls eyes>

I wasn’t trolling, you’re just incredibly difficult to understand. If you want people to understand what’s being said, then be clearer.

You made your point much clearer the second time than you did the first.

I’m still in awe that you remotely even care about accounting reports, but if you have time to worry about such things, good for you.

I’ll reply with the topic quoted:

[quote]
Maybe you already noticed it: Advanced guild features on Raidar are now available only for guilds with PRO Account.

PRO Account

Any guild can buy the PRO Account. It costs 15/month, that’s just 0.50/day. Basically, if your guild has 50 members and each one pays for just one week (that’s 3.50), you’re good for one year.
[/quote]

First question that rises is... 15 what? dollar? euro? yen?

but lets say its dollar. 15x12 = 180 dollar a year. thats almost twice the price of a ventrilo server. An investment which will probably be payed by one of the officers as there aren’t many ppl who are willing to start paying more money for their hobby just to raid. Organisation is done by officers why should guildies pay with their RL money for something that can be done otherwise.

[quote]
You can pay via PayPal. Any guild member can chip in, any time. You can see the list of payments and various payment options under the Account tab on your guild page.
[/quote]

I’d rather have you invest your time and effort into more functions than a whole payment system.

[quote]
Guilds with PRO Account get these advanced guild features:

Forum and raid discussion is hosted elsewhere. you missed the boat on that one.

Guild only raids. The situation I foresee is this:

say that on an average server there are 25 guilds using wow-raidar. From these 25 guilds noone will start paying 15 dollar a month just because the website they normally use dictates this as the new rule. So you now have 25 guilds posting 7 raids a week. which is a long scrolling list of 175 raids every week. now just think how long it will take for everyone to abandon the use of wow-raidar rather than pay 15 dollar a month to “filter” raids. There is a great tool ingame which allows you to register raids and such and i’m sure there are other websites/forums which can do the same. Surely it will have lots of problems etc... but it still beats paying 15 dollar a month.
Everything else is FREE.

[quote]
Why?

Raidar started as my love child. Small personal project. It became popular and I was happy. But then it grew. A lot.

Now it eats bandwidth like crazy, requires dedicated server and I spend most of my time supporting it. None of this is cheap. And Raidar has no source of income. Yes, there’s advertising in the footer, but that doesn’t work. It’s gold sellers and leveling services anyway. Raidar users are advanced players of WoW, nobody clicks on that crap anyway.

So, it’s either close Raidar or try to make it pay for itself. And I love this project too much to let it go without a fair fight.

If your guild likes Raidar, please show your support and buy the PRO Account.
[/quote]

Endearing story and we can all see your point. But communities cost time and investment. If you have a really cool feature that will bring new ways and meaning to surely ppl will want to pay for it. But don’t offer stuff for free and then take it away and hold it for ransom. It sets a strange example and ppl will forever be weary of other “changes”. Like it costs 15 dollar now...but what if you decide that’s still not enough... will you raise the price to 20? or 30? or scrap more free stuff to get more subscribers?

Like someone else said is infact the case. Just the mention of taking away features and offering them as pay4use makes you think about other options and reevaluate wow-raidar as a product of need or luxury.

[quote]
The future

I have lots of great features on the list. Some of them (e.g. recurring raids) are already half-finished. If this will work out and Raidar will start making some money, I will be able to continue working on it and adding new stuff for you.
[/quote]

This is always true. You can simply state this as version 2.x and just make a bugtracker forum and work on version 3.x or 2.x+1 in the meantime incorporating fixes and new features in major and minor releases. Nobody said you have to spend all your time fixing things. Just give out statuses and ppl will understand.

[quote]
I hope it will happen. To be honest, working on Raidar is fun and I’d much rather be working on it than on the boring work-related stuff I have to do for living now.
[/quote]

Well thats another thing, you have to keep it fun and manageable. If its no longer managable ask for donations. Stop bugfixing, ask for help, get better ads, limit bandwidth, (or think up a business model in which you charge ppl for the number of raids they put up / bandwidth use), multiple things possible.

[quote]
Your questions?

Please, let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

Thank you.
[/quote]

My question would be, what were the alternatives? We have on the table: close or pay... surely there are other alternatives.

My 2 cts on the subject.

To follow up on what Dnara just said, the only way a paid version of this tool will work is if its reasonably priced, and convenient for a guild to work with. A monthly fee just won’t ever work... especially since most folks in a guild aren’t willing to spend real life money on a tool they don’t really care about. Things like this just make the guild leader or officers lives easier, so they’d be ones most likely footing this cost.

If you charged a yearly fee (say $50/yr), at least the guild might be able to do some kind of event once a year to collect money to pay for their guild tools (forums, vent server, raidar, etc.)

As it is, most guilds will be leaving since $15/yr is just too much, and there are free or cheaper alternatives out there.

Exactly. Even our guild’s web server doesn’t cost $15/month! And most of our guildies doesn’t even want to contribute on that, then think of how many would want to pay more on Raidar.