Directly stealing this idea from a widely successful ARPG called Path of Exile. Their dev team is very open about money. It takes money to make shit, and they need money to continue developing the game and making it better. So, how do they do it? They sell supporter packs.

Basically it's a pack for X amount of money, $10 to $1000, huge array of shit in between.

You pay the money, you get x stuff. In Path's case, you get Points (used to buy ingame microtransactions, skins/etc), you get skins for your character, alternate weapon effects, ingame pets that don't do anything but follow you around, shiny forum titles that say "SUPPORTER", sometimes even a Tshirt.

My favorite pack is the Grandmaster Supporter Pack. In addition to a bunch of other bullshit skins and what not, you get a Character Immortalised in Hall of Grandmasters Map. This is the equivalent of having a character of your choice put into say The Mausoleum, an Undead version of yourself.

If SS were to use this idea, our packs would come with X slightly discounted space points, skins based on the theme of the pack, maybe a unique reskin of a popular travel ship, maybe neurobound holoprojectors that can only be obtained through the supporter packs, exp boosts, whatever.

Our packs could be themed like Paxian Supporter, Bana Supporter, Mzungu/Bule/Faranji/Aveksaken/Kalthi, whatever the fuck other themes we currently have ingame. Titanium/Laconia/Demented/Adamantiumized Support packs!

Each pack would have skins relating to those themes. Yes, this is a lot of skin making work. But most of the ships in game have 1-2 skins, we desperately need more skins to sell anyways so these packs would help the ideas flow.

And of course, once we have more income, maybe we can pay the devs we currently have. Maybe we could hire professional devs to help us. Maybe we could offer rewards for playerbase fed contests to create the skins for these packs, as a reward just give the skins the players create to those players?! Revolutionary?!!??!!

For those that are wondering if anyone actually buys the really expensive packs, or any of these packs at all, have a peek at the POE forums. http://www.pathofexile.com/forum

You can see who's bought what supporter pack, just go to any topic and start reading under their names.

http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Hall_of_Grandmasters

There are currently over 150 Grandmasters. That means 150 people have purchased a $500 supporter pack. $75,000 income, from just that one pack.

Basically I just want more ways for players to give money to SS and feel good about it. Transparency, communication, progress.

Here, I put it on up on the suggestions page that no one uses. http://www.starsonata.com/suggestions/supporter_packs_2

This would be an awesome idea to further fund a game which seems to get none. Use proceeds from creations such as this to push everything in a better direction.

I like this idea. its a great idea to be able to purchase themes.

For example, if you like the Urqa Bana skin and they make a skin pack on that, you can make your ship(s)'s skin look like the Bana ship color, which I for one love those colors and seeing those on other ships would be quite interesting. Its not only good for the players, but the DEVs that make the game will then have money to help this game grow faster and alot more fun.

I am not in favour of this, I don't believe that they would fulfill their end and actually implement any of the rewards within a reasonable time.

I am in favour of what Hober suggested in the previous thread (Why do we keep making new ones?) of rewards for subbing.
This game has been running for 12 years and we're technically at "Star Sonata 2" any chance for funding the expansion of this game through tiered rewards is gone in my opinion.

I wouldn't just hand over money to them without actually seeing the rewards first or without having more transparency as to where the funds are going to be allocated. It's nice to say that the game could make $100,000.00 but if all that is just going into Jeff's pocket, fuck no and nothing anyone has shown me leads me to believe otherwise either. Hell, we never even got that Christmas DG, which is a hell of a lot easier than a bunch of ship skins / weapon recolouring, I am sure.

Reward for subbing monthly, sure, because it's something I already do and am' losing interest in because there is little benefit over being P2P vs F2P these days.
Donator packs because we're trying to shovel buckets of water out of our sinking ship, no.

I do agree with this, but I also agree with Fleet General, we would need proof that we would get what we are paying for in a reasonable amount of time. Other than that, I say give it a go.

- Chrono

Add Christmas DG to Patch: Check yes or no.

As explained by Bobbo, it was 100% complete and all that was needed to be done was checking the box so the patch could add it to the game. Was it added to the game? No. Could another dev/admin do it? Yes. Why the fuck was it not added then?

I will rag on Bobbo day in and day out for the Xmas Letter rewards, because that's explicitly his job. But checking yes or no for patching? Just shows that priorities are in a horrible state or they simply don't care.

What FG and CW said, too.

Obviously these things are given as soon as you spend the money. Not after, or when some admin feels like handing them out. They have to be automated systems that give the rewards immediately.

Sure, but let's be honest, that's not likely to happen.

Hell, you'd think that something as simple as a character name change would be automated but here we are.
https://www.starsonata.com/store/space_points_faq

Rewards for special events are still given manually too.

Not to mention the amount of work it would require is just something that our dev team doesn't do. Sure you can argue that it would generate them more money, but so would improving the game and listening to community feedback, which admittedly they are slowly getting better at but are still miles behind where would be ideal to improve the game.

I mean, how many years has it taken to fix the background of the Graveyard?
It's only now we're getting development into that item tier suggestion from many years ago and only because I've been slowly necro'ing the threads otherwise there was absolute 0% progress.

Agreed. I'm cynical as fuck on all of the things the devs due, from years of neglect. But here's the thing. A dev was informed about Graveyard, he spent 5 minutes and fixed it. The issue isn't that the devs won't fix things, it's that they don't know what is wrong because either they don't read the forums or they just don't talk to players. We need better communication on all fronts to fix these things. The last month or two has been a solid push, I'm pretty happy with the progress. Now we have to continue that progress, the community and the dev team need to keep working together to bring SS up to par for Steam release.

There is an important difference between simple minor quickfixes performed by volunteer developers and major game decisions decided upon by payed staff. Our payed staff are for the most part slow and inefficient. Our volunteer developers are for the most part super efficient and motivated to help out.

Before we start sharing our vision for Star Sonata, maybe we should get Jeff to share his vision for Star Sonata first. Which he might share with us this Wednesday, as that is the only day of the week he works on Star Sonata

I love the idea.


edit: why couldnt we just donate to the programmer directly?

I like the idea in principle. Allowing people to put money into the game to help its development isn't a bad idea in a perfect system, but...

How do you ensure that money generated by this is well managed and applied? You can have all the money in the world if you don't apply it competently, it won't make a bit of difference. Something like this isn't likely to double or triple the income of SS, so when put in we're probably talking about a 5-10% boost in revenue long term (if it's just hugely fucking popular and every buys into it, which probably won't happen). SS doesn't make a huge amount of money to begin with so a marginal revenue increase is vastly more likely to go unnoticed, than it is to do any noticeable good.

So really this whole suggestion could be relegated to just adding a chance of random cosmetic rewards when buying Space Points or adding different, more expensive SP services. You would accomplish the same thing.