WBP is an experimental server in that we're hoping to eventually convert it into an entirely community run server. The theme, events, and contests will be organized by the community.
Here's how a typical week will break down in the future:
Sunday Evening: Freebuild starts.
Monday - Friday: People build on the freebuild. People nominate themes and featured builds for the reoccurring player's choice building contest. People vote on featured builds from last week.
Friday - People vote on the next theme. Freebuild ends and weekend programming begins. Weekend programming is developed and deployed by a group of volunteers.
Friday - Sunday: Weekend program.
Then the next week starts. Sometimes additional contests will run and sometimes there are prizes. Sometimes there are special events.
So here's how we're different from other servers:
- The content of our server is determined by the community. Since there wasn't a great way to do this for the first week, I just kind of decided.
- We have a large administrators staff. There are currently something like 12 moderators so far. Today we had an average of 4 or so administrators in the server constantly. My goal is to have over 30 administrator level users by the end of September and to have a constant number of administrators in by January.
- We keep our admins in line. No badmins, no drama. We banned a grand total of 1 person today.
- We hope to eventually have a small modding team, currently the sole member is Slicksilver.
The dedicated server was ridiculously cheap. I paid $30 for 6 months. It was so cheap I considered talking to Kalphiter to see if I could cut a deal for 2 years or something, haha. Anyway, the point is, I'm not looking to make money by monetizing it. I have a job and whatever profit I could pull off of donations would be peanuts compared to what I earn at my minimum wage job.
I guarantee that all of the money raised will go into funding prizes for contests and putting bounties on mod development. That's how we plan on keeping this server a step ahead of the other servers and I've already offered to pay Slicksilver to develop a server administration plugin.
Phase 1 was trying to make a big impact with the launch. Judging by the activity in the tread and on the server, I think we've hit that. Phase 2 is to attract a large number of dedicated administrators and a highly motivated modding team. Phase 3 is our long term goal of converting this into a sustainable server. Considering how inexpensive it is, I could probably bankroll it for a year but beyond that I'd need help to keep it up without cutting into money that I can't afford to just throw at a project like this. So that's where we're at in terms of a business plan (if you could even call it that).
Now to tackle the issues of paying for avatars.
I don't really have a good system of doing this. Originally I thought "I'll just sell avatar spots for $5 and take what people give me." But I decided to back away from that. What I'm leaning towards now is if you donate somewhere around $5 maybe, you get a gold star next to your name. The way custom avatars work are that the price is going to be high enough that only a few people will get them and I will probably make them myself. I'll have to come out with a few work samples so that people know they're not paying for stuff. In any case, it's not going to be an issue of 1000 stuffty avatars all over the place because I would find that intolerable if I saw my chat full of horrible icons.
In any case, I'm happy to hear any criticism or thoughts you have on the server.
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