[Planning] TimePays (EULA COMPATIBLE)

Most people are upset over the new EULA that Mojang has stated that they will begin to enforce in the coming months, and it contains its pros and cons as does everything in life. One of the biggest cons is a very limited set of rules on what can be sold by servers to make money. I've been thinking of ways that I as a server owner can make money but not restrict access to my server. I came up with the idea of TimePays. The plugin would be simple, but its premise would, I believe, help you raise the funds you need to operate your server.

Each player's play time would be tracked, and simple calculations on your monthly server cost of operations would allow my plugin to determine how much the player is costing you as a server owner right now, and the debt he/she has caused. This would be shown on login or periodic messages in a simple interface, stating something like

"You have played 4 hours and 30 minutes this week. That has costed (your server here) $5.50 in operating costs. Cumutivaly you have costed the server $20.02. A donation could cover this cost, and help us keep the server up"

When you donate, the debt is subtracted from the donation cost and their meter is reset. This would comply with the EULA and hopefully get you some more donations.

This plugin is purely a concept at the moment, feel free to comment with any ideas/comments/concerns, and I will try to reply asap.

Cheers,
ccrama

 

ccrama Interesting concept, but it also leaves out some other factors:
[1] What happens if the meter gets too big?
[2] What would players which are unable to donate do? Watch their meter rise? (for example, cannot pay on the internet, don't have PayPal/Enough money etc.
[3] This is technically getting people to pay to play (if they want to donate or not)

 

1. What do you mean by "too big"? If no donations come in, it will just continue to display their rising total. It really shouldn't be too big, getting to a few dollars a month or so (totalling off of $8 a month with 10 players average)
2. Yes
3. Pay to Play is suggested and supported by Mojang, and it does not explicitly make them pay to play, it just suggests that they should.

 

I checked mojang EULA, actually there is only one rule - you not allowed to host pay2win servers:
not allowed to let some players to make gameplay miserable for other players with real money, all players on same server must be equal.

This rule as about protection of Minecraft "prestige", offensive actions of server admins can scare off buyers and harm mojang's revenue.


You allowed to ask payment for features not affecting gameplay and for server access in general.
I can see this rule limiting only for brain damaged server owners who sell admin powers to users, in all other cases this rule cannot be noticed.

In most legal systems agreement cannot be changed by one side without notice or permission of other sides, you wont break mojang EULA by plugin that ask money for playing on server and calculate cost at runtime, but you will break your local civil law by such actions.

Payment must be fixed and cannot be changed at random without additional agreement.

 

This plugin isn't condoning pay to play or anything like that. It just contains a running tally of the expenses you as a player have put on the server and would make it easy to calculate a reasonable donation to the server.

 

in final you will divide month cost by hours played by all players and multiply it by specific player playtime.

but this will provide same result as "piracy" calculators that mark each downloaded game as missed money, i will proove this later, when you post prototype.

 

Neat idea, but some players might get pissed off to see them owing the server $800.

 

ccrama There is no "new" EULA, simply the attention that has been bought to it that's new. But the idea is interesting.

Phasesaber And some would feel guilty enough to donate, and some would think "haha, look at all the free gaming I've got!". Reactions would vary per person, as they would to anything.

 

ccrama I LOVE this idea! Are you still making it?

 

ccrama I like your Idea to track how much it costs for the owner that the player can play on the server.
I follow your project, if you need help just pm me.

 

You have gotten banned for costing $1,000,000 to the server, Sorry.
P.s Well, You just shut down hypixel.

 

ccrama Great Idea! I Download!