Page 1 of 3

Website update: new donation page!

Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 5:29 pm
by Rapsey
In continuation of the website and forums revamp, we've now also completely reworked our donation page


PayPal changes
We have updated our PayPal integration to a more recent version. Their old integration (which dates from over five years ago) proved to present some troubles with some of our donators. Hopefully, several players who were unable to donate through PayPal before should now be able to do so! With the new integration, credits should also be received instantly rather than several seconds (or minutes) after you have performed your donation.
Secondly, on top of the regular packages, players can now enter a custom amount (between 250 and 15,000 100,000 credits) to donate for. The discounts for donations of over 500 credits still apply.


Extra Onebip donation option
On top of the 8 and 12 euro donation options, we have added the ability to donate for 4 euros. For this price you'll get 330 credits, which isn't ideal, but you can always vote on toplists to get those few extra credits to get to 500.
We're looking to add the option to donate for 250 credits through Onebip (which would cost 3 euros), but Onebip needs to enable that price point before we can put it to use. Once they have approved it, we'll most likely replace the 4 euro option with the 3 euro option.


Improved donation process
The flow of our donation page is also somewhat different - the whole process of entering your username, selecting the payment provider and choosing the amount to donate now all happens on the same page. If you are logged in on your forums account, your username for donations will also be saved and automatically prefilled, similar to how our vote page remembers your username for voting.
Image


Ability to donate for coins
After a lot of consideration, we have also decided to add 100M and 1B tickets to our donator store. The price is 50 donator credits for a 100M ticket and 500 credits for a 1B ticket. For those with a credit or two to spare, you can now also purchase stacks of 2M coins for 1 donator credit. This means coins and tickets are slightly less profitable than our mystery boxes, but at least you won't have to go through the hassle of having to sell them if you are donating just to get some extra cash.
Image


Donator item overview
Rather than a simple plain text page, donators are now presented with a more organized overview of all our donator items, with better and up to date descriptions.
Image


Improved order done page
After you have donated, you are now presented with a nice overview of all the related information. You can revisit the exact URL at any time in the future in order to get your donation overview again. You will also receive an in-game message when a donation is done processing.
Image

In case your donation was in the form of an eCheck, you will now also receive an appropriate message, along with the estimated date and time PayPal should be done processing it. In case of a payment review or other delay, there should also be a message shown, indicating the reason for the delay.
Image


Also a small notice about a Christmas Event: although we had planned to release one by today, we haven't managed to get through all the work so we have postponed its release. It's still planned for release, but it'll be several days after Christmas at the very earliest. Sorry folks!

Re: Website update: new donation page!

Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 5:54 pm
by Iron adam
Looks really nice. I am thinking it might be better to have the item list expanded by default if possible. I didn't notice it at first and I am sure the same will happen to a percentage of donators.

Re: Website update: new donation page!

Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 6:08 pm
by Mike
Adamthalion wrote:Looks really nice. I am thinking it might be better to have the item list expanded by default if possible. I didn't notice it at first and I am sure the same will happen to a percentage of donators.
We did consider that, but then the PayPal and Onebip buttons would be invisible until you scroll down. Newer players might not notice, so it was a difficult choice either way.

Re: Website update: new donation page!

Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 6:10 pm
by Skiller
Looks awesome Rapsey! I disagree with Adam though, I don't believe it should be expanded; if they want to see the available items they can click, but otherwise it just makes it busier.

I'm a little concerned by the addition of GP values to the shop though. Before, the prices on these items were able to fluctuate completely based on the demand, but now you've put a lower limit on their values; if anyone were to receive less than X amount (haven't actually calculated it), it would no longer be worth it to buy item Y, as they can now just receive in-game GP instead. It kind of feels to me like the opposite of a money sink, and has other negative benefits too.

Just my thought, but I'd love to hear others thoughts on it too.

Again, looks great!

Re: Website update: new donation page!

Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 6:15 pm
by Mike
The builder wrote: I'm a little concerned by the addition of GP values to the shop though. Before, the prices on these items were able to fluctuate completely based on the demand, but now you've put a lower limit on their values; if anyone were to receive less than X amount (haven't actually calculated it), it would no longer be worth it to buy item Y, as they can now just receive in-game GP instead. It kind of feels to me like the opposite of a money sink, and has other negative benefits too.

Just my thought, but I'd love to hear others thoughts on it too.
That's true. However, for the past five years, our mystery boxes have barely changed in value (at first they were about 650M, now they are still 570M - 600M). The biggest problem with the mboxes was that they kept introducing cosmetics and other rare items, increasing their supply and slowly driving down the prices of those items (albeit only very slightly). Now that donators can donate for cash, there should be a somewhat lower supply of mystery boxes (and the cosmetics and rares from the boxes), driving the prices of mystery boxes slightly upwards again.

We've done the calculations, also for donator/premium/honor statuses and custom whips, and cash is still the least interesting option in every case. Considering the stability of the prices of all donator store items throughout the past years, the chance that one of the items would be less interesting than plain cash is virtually nonexistent :)

Re: Website update: new donation page!

Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 6:19 pm
by Isaac
Any nice, clean job there.

Re: Website update: new donation page!

Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 6:39 pm
by I3 e a t e n
As an avid donator to this amazing server, I think the updates are brilliant and gives people more opportunity to donate!

I for one had the odd few tokens left and I've put them to good use now with the 2m coins!

I was one of the people who experienced the issues when donating with Paypal, I'll no doubt make a donation soon and will keep you posted on if these are credited accordingly :)

Keep up the great work guys!

Re: Website update: new donation page!

Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 7:29 pm
by Migetmanz
sweet updates :) thanks mike!

Re: Website update: new donation page!

Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 9:03 pm
by Pim
Looks cool! While we at it, is it allowed to let people donate in exchange for in-game cash?
It was once allowed by you on jad pet release so that people could gamble for fire capes. So just to be clear. If person x wants to donate 5 $ and i need the donator pts, therefor ill reward him slightly more, is that RWT or allowed? In fact im not receiving irl cash but just to be sure.

Re: Website update: new donation page!

Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 9:25 pm
by Rapsey
Counterret wrote:Looks cool! While we at it, is it allowed to let people donate in exchange for in-game cash?
It was once allowed by you on jad pet release so that people could gamble for fire capes. So just to be clear. If person x wants to donate 5 $ and i need the donator pts, therefor ill reward him slightly more, is that RWT or allowed? In fact im not receiving irl cash but just to be sure.
Letting someone else donate for your account is certainly allowed. In fact it's one of the reasons why we enable people to donate for any account without requiring a login. If you compensate them for it in-game that would not be considered RWT, though I would advise caution. As of yet there is no real scam-prevention for this sort of thing so it relies on trust, and of course, if a random observer sees you talking about real world money in exchange for in-game money they could easily jump to the conclusion that you are RWT'ing.

Basically RWT means trading something in-game for something IRL. What you're talking about is trading in-game money for in-game credits, and the only reason you'd even have to do it this way is because there's currently no way to trade credits. In the interests of preventing scamming I expect we'll be making credits a tradeable item at some point, then it would also be far more obvious that it is indeed allowed.

EDIT: Actually, don't hold me to that one just yet. We'll have to think it over if making credits tradeable is a good idea.