Backup Zone

[ronaldinho]

Can't tell if it's true, but I heard 24 brought clothes for his son with donated money.

[Exalt]

Rab is actually right. Why are we still dependent on Priitk to host the shitty server TW runs on? TW staff are powerless to do anything, and the only excuse I've seen as to why we don't control our own zone is money, yet somehow the bot server is paid for without problems. Why can't TW be run on the bot server then? Is 20+ year old 2d game really taking up that much bandwidth?

As for money issues, this is what's shown on the TW site (if it's not updated, that's Staff's fault):

Description	You choose for me	Cash Events	Advertizing	Charity	TW Development	Totals
Amount Donated	$9,1175.56	$1,428.00	$2979.00	$925.00	$1,108.00	$15.615.56
Paypay Fees	$256.12	$35.52	$94.06	$31.08	$1.08	$416.78
Actual $ Donated	$8,919.44	$1,392.48	$2,884.94	$893.92	$1,106.92	$15,198.78
Money Spent	$3,524.07	$1,243.50	$525.00	$187.72	$4329.86
Actual $ Available	$5,395.37	$148.98	$2,359.94	$706.20	$-3,222.94	$5,388.63

There's 'supposedly' $5,000 available, although none of us have seen bank statements (which takes less than 2 minutes to produce in 2019). If you cut out all the bullshit like Advertizing (waste of time/money), Charity (what is being considered 'charity' and why is this even an option?), or Cash Events (completely useless when TW can't even keep a server up), then you could consolidate the money into being realistic and useful, and possibly people like me would donate.

If you set up a TW Server Fund to go along with the TW Dev fund (or whatever pays for the bot server and/or people like qan for his time), and you actually produced bills/bank statements showing where the money is actually going, then I know I'd have no problem paying for it. I do have plenty of issues with how donations are currently set up, because none of us know who controls the bank account, how each dollar is actually spent in detail, or if it's even being managed responsibly. Just as an example (don't take this personally anyone, because I'm not accusing you), if someone on the Dev team takes money as payment for their time/effort in making a website or coding bots, how much are they getting paid exactly? Are they being paid salary or per hour? How much is that, and is it industry standard, below standard, or obvious corruption? With $4000 spent on TW Development, what part goes to paying Devs and what part goes to the bot server? For example, if someone fronted $5000 to a coder/team of coders to create a Subspace clone in 2019, I'm willing to bet it could easily be done. I could go on Fiver and find someone to make a barely functioning TWL website, so where's the rest of the money going? Priitk made a Subspace clone (Continuum) by himself for free, and there have been multiple projects done by volunteers to create one themselves (albiet all were abandoned), so why hasn't anything been done on that front with the funds available? You wasted $1,200 on Cash Events to buy some nerds pizzas or pay them for winning elim games, but then claim there's no money for TW to not be down whenever Priitk fails to pay for the server?

I don't want to sound like there's obvious corruption, but I will say that the donation fund is not transparent at all, and I really don't know why the money has been spent in the ways it has. It looks like obvious mismanagement to me when I hear TW Staff say that hosting a server costs money and there are money issues, yet the bot server is paid for and there's been $15,000 donated already. For that amount of cash, minus the bot server and paying off some Devs (assuming they took a fair fee and actually did the work before buying a television with it, cough cough), we could have had an updated, fully-functioning Subspace clone (and access to our own server) by now. Instead, we rely entirely on Priitk (who is extremely hard to get ahold of) to do everything for us, and the minute he just doesn't pay the bill, TW is gone for good. The server is already a piece of shit, so I highly doubt he's paying top dollar to keep this zone alive. It's not 2002 anymore, so there's literally no excuse left as to why things have remained this way.

[bandcampgirl]

"Guess you could play on the dev server if you want. 104.128.69.148 port 6868."

NO ONE there! BS!

[WherzWaldo]

I have server capacity and bandwidth to donate to the cause.

[Bluff]

Considering all the agitation caused by TW?s temporary outage, everyone having a break is probably not the worst thing to ever happen..

[Bluff]

Sorry this downtime is extending out a bit. I should have more to report soon. It might be painful at present, but I think there should be a silver lining to it this time.

Have you heard from Priit? Having to go different zones and listen to all those lonely DSBers hate on TW is getting old, haha.

[Rab]

but I think there should be a silver lining to it this time.

such a tease! give us the deets!

[Falconeer]

just log off for a day or two man...lol.

I logged off and played Witcher 3, but there are other zones out there, I played DSB for 4 hours since it won't be that active again.

If you never tried another zone, then TW being down is a good time to have an open mind, support some other zones, and see whats going on elsewhere in subspace. (though with EG, and Proleague down, it's less likely). But devastation was online, DSB, and Hockey zone.

I don't view other zones as 'competition' at all, neither do I view TW as competition. Instead other zones are all apart of the game we like and provide different gameplays/settings for when I feel like playing something different. Each zone has it's pros and cons to it's settings, including TW.

If you want subspace to be around in the future we need to stop hating each other.

[Jessup]

Sorry this downtime is extending out a bit. I should have more to report soon. It might be painful at present, but I think there should be a silver lining to it this time.

Cool.. glad to hear, hope we can protect ourselves a bit better.

[Ricko]

just log off for a day or two man...lol.

[qan]

Guess you could play on the dev server if you want. 104.128.69.148 port 6868. It's not connected to any biller, though, so anyone can log in as anyone else.

Before anyone asks, no, not planning on running bots there, heh. So if you'd like, you can enjoy truly classic TW pub there for a limited time. :P If anyone wants to manually host there, DM me and I'll send you the mod password.

Sorry this downtime is extending out a bit. I should have more to report soon. It might be painful at present, but I think there should be a silver lining to it this time.

[Rab]

U gonna pay? U know there has been struggles in the past years to keep going on with payment..

Don't even know if it would cost anything, i.e. if it could be installed on the web server then it's no extra cost.

[Majorcrisis2]

When TW is down, we still should be able to join another zone and play TW settings.
Is there a zone with TW arenas already set up?
Can we set one up?

U gonna pay? U know there has been struggles in the past years to keep going on with payment..

[Falconeer]

Just play other zones if TW is only down for 1-4 hours, treat it like an event, like Distention in pub or something, this ultimately helps the whole community. If people play in other zones the core players from those zones come back, and when TW is online again those core players will go where their is already population setup.

As for having their own biller and zone, this is something I suggested for the past year. TW has an AS3 zone, but it still requires a lot of work to be functional. I keep reminding staff to work on it and finish it so they have a backup plan in case TW goes down one day permanently.

[Rab]

Also perhaps we should just make a zone anyway so we can have proper control of it.