We get a bunch of donations from the TFC servers. They are nowhere near enough to cover the costs of running a server. But they do help and they add to a feeling of community. Since the ARK servers use up quite a lot of time and server resources and since we seem to be doing OK with them, I think it's time to consider adding donor perks.
- Do we want this?
- Is it possible to do without making it pay to win?
- Are there are any plugins/mods that can be linked to a shop system like we have for the Minecraft servers to automate the process?
To give everybody an idea of just how much resources the ARK servers use. We currently have three ARK instances which we have to run on Windows. Our Minecraft servers are running on Linux. This means that the memory and CPU we allocate to the ARK server can't be used elsewhere. This makes them relatively expensive. Currently the ARK server has 32GB of RAM, 8 CPUs and two SSDs allocated to it. This is roughly a third of our server capacity. If we could run them under Linux the CPU and memory that's not actively being used could be assigned to other servers, but now they are exclusive to ARK whether they are used or not. Of course we can always move CPUs and memory around between virtual machines as needed.