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March 2020 Donations & Finances


Cipher

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  • City Council

Hey everyone!

 

I hope you have all been enjoying testing Page 5 (Builds 1 & 2) of Issue 26! We really appreciate all of the testing and feedback you have all provided us. For those who are unaware, we are currently testing the latest build for Page 5 on our beta server. For more information on how to connect and copy your characters see this and this.

 

We have a few additional expenses starting this month which increases our monthly operating expenses by $43. The first new expense is a Paperspace Air instance as we needed an inexpensive server with a GPU to use as a rendering node both for current internal and future public-facing services (more information at the bottom of the post!). The second new expense is 6 more failover IP addresses from OVH. The first new failover address is used to move our authentication server to another physical machine in the event that we need to (such as during the hardware failure that we had earlier this week), and the other four addresses are for our beta, staging, and development shards.

 

Finally, we have received the invoice that we recently received from our primary law firm for their services rendered through January 31st to be paid early in March.

 


February 2020 Breakdown

Last month we accepted $5,971.53 in donations - $56.66 over our target for the month.

 

Here is the breakdown of what the January funds went towards:

  • $4,820.39 to OVH for our hosting
    • + $15.00 for 5 new failover IP addresses (failover for the box we had a hardware failure on and new addresses for our beta & staging shards)
  • $953.32 to our lawyers for their services rendered through December 31st
  • $96.00 for our Google G-Suite Business account
    • + $12.83 for Google Voice
  • $30.00 for our 1&1 IONOS domain & outbound email service
  • $22.00 to Paperspace for an Air instance with a dedicated/static IP address
    • This is $22/mo for the Air instance; an additional $3/mo will be charged starting in March for the IP address
  • $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira Cloud instance (10-user)
  • $9.73 for security / administration software

 

image.thumb.png.21babffb86c5c8c69fbf92e7489901e4.png

 


March 2020

As previously stated, we received the next invoice from our primary law firm for their services rendered in January totaling $375.30; this will be paid in early March. We still have $21.04 overrun from February which will be put towards the donation target for March.

 

In total, the donation target for March 2020 is $5,376.21. Here is a breakdown of how the funds are allocated:

  • $4,838.39 to OVH for our hosting
    • This includes the new $18/mo for the failover addresses
  • $375.30 to our lawyers for their services through January 31st
  • $108.83 for our Google G-Suite Business account
    • This includes the $12.83 Google Voice line
  • $30.00 to 1&1 IONOS for domain services & outgoing email
  • $25.00 for the Paperspace Air instance
  • $9.73 for the security / administration software
  • $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira Cloud instance (10-user)

 


Paperspace Rendering Node

As stated at the beginning of the post, we now have a Paperspace Air instance ($22/mo base + $3/mo for a static IP). This server is currently being used as a rendering node for a scalable character / costume rendering system that we’ve been building to render characters both on-demand and automatically as they log out for use in an internal system and future public-facing web projects. Here are a couple of renders of GM characters (note that this service is still a W.I.P.):

Vishao.thumb.png.f487678b4bca5af05e6b951742bbe468.pngClassic_Cipher-0.thumb.png.548f2bd5b766762cedf896afe9c0db83.pngGM_Cipher-0.thumb.png.0a766264f891d753645b33a8dac7d863.pngGM_Arcanum.thumb.png.decd716d510e9d5f077d813b17d6d1d7.pngGM_Miss-0.thumb.png.af86a0fef8475da9219dbe09cf8cb3d7.png

 

(Fun fact: this system is also how I generated a headshot for my forum avatar!)

 


 

Donations are now closed; thank you for the support! The next donation window will be on Saturday, March 28th.

 

Our donation system will be open as of the time of this post with a donation target of $5,376.21 and will automatically close once that target is met.

 

Thank you yet again for your continued support!

 

  • The Homecoming Team

 

  • Like 4

If you need help, please submit a support request here or use /petition in-game.

 

Got time to spare? Want to see Homecoming thrive? Consider volunteering as a Game Master!

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Know it isn't much (everyone wishes they had more) and haven't been able to play as much as we wanted to this month but, still, got our "subscriptions" in at least.

Can only hope it helps.

 

Thanks to everyone, you folks are really doing some amazing work.

 

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Once more on the ledger, keep it going folks.

" When it's too tough for everyone else,

it's just right for me..."

( Unless it's Raining, or Cold, or Really Dirty

or there are Sappers, Man I hate those Guys...)

                                                      Marine X

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Might have something to do with knowing exactly where the money is going.  If we got to see how much money went to the actual Developers and server maintenance costs versus the publishers, maybe that little bit of information would provide the context we needed back then to feel like we were adequately informed on our purchases.

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This was the first time I was able to get in there and donate before the donation window closed.  I am so glad to have this available to me and my family again.  This was the first game I introduced my son to gaming on and now I am sharing the same game with my daughter.  She loves it!  

 

I can't tell you how much I appreciate having the game available again!  Keep up the great work!  As long as the window is open, I will donate!  We have 5 gamers in the family and it helps us to all run together even though we are spread out in 3 different states.  

 

Way to go, guys!

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  • 3 weeks later
5 hours ago, JayboH said:

I apologize for being a noob:  what are the lawyers for?

The fact that that game is running, um, ILLEGALLY right now, and they don't want it to? 

Edited by The Philotic Knight
  • Like 1
I'm out.
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  • Cipher unpinned and unfeatured this topic

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