Hi Joe,
It was a indeed a sad day when we had to take Beatniks Extreme, the last of our A3 servers offline. I may be biased, but I feel that Extreme was the very best coded of all the A3 PvE servers around, due the the balance of the AI, the economy, and player weapons and vehicles. I got quite a bit of player feedback that said the same. We had a dedicated player base that spend hundreds and hundreds of hours each getting maximum enjoyment from this server and I am very-very appreciative for their support.
A3 servers are expensive, and servers the caliber of the Extreme server takes quite a bit of work, time and effort to keep the code running smoothly. Unfortunately, aside from the gracious and precious "from the heart' donations of a very, very few, and much appreciated regular donors, there is only one other official way allowed to generate revenue to compensate for the server owner's expenditure of time and cash and sanity, (ie..getting up at 3am to answer emergency server issues, digging through the database to fix despawned bases, etc..). That way is to charge a small fee to play the server. We can't sell building mats, vehicles or anything else. We were running five servers at the time, three A3, two A2, a test server for each map, as well as web page hosting and a Teamspeak server. Even though they all had a player base, the open A3 servers relied entirely on "charitable" donations that weren't coming and unfortunately became unsustainable, so we had to find another way to cover expenses.
I am sorry Joe, but you are incorrect about previous donations not counting. If you donated to
any of the Beatniks A3 servers
at all, you and all other donor players were indeed allowed a free subscription for a time on the Extreme server. We even made it a point to seek out previous donors and make that fact clear to give them a chance to get hooked on the server. If you donated, you played, or at least had the chance to. I do believe your questions were answered in the post you mentioned. That thread can be found here:
http://beatnikbandits.com/forum/index.php?topic=1227.msg4186#msg4186 Actually, when you look at it, its not such a bad deal for the money at all. Instead of paying a fee for each donor vehicle you acquire, and another fee to replace it if it gets destroyed, you instead pay a small monthly fee to have unlimited access to a better list of donor vehicles you can buy in-game and have some really nicely tuned and balanced AI to use them on, all in a regulated, troll-free environment, (where you didn't even have to worry that you didn't lock your vehicle). All this for less than the average donor would spend monthly on donor vehicles the regular way.
If we get enough interest, a possible Extreme re-boot might not be out of the question in the future, but can't promise anything right now.
Thanks for your time,
Sandman
