Lifetime Forum Perks, Tips, & Ads?!

Hello Brawlers,

Just a quick thread to mention some changes we've made to mainly the forums, but also in some other areas. Most of this was inspired by the latest EULA discussions.

Lifetime Forum Benefits

Lifetime VIP, MVP, and ELITE members now get benefits on the forums.

After purchasing your in-game rank, it will automagically sync to your forums account within 1 hour maximum granting you to the perks above. We are still tweaking these a bit, but we are very happy to be able to provide perks on the website now too. Feel free to suggest additions or changes!


Accepting Donations & Tips

While we are extremely grateful that many of you have spent money in order to keep Brawl functioning in return for in-game perks, we are opening up an area to accept donations with nothing in return.

The shop has a package where you may feel free to contribute any monetary value at http://shop.brawl.com/category/682124.

This is not required by any means, but we greatly do appreciate it as the EULA is presumably going to greatly diminish our ability to take care of expenses.


Forum Donation Medals

In return for taking donations, we would be glad to give you a one of the new medals on the forums.

https://www.brawl.com/help/medals

Just message an Admin on the forums after making your donation and we'll hook you up. Shout out to @Totalrock123 who saw this before we said anything about it.


Expense Payment Goal

On the shop at http://shop.brawl.com/ we are now showing on the sidebar what percent we are to completing our expected expenses for the month.

This will allow a more transparent look between you, the players, and us at Brawl.


Forum Advertisements

We are working on placing about two Google adsense advertisements on each page. We are kind of testing the waters with this right now, but if all goes well it will help us pay a little bit of the expenses each month.

As of now, there is an advertisement on the top and bottom of: threads, member pages, and forum node listings. And there is one advertiser on the bottom of the main forums page.

These are all provided by Google's adsense program which is heavily monitored to ensure that all of the advertisements are very safe and non-malicious. While we do not encourage that you falsely engage in the ads, we do suggest that you disable your ad block for Brawl to at least give it a chance.

If the ads begin to subtract from the forums experience we will be removing them.


Thanks,
Brawl Staff Team

 

That may of slipped in the list of perks. We'll have to sit down and think about it before adding it back.

What's wrong with the changes to the forums? We have to progress somehow.

 

I do not see the perks that we added as something you have to bust out your wallet immediately for. Its just some other nice benefits that go along with the rank.

The old conversation participant max was 12, so it was decreased a little to give room for expansion into the rank benefits. Sorry if this creates a damper on your conversations.

The negative ratings was a brainstorming idea that slipped onto the final perk list on accident. All of the perks on that list are active, but for the ratings. We will discuss this further before doing anything, but I don't see it happening if we can't prevent abuse.

Overall, I don't see the need to just say that the changes were overall bad (or dislikable). You have to understand that we are trying to create ways to keep the server up at this point.

We haven't accepted donations before. The players who made purchases have received what they paid for.