Topic, Premium accounts, Should they be made?

  GIS has developed the perfect argument :D

  @geckojsc: I agree and sometimes when i ask my parents to have premium on something they say no. Unless a premium account has run out on another site that i play, which i have to wait about 6/7 months from now.

  Against premium accounts! THEY SHOULD NOT BE MADE!!!

  Gamelover is right, none of the people on this site who are younger than 18 (which is pretty much everyone) would be legally allowed to have a Paypal or other money-spending account, which means we would have to nag our parents for it. I know a lot of parents would say no.

There are perfectly good alternatives to premium accounts: more ads, merchandise, donations, and more iPhone apps would keep me happy!

  I just hate premium stuff, and probably will leave if it comes

  Let's see who thinks what after I've...

  It's not that, I just hate games where people think they're better than other because they paid for it.
And yes, that will happen!

  Do not expect to see too many new features coming then.

  If this game gets premium accounts, I'm stopping, period.
I hate them that much!

  They don't have to if they don't want to (or can't!), everyone remember that.

  BUMP, coz young members of BL maybe aren't allowed to pay for it.

  we can afford them probably, but we probably don't have the accounts for online paying

and plus, we don't know how much this'll cost

  I think you must be VERY poor to not afford them.

  against coz its not fair on the people who cant afford them!!!

  So am I.

  AGAINST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Hey! Bump!

  for me downloadable games are better than online games

  True, but for there to actually be an incentive to pay for downloadable games, they would need to have many more features than the online versions. That IS a lot of work. Then again, so are premium accounts.

jp, you may want to try putting Project Wonderful ads on the site. They use images instead of Flash so they won't interfere with game performance, and they can be very profitable.
http://www.projectwonderful.com/

  downloadable games would only require some modification to BL API to allow the game to communicate with bl and store scores if offline until connection is available
[edit] as far as im concerned

  Interesting thoughts thanks.
What I like in the premium accounts is that it makes it possible to prefer quality over quantity. For example I could develop extended features like detailed statistics and history of your scores. This is the kind of feature that will never exist without premimum accounts because it's not trivial to develop and it has server costs.

But, I understand the reasons why many don't like premium accounts. Actually it's maybe a better strategy to make more games + more ads (like all other game websites), than making premium accounts.

The downloadable games is a nice idea, but that's a LOT of work, and iPhone is maybe more profitable right now. I also think level packs (with mochiads for example) could work also for less work.

  @minmay: you're so right :D
@demonicyoshi: this is the best site that i express my creativity of levels that i have ever been on too. Ruining it will make me sooooo sad.

  DY that notepad stuff IS C++ or maybe even C :P
also you can download flash games and flash has a function that allows it to be run in fullscreen :)

  Well to add to MIMay's list- i have an other reason, (but i'm not shure how many others feal this way...)

I voted "no" because i absolutly hate becoming a "membor" on online sights.
Perhaps im too atached to my money, but once i spend money on something like being a "premium membor" i feal that unless i acomplish something, i'm wasting my time and money. So if i were to become a "premium membor", my life would be ruined. I would obsess over the sight, and my life would slip away.
So if you add "premium membors" i would NEVER become one. (on rune-scape i've never been a membor)
But since i've become so atached to this sight, by never becoming one, eveytime i enter this sight i would feel like i am missing out on stuff. This would cause me to stop visiting the sight as much and ill be forced to quit, or become a dreaded membor.


So i ask you JP to please don't do this!!! BL is the only place that lets me express my creativity and i dont want to lose this!

  minmay is right. If we do this, what if ppl start hacking?

  There are many, many problems with a premium account system. I'll mention two of them.

First, it would cause an immediate and dramatic fracturing of the community. Paying users would look down on non-paying; non-paying users would in turn regard paying users as unpleasant elitists. The 'Haha i'm premium and you are a free noob' post was, admittedly, a more concise and understandable way to say this.

Second, it would greatly degrade the free users' experience. After all, people need some sort of incentive to pay for a premium account, and in practice the only way is to make free players miserable with ads, crippled functionality of just about everything, et cetera. I'm sure most of you have seen that happen before.

Also, while I freely confess this seems trivial: it's bonuslevel.org, not bonuslevel.com. .org domains are for non-profit organizations.



Alternative, possibly better, methods of making money certainly exist. The iPhone games were an excellent start. I don't think merchandise would be a great idea right now (BL isn't really marketable, what are you going to put on a shirt? A turtle? I just don't see it working).

  Marc, im not talking about internet games... making a downloadable game is simular to making a websight, it uses varius types of code. It is posable to make games without C++. If you ever look into the program files of old games, most is done in notepad with custom coding.

  against it fore sure!

  I agree with allyally, more BL apps would be nice. How about adding BB2 as an app seems that that game has been created? Or/and CoBaCoLi as well.

That is a much better way with apps because quite a lot of people have a iPhone/iPod Touch now.

  I'm changing my mind to yes...