Debating Deluxe Account Aspects

In response to the many insightful and helpful comments I've received, I'm going take a moment to lay out my basic principles with respect to the game, and the options that arise from those principles.

First, you will always be able to play for free. Always. Deluxe accounts will get extra features that (I hope) will enhance play, make the game more varied, and encourage donations, but people with those accounts will still be playing the same game. There will be no wall, no segregation of the masses from the elite. Right now, there's a temporary hack to improve performance that invisibly divides the game into "arenas". This will go away, for everyone.

Second, I want everyone to have a chance to experience Deluxe features. But I also want to encourage and reward supporters. These goals conflict. Free Deluxe accounts stand at one extreme, with sky-high fees for short account terms at the other. Balance is tricky. The easy part is lifetime accounts for certain extraordinary generous supporters I've mentioned in prior posts.

Now for the options. These aren't alternatives to each other, there more a sort of mix-and-match grab bag of idea. Please give feedback! All dollar amounts have been pulled out of thin air to provoke discussion - I'm not committed to any of them.
(edited to reflect feedback:)

• Lifetime accounts for $100
• Yearly accounts for $24 (working out to $2/month)
• "Calling plan" accounts for $5, giving 30 hours of Deluxe play. Only game time spent playing with Deluxe features turned on would consume the account's hours. Designed for infrequent and cash-strapped players.
• Deluxe days: free Deluxe features for all players, for a day, at either random or announced intervals.
• Hardship accounts: tell me that you love the game but plead extenuating circumstances (unemployed, law student, held prisoner in a fortune cookie factory, etc). But this has the potential to both eat into what little precious time I can devote to the game and force people to grovel. How can I avoid those drawbacks? Allow non-monetary donations of some sort, such as mailing me a nice bit of original art or a nice letter about how the game changed your life, or writing me in as a presidential candidate in 2008 (just kidding)?
• Free trial: Two hours of Deluxe play just for registering an account, then pay-only.
  

What do you think?

Snail Mail and Development Priorities

Although I have nothing profound (or even visible) to present to you, I want to keep you up on what's going on in my head. Also, donations by US mail began to arrive last Wednesday; Several people sent cards and/or wrote nice letters to me. If you mailed anything to me, please also send me an email with your real name and city so I can match up email addresses with letters. I need email addresses of donors so I can create accounts for you all when I roll out "Deluxe WEBoggle"; I have them already for all PayPal donors.

My first priority is a set of client-server changes that I've had in mind for quite a while. I've already written a new server, but the client-side is lacking because I was trying to combine the new functional code with a complete re-design of the site. Now, I'm going to back off on the re-design and simply adapt the current client code to work with the new server. This change should allow me to eliminate the "separate arenas" hack that is currently and arbitrarily dividing up players, yet still support several hundred players with ease. It should also completely eliminate "Too Late" words and other Internet bugaboos; Under the new plan, every word you guess within the time limit will be scored, and the only effect of Internet lag (or even complete loss of connection!) should be that other players might not see your full score and all your guesses.

The new code will also pave the way for "Deluxe" features. These will include the ability to "ban" other players (really just hiding them from you), play "private" games (only see players who have typed in the same game name), customize the scoring rules, and keep play statistics. I plan to make these features available to anyone who donates (or already has) by automatically creating "Deluxe WEBoggle" accounts. There will be lifetime accounts for those who have donated truly staggering amounts, yearly accounts for substantial donations, and some other kind for all other donors. The obvious "other kind" is monthly, but I don't feel completely comfortable with requiring monthly donations to keep an account alive. Any suggestions?

Statistics of Gratitude

I spent part of this afternoon getting my donor database into shape, making sure that I have everyone, and have marked those who wish to remain anonymous. I now have the raw material for the "Sponsor's Hall of Fame", or whatever I end up calling it. Here are some statistics:

• In the past 3 years, 315 of you have donated a total of 372 times.
• 172 of those 372 donations were made during Pledge Drive Weekend.
• Of the 172 of you who donated during PDW, 39 had donated before.
• The amount donated during PDW was a bit over 56% of the total donated for all 3 years. In other words, you donated more during those three days than during the entire previous existence of the game!
• Over three years, the Johnsons have donated 14 times. Dan, the grad student who found a volunteer programmer to help me, has also donated 7 times. Two people have donated 4 times each, five have donated 3 times each, and about two dozen have donated twice.

Feeling Blessed and Humbled

As you probably know (or you wouldn't be reading this), I'm the proprietor of the online game WEBoggle. My name is Evan Simpson, and I live in Waco, TX with my wife and four children. Several of the many fine folks who donated during the June 15, 2007 Pledge Drive said that they liked learning more about my background, and one person suggested that I start blogging. This struck me as a good idea, if for no other reason that I can use this blog to tell you all what's happening behind the scenes of the game, and to put up emergency status bulletins if something is going wrong with the server.

First I'm going to repeat here, for posterity, what I added to the Pledge Drive page in its ninth hour:

Wow. I don't have the words. I am humbled by the outpouring (yes, that's the word for it) of support and encouragement. "You all rock" doesn't begin to express how my family and I feel. This morning I just thought that maybe, over the next two weeks, enough people would be willing to send us a few dollars that we could squeak through the end of the month. It has been only nine hours, and the crisis is over. I've spent an hour writing brief thank-you's in reply to PayPal notifications, and I'm not done. If I haven't gotten to you yet, rest assured that I will. The Pledge Drive is officially downgraded from Category "Please Help!" to Category "If you haven't donated before and you enjoy WEBoggle, please do." This weekend I'm going to take a hard look at what I can do here to show my appreciation. And I hope, when I get to the next phase of my life as a lawyer, to be able to pay forward all the generosity that you've shown me.

That said, I'll tell you a bit more about the history and people behind the game. It was created by Logan Ingalls, who wrote the original Perl server and JavaScript client. I was an avid player and also a web programmer, so in mid-2004 when Logan was unable to keep the game running any more, I volunteered to host it on one of my servers. Over the next few months, I rewrote the server in Python, added the 5x5 board, started tinkering with the word list, and added board customization.

In February 2005, I started studying at Baylor Law. Naturally, the game became so popular not much later that the server began to choke on a routine basis. For the next half-year, I tinkered and tweaked. My final news entry was in October of 2005. After that, it was all I could do to keep the game bumping along in my spare time. It needed some serious re-coding, and that went very slowly. I'm not efficient when I write code in scattered hour-long bursts.

Meanwhile, my wife Penney launched Beatnix Coffee House. It has been a huge success, gathering a loyal clientèle and a fantastic group of creative people who run poetry nights, open mic music nights, comedy nights, and art shows. But it isn't yet profitable enough for Penney to pay herself for all her work. Yes, we are nuts: we started a small business at the same time I took a huge pay cut to start school.

Fast forward to June 2007: I am in my final quarter at Baylor. Practice Court (the part of the curriculum that makes Baylor the "boot camp of law schools") is 3/4 done. Next month, I will graduate and take the Texas Bar Exam. I don't yet have a job lined up, and the student loans are about to run out. In particular, thanks to some bad loan disbursement timing, we can't figure out how to pay the bills for the rest of June. My family and Penney's have both chipped in, both financially and to help us with the kids, but they don't have any more to give. And I still need to pay for bar prep materials, or I fear that I won't be able to do my part to uphold Baylor's bar passage rate (100% this February!)

The rest is Pledge Drive history. Over 125 players donated, in less than two days. Now we can put gas in the car, pay the bills, and I can get my study materials. Before this I knew that "lots" of players visit regularly, and the mini-floods of email I would get when there were server problems told me how dedicated (or in the words of many, addicted) many players are. But I never imagined that there were over a hundred great-hearted, loving people playing this game, ready to help out as soon as they saw the pledge link even though the game itself was never at risk. Now I know. I feel blessed and humbled.

I'll take the pledge link down Sunday evening. Someone has suggested that I put it up once a month, just to nudge new players. I may do that. For now, I need to find a way to honor everyone who has already given. Several things are in the works, including a pledge thanks page. I'll let you know more as it happens.

Here are some snapshots for the curious:

Me and My Family