Okaaaay... so... here's what I'd like to do about the GAF server.
First off, why I'd like a dedicated one: Well, to be honest, as long as the server is running (and its pretty much running 24/7), I can't really do anything that intensive other than run the server, and play Starbound. Which kind of sucks, because I'm a gamer, and I'd like to actually play other games.
Now, in terms of getting that dedicated server, I could pay for the server by myself, but I'd be looking at running a measly 6 or 8 person server a month. If this was Terraria, sure, maybe, but Starbound isn't just one planet like Terraria, there's thousands of planets, and while in Terraria, its fairly easy for a group of players to strip the planet dry, or hell, troll the hell out of the world, in Starbound, we can always just easily say screw it, and easily move to another planet, without resorting to any actual wipe. This game needs to be played with a lot of people shaping the universe, and I feel that only 8 people is too pathetic a number to have for this game.
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Considering how I could have at least 18 people in Terraria on my PC, I'd like to shoot for, bare minimum, a 20 player server. We COULD go higher, but I'd like to start at 20 for several reasons:
1) It's still a beta. It's because of that, that we're probably not going to get that huge influx of people on a constant basis. Once we're out of beta, I'm sure the amount of players will increase, and maybe at that point, we can increase max capacity.
2) Keeping it at 20 means that the expenses won't be as high. There's a good $150 difference between 20 and 30 people for a one year server.
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Which brings us to the money aspect. I can't afford to pay for a server that large. For this to work, I would appreciate it if we could all chip in. At most, we need about $350 (I'm rounding up, and havent taken into account the discounts) for a 20-man server for one year. During that time, if we need to increase capacity, I could always ask for donations again so we can bring up that number.
We probably only really need $300 though. I'm willing to put in $50 to start us off. If we really want that 30-man server, we'll need about $520 ($470, if you subtract the $50 I'm going to put in).
Could we go higher than 30? I suppose we could. It could be a waste of money though. We gather enough money for a 50-man server, but after the intial hype dies down, we'd only be doing a 20-30 man capacity, and that's just wasteful. We could have used that extra money to buy ourselves games or something.
I havent worked out how to actually collect donations, or if there's a reward system we can implement for people who donate, but I'll take suggestions.
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Now, as for when we could move to a dedicated server? Honestly, I'm debating if I should wait or not. Again, I'd actually LIKE to use my computer for other things, but we could also start as soon as we gather enough funding, or we can wait till we hit Phase 2 or 3 of the Beta, or even for the game to come out of Beta.
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Well, those are my thoughts on the whole dedicated server idea. Any and all input is apprectiated.