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Pang Game profile

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Jan 13th 2020, 2:02:16

Hi everyone!

I’m excited to announce something that’s been in the works for a long, long time — Patron, Credits and Premium subscription for Earth Empires! We'll be looking to roll this out in the next couple of days but I wanted to give everyone a heads up so they can get ready.

Here is a quick rundown of the new stuff:

Patron
Patron mode is a one-time purchase that grants you access to the Patron board on the forums. We’ll also do some more vanity things — icons and the like — once I get a chance to get a designer re-engaged in this work. Patron is basically just a way to show your support/say thanks for the work we’ve put into the game over the last decade.

Patron costs $30 USD for now, but I’ll probably up it to $50 USD after the current user base has had a chance to join. People who come back in 6-12 months from now will have the opportunity to buy it at a higher price. We may shut down enrolment to it eventually as well.

Credits
In order to make in-game transactions, we’ve created a new Earth Empires Credits system which players can purchase on the Earth Empires Shop. The shop is powered by Shopify and accepts all major credit cards, PayPal, Google Pay, and Apple Pay.

Credits will allow players to purchase benefits for their countries or accounts. To start with, the only thing that is able to be purchased is Premium, but we aspire to do something more like Utopia where they have many options for things to buy that improve the gameplay experience but don’t unbalance the game. This could include things like allowing other players to temporarily log into your country (babysit), taunting other players/tags, SMS/email bots when hit or market transactions are completed. We’re very interested in hearing what sort of ideas everyone has for things like this so please share them with us on the Bugs and Suggestions forum.

For launch, the cost of Credits will be as follows:
20 Credits for $3.50 USD (down from $6)
50 Credits for $8 USD (down from $15)
100 Credits for $14 USD (down from $25)
Edit: I lowered the pricing since we'll be potentially tweaking that moving forward, we'll see how this goes first!)

Premium
Being an Earth Empires Premium member will give all of your countries several bonuses. To start with, we’ll be launching with the following items:
- Ad-free game and forum experience
- Automatically receive 9 bonus points daily just for logging in (replaces daily voting bonuses AND 1 extra bonus point)
- Provides estimated chance for spyop success
- Daily bonus point reset time is 22 hours
- Change country names while in protection
- No more captchas
- Access to Alpha servers (test servers)

As discussed in the Credits section, the focus for the Premium benefits is to improve the quality of life of players without making it into a pay-to-win service. We’ll look to add some more things to this list as we think of them/find time to code them.

Earth Empires Premium is a subscription service done at the account level and applies to all your countries across all servers.

For launch, the cost of Earth Empires Premium will be as follows:
1 month for 15 credits
3 months for 35 credits

I’m hopeful this will all work without issues (I’ve tested it all a bunch) but have added a lot of logging for transactions and have a list of all transactions in Shopify. If something breaks with this system, please let me know as we don’t want to be in a situation where paid services are not working as expected.

As I said above, we’re really excited to make this available as it’s been something a lot of people have been wanting for a while (especially the automatic bonus points). Increasing the revenue base for the game is also important to help fund marketing and create incentive to keep putting time toward building and growing the game. We'll be continuing to tweak all aspects of this system and look forward to hearing everyone's feedback.


Thanks for everyone’s support!

Cheers

Edited By: Pang on Jan 27th 2020, 4:18:57
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-=Pang=-
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