Reason behind economic measures
RetroCores is more expensive to keep up than you think!
Majority can agree, there's certain quality to RetroCores that's not easily found elsewhere.
It's reliable, stable and always available and quite smooth for most.

It's not affected as much by attacks such as DDos/Hackers and more, even though RetroCores is almost constantly under attack.

Why is RetroCores expensive to keep rolling like it does today?
The reasons are many, but to name a few.
RetroCores is run on multiple high-end dedicated servers, which all serve a vital role in the stability in RetroCores with it's many features and abilities.

The website alone, run on its own and very powerful dedicated, we're talking 5.0 GHz intel core processor, and other quite impressive hardwares.
Together with website, there's 2 dedicated servers that serves as "load balancers", they help the website with tasks that can get heavy and generally just make sure the website runs as smooth as possible, no matter where you are in the world, or what you're doing on the website.
They also help keeping connections strong between the worlds.
Unlike most games around the world, the website and each world is constantly connected and are talking to eachother.
That's why RetroCores highscores updates so quickly, for example.

In addition to that, there's a storage dedicated, a computer fit to keep a lot of data on it.
It's purpose it to keep track of all CAMs generated in RetroCores, but also server as a third-wheel to the website and helping it loading images quicker and easier and helping taking the load off from the website which would be the one having to fix with images all the time.

After that, each world is on different dedicated servers, so there's 1 dedicated server per world after that.

When we're done counting up the game and website, we're moving on to our private network, the thing that help RetroCores to battle massive attacks such as DDos.
RetroCores has network nodes, which is an entry-point there you enter the private network and from there connect to the world you're logging into.
It sounds and works almost as a proxy, with few differences that it filters and adapt towards attacks.
We have a lot of nodes, to ensure best connection for everyone.
We have nodes in Netherlands, France, Germany, Poland, England, Denmark, Sweden, USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Singapore and in Australia.
That's a lot of countries, right?.. and most countries have multiple nodes.
Technical people can research this quite simple themselves, because when you login to RetroCores, you can with help of CMD see that the client connects to multiple nodes around the world, before choosing 6 key nodes to use for your best connection.
From that point you'll be connected to the game through 6 nodes (6 different IP addresses), if one or even multiple nodes are disconnected, you wouldn't know, maybe you'd get a ping spike but you wouldn't notice anything else.

After we've covered the "hardwares", it's time to look at other expenses.
We have multiple services we need to pay for, such as mail, they're not free, we're paying for the mail sent to every user from account creation, account recovery, come back offers, and so on.
I also have a very advanced SMS system that alerts me (The Admin) in case something is wrong, if a world would go offline, if website act up or anything that's not normal, I'll be spammed down with SMS to ensure I know about the problem and can fix it ASAP.
We also have some statistics services we use to run statistics where users live (country/city) and where they came from, which helps running statistics on how many possible players exist in certain areas and if any changes can be made to better fit them.

After that we have the massive costs of advertising.
The more effective the advertising is, the many times more it costs.
Facebook, google and more.
Streamers from time to time, which is the most expensive advertising to hire, so expensive that it's not worth hiring streamers if your only source of income is premium similar services.
A streamer with 500 viewers could be asking for 50 EUR/Hour to play a certain game, even more.
And if we calculate that with golden accounts, there would need to be sold 10 GACC per hour to compensate, and GACC is 14 days long.
If the streamer was paid to stream for 3 hours/day, which is very short and not very efficient in advertising, there would need to be 450 people buying golden account every 14 days, just for that one streamer who probably doesn't even manage to get 450+ people that actually purchases things.

I think you get the idea, GACC is not enough to hire streamers because it would drain the funds of RetroCores until it goes bankrupt.

And finally, the cost of me, an admin who's always here, working on interests of RetroCores every single day with exception of the summer.
I work every day you can imagine, weekends, Halloween, Christmas, New Year, even my birthday, even when I'm sick I'm always around working on something.
Often my work can't be directly seen as much of it is in background, stability, security and smoothness.

And as result, which you can clearly see, RetroCores has come a VERY long way, there's no way for any "download&run" servers to have any chance catching up with RetroCores because the evolve phase is too high and consistent.

I too, need some sort of income to keep me doing this (which I love to work with).
RetroCores is time consuming (no shit), and I wouldn't be able to work with it if I had to take another job to support my life.
RetroCores is my life, my job, simple as that, but I too want to survive.

Stability economics
To keep RetroCores stable I collect money-buffers. (Imagine Super Mario running a course collecting coins)
When RetroCores does well, the profits aren't wasted up, they're stored to secure the future.
And that's the most important part of economics, building as big buffers you can, to ensure future stability and making sure you can handle accident that can cost you more than you dare to dream about.

When RetroCores was first launched, it didn't take long until it was under massive DDos attacks.
It lasted for almost 2 weeks and during that time RetroCores burned more than 250 EUR/Day trying to get it fixed.
Multiple companies was involved trying to stop the attack, without success, the attacks wasn't stopped until I built and launched the private network mentioned above.
And by that time, RetroCores economy was minus 4,500 EUR (250/day + cost to purchase nodes around the world) and took 2 months to recover from, before the economy was on + again, and on that I don't include any pay for myself that worked 20 hour/day at that point (legit numbers, no joking around).
Archive [Nov 29 2019] -RetroCores own and upgraded network!.

Anyway, point is that we secure RetroCores by building large buffers that help RetroCores to keep evolve and stay stable, even if periods there's lack of players.
We are able to "ride out storms" with this technique.
But we must look to future, and always make sure the economics stay stable as well.

Decision to increase funds
In early 2020 it was decided that GACC wasn't enough to sustain RetroCores, the costs keep increasing and the buffer started to shrink in a time there it should have grown.
So a discussion was started, how to increase fundings of RetroCores, and after 3 months time there was two solutions, either we added AOL and Bless to the store, or we include a supply category in the store.

Just to be clear, cosmetics was brought up often, but that's not reliable nor stable funding, for stable funding you need to sell something that people want, and that they use up and isn't permanent.
Along with the fact that 90% of the players wouldn't purchase anything cosmetic, and most of those who would, would only do it once or twice in a year.
Leaving a small group of 1% that might be purchasing random cosmetic things once or twice a month.

Anyhow, the supply category was voted down, and AOL/Bless came out as a preferred solution, and so it was introduced.

Economy stabilized
The AOl/Bless in store worked wonderfully, the economics was stabilized and everything was fine in terms of economics.
There was no need for further changes or ideas to secure fundings.

People had change of heart
When the first season of Zenera ended, people had a change of heart.
They would really want to see AOL/Bless removed for the sake of being able to make wars there people didn't carry AOL.
They would want to be able to kill enemies that wouldn't easily come back because limited losses thanks to AOL and Blessings easily obtained.

So again, the discussion was opened about AOL/Bless vs Supplies.
And to my surprise, majority of the people I talked to wanted supplies more than AOL/Bless.

After research, and talking with multiple players, inside and outside war-teams, players that come and go and active players, most seemed to agree, that they'd rather want supplies than AOL/Bless.

So on Saturday of August 29, AOL/Bless was removed from the store and the supply category came to be instead, as a test.
To see how it works out, if people really wanted it, and if prices were right.
I've implored people to leave constructive feedback how they want the situation handled.

Now when we've tried it out, people have seen it, we can have a decent poll on what people actually think about it.

The supply store might have less impact on the game than you expect
Either if we run a supply-store or not, people will still get runes with money in RetroCores.
As we've seen and experienced, like half of people selling runes, will in PMs tell you they only sell for paypal or similar.

Quick analyzing the subject would tell us the pros/cons being this:
(Keep in mind store can't be used while PZ, so cons of people refiling UHs while trapped or other, doesn't exist)

Cons:

• Part of oldschool feeling is taken away.
• People think it's P2W (this is not valid, check below)

Pros:

• People can get legit runes quickly in emergencies, to recover their dead body or similar situations.
• Rune sellers for $ will decrease, making higher percent of trade messages legit for gps and hence easier to buy runes for gps, not paypal.
• Less people will get scammed through rune-sellers using $.
• Less rune-making bots, since it will be harder selling runes it will discourage cheaters (not all, but some of them).
• The store wont have need for AOL/Bless to stabilize the economy.

Why P2W isn't valid is simple.
Everything is already P2W in every multi player game, with or without official shop.
There will always be players selling things for real money, something that's impossible to get rid of, and hence that the market exist for it, it will always be present in all games.
In any multi-player game, if players can trade or give away items, you can purchase things from other players.
There are entire forums, facebook groups, discord groups and more, dedicated for sales within different games.

Stay objective and with your opinion
Please don't get this wrong, this is not a sales pitch there I try to convince you for my own agendas.
All I want is for you to understand everything, before you blindly vote and later learn something that make you change your mind.
It's easy to think one way, and then suddenly change the opinion because new information was given to us.
And that's life, it's about growth, learning new things, getting new opinions and grow as a person.
I want each vote, to be accurate and thought through, so the best decisions can be made that benefit everyone!


PLEASE READ THE WHOLE TOPIC BEFORE VOTING!

All options except "Only AOL + Bless" will have follow up poll about prices and similar.