PBW upgrades - Pardon our dust...

[capnq]

Maybe there could be licensed franchises to produce stuff locally for the international players?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

I trust not paypal.

[se5a]

aye narf.
doesn't google do something simular now?
has anyone used here it? I heard it had a few teething troubles, but what's it like now?

[Suicide Junkie]

I don't trust 'em either.
So I pay it by credit card and make sure it gets to the other end before paying the credit card... just to be safe.

[geoschmo]

I understand people have concerns with Paypal. Fortunatly as far as I know I've never had any problem with them. Either with donations to PBW or my own personal use buying stuff online. I think the main problems people have had with them in the past is when thet have gotten ripped off by a sellor, Paypal was less helpful than they could have been in resolving the dispute. That shouldn't be a problem for anybody with PBW donations I hope.

As far as alternatives, when we started taking donations on PBW there were some similar services out there, but I think Paypal is really the only one left of any consequence. Google's version seems to have gone away, or perhaps they haven't got it off the ground yet. I can't find a link to it anyway.

For a while I had a PO box and I took donations by mail. We never got enough to offset the cost of the box rental. If anyone really, really wants to send a donation and can't get past their aversion to Paypal, I can give you my address in an email. I understand in this day and age it's not really hard to find someone's personal information so if someone really wanted to they could find my name and address online. But I don't care to post it and make it easier on the spam bots.

[capnq]

geoschmo said: I understand people have concerns with Paypal. Fortunatly as far as I know I've never had any problem with them. Either with donations to PBW or my own personal use buying stuff online. I think the main problems people have had with them in the past is when thet have gotten ripped off by a sellor, Paypal was less helpful than they could have been in resolving the dispute.

Some people who haven't had any problems themselves object to Paypal's business practices.

[geoschmo]

capnq said:
Some people who haven't had any problems themselves object to Paypal's business practices.

Well, that's pretty vague. I don't want to set myself up as some sort of Paypal defender, but pick a business and you can find people that will object to it's business practices. In fact you can find a significant portion of the population that objects to business in general.

All I can say is Paypal offers a service. A pretty valuable and conveinent service for an operation like PBW. If we didn't have Paypal we'd be dependant on mail donations which would entail all sorts of headaches and hassles with cashing checks, making deposits, worrying about envelopes lost in the mail, etc. And we wouldn't even be able to consider taking credit card donations because of the costs and hassles to get that sort of thing setup. And on top of that the CC compaines take a percentage just like Paypal.

It would be different if this were a real money making operation, but it's not and isn't intended to be. Not that I object to making money. I just don't see PBW as having real pontential for positive cash flow. The user base is loyal, but too small. We'd have to branch out into other games to really make a go of that and I just don't have the skills for the programming needed for something like that. At least not yet. Who knows what the future may hold.

Is Paypal perfect? No way. But considering they handle BILLIONS of dollars in transactions every month they must be doing a pretty decent job or they'd be out of business or facing droves of competitors by now.

[Azselendor]

I used to sell online at ebay with paypal, and I took donations during my se.org days with paypal.
I can safely safe they suck. google was supposed to have a service called "GPay", i believe, a few years back that would compete with paypal, unfortunately ebay was unwilling to partner with google on it and offer this payment solution alongside paypal and that killed the project much like how ebay shut out other paypal-like services from ebay.

Geo is right on the other concerns with payment by mail and credit card processing companies are among the worst to deal with. Paypal, sadly, is the least of several evils.

As for other games, I always told aaron that a dungeon odyssey MMO would be a lot of fun and attract players who can't play games like WOW or Everquest or just want to have a casual hack'n'slash without having to worry about a Leeroy Jenkins.

[capnq]

geoschmo said: Well, that's pretty vague. I don't want to set myself up as some sort of Paypal defender

And I don't want to derail the thread into a discussion of Paypal's shortcomings. Anybody who's interested can find plenty of Web sites by Paypal's critics.

I've used Paypal in the past, and probably would again if I really needed to, but everything I'd use it for right now are luxuries that I can do without.