Help review Payment terms

[Accipiter]

As I’ve been hinting earlier; I’ve been tinkering on a supporter payment system while being on a bit of hiatus. It might not be the most fun thing to work on, I still think it is a crucial part for the longevity and growth of this project. And it is just about finished!

But that also means I have yet another policy document that I need help reviewing!

You can find it here: Mucklet’s Payment Terms

Spelling mistakes?
Clauses you think are missing?
Things in need of clarification?
Terms that you find unreasonable?

Any comments are welcome!

/Accipiter

PS. I have currently disabled payments, and any attempt will get the message:

An error occurred when contacting Stripe.

I want to properly test a few more things before going live with it!

[Aura]

Hiiii~

I checked it out, I have a few questions about the expiration :o let’s say my subscription expires:

1. What determines which characters are available and which aren’t available because of the decreased character limit on my account? What about profiles?
2. On the same subject as above, would I be able to delete a free character to free up space for the subscription slots I lost access to, and thus reactivating characters that were beyond the free limit? Would I be able to pick which character can become active again?
3. if I don’t plan to renew my subscription but I’d like things like the pictures, notes, descriptions and other things from the characters I don’t have access to anymore, would there be a way to download them somehow, at the very least?
4. What happens to rooms and places that were made by subscription slot characters? Do they cease to exist or are they passed over to another character? Or do they just become orphaned?

Oh oh I noticed it says being a supporter allows you to have bots! Is there anywhere that says how many and what are their limitations? I think it would be nice to include a comprehensive list and description of the perks that come with the subscription for transparency, after all looks like refunds for regret are excluded which I think its fair :o but I think more information on what you get and upfront is necessary! (I only found a little tooltip on the subscription page that talks about it but its kinda minimal!)

Other than this, I think the terms look nice, nothing really seems unreasonable and I didn’t find any spelling mistakes!

Please don’t forget to include a checkbox on the checkout that forces the user to confirm that they read and understand them as well~ I think this is important!

[Accipiter]

Great questions and feedback!

Expiration

1/2. Character/profile caps

Yes, the expiration is a tricky one that I haven’t got a complete answer to yet.
The current behavior is a no-action behavior, which means the limits will simply return to non-supporter levels; instead of 50 chars, you are back to 5. You can still wake up all characters you created while being a supporter, but in order to create a new character, you first would have to delete characters down to 4.

But this can currently easily be abused with the following steps:

1. make a one time 30 day supporter payment
2. create 50 dummy characters
3. create 20 dummy profiles for each character
4. whenever you want a “new” character, you simply edit one of the dummy ones.

To prevent this, my current idea is to let you select 5 characters to continue with, while the remaining characters will be locked. And I liked your idea of letting you delete one of the 5 unlocked characters in order to unlock another one.

A similar system would be for profiles as well.

3. Exporting character profiles

We would need this as well, wouldn’t we? Yes. There should be a viewer for character profiles for both locked characters as well as unlocked sleeping characters.

4. Room ownership

Oh. I forgot about rooms!
Room limits are currently per account, but will not be affected by the supporter perks.
Maybe the easiest solution is to simply allow all your characters to have access to all rooms owned by any of your characters, including locked ones.

It would allow you to transfer rooms/areas freely between locked and unlocked characters.

Bots

Ah, yes. I probably need to clarify the offer.
Bots are just characters, taking a single character slot. Any ordinary character can be a bot, and any bot can be used as an ordinary character. The only difference is whether it is connecting using a bot-token in a script or if you are using the client.

The perk simply allows you to create bot-tokens and connect with them.

Perks in the offer

The checkout page does have some more info, but it is still also very limited:

Maybe I should include a tool-tip for each of those perks to explain more in detail what they mean?

Agree to terms confirmation

@Aura

Please don’t forget to include a checkbox on the checkout that forces the user to confirm that they read and understand them as well~ I think this is important!

I don’t have a checkbox currently, only the following text:

Would that be sufficient?

Once again, thanks for great feedback, Aura!

[Aura]

Hi hiii! I’d like to go over a few things again if that’s okay!

To prevent this, my current idea is to let you select 5 characters to continue with, while the remaining characters will be locked. And I liked your idea of letting you delete one of the 5 unlocked characters in order to unlock another one.

A similar system would be for profiles as well.

This sounds good and pleasant, I feel its possible some people might not use old characters or vice versa and having the freedom to choose is important!

I saw you mentioned that the exceeding characters are only preserved for another 90 days after the subscription ends, I believe its important to point that out to the player when the subscription ends, and also make it clear on how many days are left until the exceeding characters are permanently lost just in case!

I think this might also be a good use case for a more annoying alert when there’s 7 or less days for the characters to be deleted, but that might be a little too intrusive. I just don’t like considering losing so much entirely by accident or forgetfulness :c

4. Room ownership

Oh. I forgot about rooms!
Room limits are currently per account, but will not be affected by the supporter perks.
Maybe the easiest solution is to simply allow all your characters to have access to all rooms owned by any of your characters, including locked ones.

It would allow you to transfer rooms/areas freely between locked and unlocked characters.

That could get kinda very messy, wouldn’t it? Depending on how hard someone plays with multiple characters at once, it can get a little confusing I think :o (accidentally teleporting into a room that is owned by another character you have when you would rather have kept things completely separate, especially if you have given other people access!)

Although I agree that’s probably the easiest solution :3 I’d like to ask to include on the interface a way to identify who owns a room more easily! Like instead of just “Destinations” and “Owned rooms”, change the owned rooms to stuff like “Aura’s rooms”, “Character 2 rooms”, and so on! I thnk this would go a long way into making this solution usable, especially for people who are power users!

Maybe even a little search if that’s okay! Ths is beginning to feel like a “feature creep” but I think some people would really enjoy being able to actually find a teleport or room destination with a text field just like the character filter!

Perks in the offer

The checkout page does have some more info, but it is still also very limited:

Maybe I should include a tool-tip for each of those perks to explain more in detail what they mean?

I think it would be nice to inform what’s the free limit just in case someone didn’t reach it yet, and information on how to use the bot feature would be very welcome!

I’m not entirely sure you need to hide them in tooltips either (I feel these are kinda overused in Wolfery in general :v ), but just adding at the end “(free users can have up to 5)” is just as nice and readable!

Agree to terms confirmation

I don’t have a checkbox currently, only the following text:

Would that be sufficient?

I think its important to actually have a checkbox :o I’m not formally knowledgeable on the subject but every other online service or anything that requires payment does have these, and a quick search shows that in most use cases that really is a legally binding thing (at least regarding regular terms of use when signing up for stuff!).

As much as I know everyone on the community is super nice, I believe its worth actually implementing the checkbox and making it required :3

[Shinyuu]

@Accipiter

Would that be sufficient?

You’d want to ask a lawyer about that, actually.

[Accipiter]

Reading and considering all your input . Just replying to one this now:

@Aura

I saw you mentioned that the exceeding characters are only preserved for another 90 days after the subscription ends

Yes. But 90 days is just the guaranteed duration. After that, I make no promises of retaining the data. But, just like with all the characters created on non-supporter accounts, I have no intention or gain in deleting anything at all, to be honest. That is why I added “but likely longer”. And with “likely”, it is highly likely!

I just wanted to keep the option open for pruning the database in case we start to get too much old and unused data, without someone returning 3 years later to make demands.

[Aura]

Ooohhh, okay! It still makes me a little bit uneasy because I’m averse to risk, but I think that can ease up on the warnings! Thankee for clarifying!

[Accipiter]

@Aura

I’m not entirely sure you need to hide them in tooltips either (I feel these are kinda overused in Wolfery in general :v ), but just adding at the end “(free users can have up to 5)” is just as nice and readable!

I have experimented in removing that info tooltip, replacing it with a link that opens a dialog:

This will hopefully provide a little more clarity in what is included.

Also, I did add the “I agree to the terms” checkbox thing as well.

[Aura]

Yus, I think that looks very nice :3

Thankee for tweaking it!

[Soulwing]

What about an increased room cap? With a possibility to have so many characters while keeping the maximal room count at our current max does that mean roughly one room per character. Is there a different tier planned that includes rooms?

[Accipiter]

The reason why I didn’t include a raised room cap is because I consider the room cap something that should be up to the realm administrators, and not decided by me as the one running “Mucklet”.

In the future, I imagine realms where the admin only grants you 5 rooms. Or perhaps 100 rooms. Or maybe no rooms at all, because the world is meant to be only built by admins and/or builders.

So, instead of letting the supporter role dictate how many rooms someone can have, I’d rather let the admins decide that for their own realm.

[Accipiter]

@Aura

okay! It still makes me a little bit uneasy because I’m averse to risk, but I think that can ease up on the warnings! Thankee for clarifying!

I updated the “Expiration” section again with two main changes:

• clarified that you should be able to retrieve/export/download content that gets inaccessible
• removed any mention of 90 days

After some reconsideration, I realize that database pruning and content deletion should not be dependent at all on whether someone is a supporter or not.

Example:
You, being a supporter, try out someone’s Steampunk realm. You create a character and a few rooms, but find the realm boring and end up never visiting it again. Both Mucklet as a whole, and the admin of that realm, should have the right to prune the realm of unused and derelict rooms/areas/character/objects, no matter if it belonged to a Supporter or not.

So, the section now reads:

Expiration
When your paid period expires, and you do not have an active subscription that will renew the period, the functionality and perks included in the offer will no longer be accessible to your account. Any content that has not been deleted but can no longer be fully utilized or accessed due to the withdrawn functionality, will remain downloadable, exportable, or in other ways retrievable. By starting a new paid period, functionality and content will return to same accessible state again.

I am not really happy with the wording though. It sounds a bit confusing.

[Scarlet_Himari]

Wait, so this means that if the area is no longer visited, will it be removed?

[Accipiter]

No, that is surely not what it means.

But there are no promises of content never being deleted.
If this place runs for 5 - 10 years, with the database growing ever larger, it might come a time when some sort of pruning will be added - clearing data that is no longer in use, deletion of rooms and areas that are not accessible and where the owners are no longer active, etc.

Now, this is a non-issue at the moment, and I currently have no plans on any type of pruning.

Rooms and characters take up very little space, and even large amounts of unused rooms will not degrade performance to any noticeable extent.

So don’t worry!

But…

Realm admins (you might some day create your own popular realm) will be free to shape their world as they see fit. And as the admin of Wolfery, I don’t see any use in us deleting anything - only letting the builders choose what and where things are linked into the world.

[Aura]

I actually think its fairly well written! It really doesn’t give much room for misinterpretation!

Database pruning seems to be a completely different subject to tackle :o on the long run I think its more likely anyway for rooms to bloat rather than characters, but if I understand correctly, management of the realm will be a different thing!