Donation level changes

[Ligustah]

Hello everybody,

with the recent influx of donations coming in we felt the need to update the rewards/perks handed out to those who send money, both in an effort to find new ways of showing our appreciation as well as fixing some issues that were noticed once the rarely used privilege (i.e. server level) was suddenly used so much.
Across several rounds of discussions with different groups of people we made the decision that as a first step and effective immediately the donator ranks on the servers will not be awarded any longer. Let me explain our reasoning on this:
Until recently there were basically only two places that recorded the kindness of our donors: the forum group (including the associated color and the category in the member list) and the server ranks. Things had been this way for quite some time before a few weeks ago we started exploring ways of giving more obvious credit where it was due. That was when a few things were added gradually, namely the donation bar on the front page, the box in the sidebar and the fixed donors page. Even then we already considered removing the server level, since it's a difficult thing to manage at scale (i.e. the more people it receive). The supremes have always had the last word in who was to receive the level and who wasn't. That was perfectly fine when only a few people donated over the course of many months and when those people were mostly respected long term members. But out of a sudden supremes were put into the uncomfortable position of having to decide whether to give a privilege to a person, who just donated a chunk of money to the clan, while risking that said person might abuse that power and basically ensuring that person would be immune to all the server's admins. The alternative would be denying the level, which might leave a sour taste with the donor, who at least assumed the level would be part of his/her "appreciation package", even though we always explicitly mentioned the fact that it wasn't guaranteed, because the last thing we - as MSTs - wanted was imposing level decisions onto server supremes. So here we are removing this somewhat shaky relict of old times.
More specifically, we ask all supremes to stop awarding it to new donors, while the level itself will be removed in about three months (which is the timespan that we usually gave it for to the donors), so we're not trying to take anything away from those who already hold the level.
As time goes by we hope to add new cool stuff that we can give to our kind donors, so stay tuned.

Thanks for your time, have a nice week!

-- Ligustah

[zebra#]

Seems fair to me

[Thrasher]

yes fair enough, the donator levels were way too high with the junior level which is easy to obtain by simply paying is 30 levels higher than the leader rank! as you said, somebody can buy that power and simply abuse it.

i think the most that should happen in a server for donators would be for them to keep their level but obtain the !donator command. (opens up donator features ofa map added by moanraker)

[Nirv]

I personally donated to have orange colors tags ingame and for those fun commands.

I used them twice ingame...

Phoque the people who abuse...

That's too bad for the guys who are actually not abusing.

[Fox]

I suggest donator level(s) not to be above Recruiters' ones.
In case a donator abuses e.g in Jaymod on level 40, a Leader level 10 can't use commands at all on donators by then. Not sure if this is still the case (I only know from Jaymod)

Such rewards as profile customization for donators (e.g. own background picture) could be one donator feature, but don't know if this is what MST's want and not sure if it's possible.