So, you guys need subscriptions to grow your site, make it worth your time to continue developing, and realize your goals. As players and DMs, and just generally enthusiasts about what you're doing here, we want to see your site grow and support for it continue to improve. My suggestion is to implement a referral system; it can be started with something as simple as adding a "did anyone refer you to this site?" question on the registration page, I would recommend having five tiers of referrals, and rewards associated with it similar to the subscription based rewards, but distinct in their own way. Here is why: a certain percentage of your users are going to pay subscription fees. That means that promoting your site and attracting other users has an indirect monetary benefit to you. By rewarding users for promoting your site, you encourage them to do so. By encouraging users to promote your site, you gain that indirect monetary benefit faster. A suggested breakdown of referral tiers follows: Tier 1: 5 users referred to your site. Reward: A forum tag that says "L1 Promoter!" Tier 2: 25 users referred to your site. Reward: A forum tag that says "L2 Promoter!" A token pack with cool graphics for a number of common player tropes. Tier 3: 100 users referred to your site. Reward: A forum tag that says "Advanced Promoter!" Advanced features (TBD)... more graphics, maybe a private soundcloud channel which you guys have access to and offer... something nice that seems to scale with the other rewards listed. Tier 4: 500 users referred to your site. Reward: A forum tag that says "Promotion Specialist!" The equivalent of a permanent basic subscription service. Tier 5: 2000 users referred to your site. Reward: A forum tag that says "Maximum Promotion!" Equivalent of the premium subscription service, permanently. The reason I would suggest valuating tier 4 & 5 referrals as such is that, as a low estimate, 1/100 of your users will buy a basic subscription. that means that a T4 referrer is worth roughly 5 subscriptions to you, which they put in the work to earn for you. I think they deserve a basic for that work. You also have to consider that a percentage of the people they refer will ALSO refer people, and that same 1/100 ratio applies meaning they're earning you a lot more indirectly than is immediately apparent. The same logic applies, but moreso, for T5 referrers (equivalent of 20 subscriptions, plus all the referrals that you'll gain from the people they refer.) T3 referrers have likely earned you at least one other subscription using conservative estimates. Maybe more. I don't know what the best balance for that would be, but I'd suggest they deserve something. Now the biggest issue for implementing this: existing users. My suggestion is that anyone with a basic subscription or who has been with your site since 2013 gets credit for T1 automatically. Anyone with a premium subscription, Kickstarter backers, or who has been with your site since 2012 gets credit for T2 automatically. While it is possible that this is not a perfectly equitable acknowledgement of the efforts made by players so far, since you have no way to accurately track previous contributions in this regard, it is a fair way to give some credit to people for their participation so far, and translate that into implementing this new system.
