WHY!?

[Amanda77]

Why do the creatures have a breeding cool down time if they werent interested in each other? They didnt breed. No breeding means nothing to wait for...

Why are shards so expensive?

Why if I'm spending up to $7.00 for a picture or $14 for a pair, do I have to pay again to breed them? Most of us can not afford this. Its not right. We should all be able to get all of the creatures. You guys could do 10 shards for 5.00 or 20 for 10.00 and people would be able to get more pets. Also if we are buying them they should be breedable.

These are huge problems that need fixing.

[Munin]

Breeding cooldown: Because otherwise you could just try over and over with the same pair and it would defeat the purpose of having "no interest" breedings in the first place. Does it make sense from a biological standpoint? No but it absolutely does from a game mechanics standpoint.

Shard prices: Because magistream is ad free and servers cost money, as does art. The site cannot run without income and I personally prefer having an optional way for people to donate rather than seeing annoying ads. If you do not want to or cannot donate it is usually entirely possible to get the donation critters from other users who prefer to spend money over time to gain gold.
The same thing is true for breeding costing shards. Originally the donation pets were entirely unbreedable, having them breed, even for shards was huge in making them more widely available for a fraction of the price they originally cost to obtain because the existing creatures were all that was ever going to be available on site. If they were able to breed for free it would devalue them immensely and we´re right back to the point where the site cannot run on air and enthusiasm alone.

"Being able to get everything anytime" sound like fun but it gets boring very fast because every goal you set yourself will be fulfilled in next to no time.

[sammythethief]

These are huge problems that need fixing.

It isn't a huge problem. It's been this way since the beginning. It's also completely optional; it's a donation, not a membership. You still have 100% access to the entire website without donating, and other users frequently sell donis. The issue of making gold is being worked on, so patience is required from everyone right now.

You say that "we should all be able to get all of the creatures": You absolutely can get all the creatures, and it can be done without spending a dime of real world cash. It simply takes time. With nearly fifteen years worth of creatures, it's not a goal that can be achieved overnight. It is, however, very much possible if the effort and time is put into it. Just like with anything else in life, anything worth doing takes time.

[VilaWolf]

1: because bad dates are exhausting.
2: because those are how the site pays it's bills.

[Merkwerkee]

Donation pets have to cost real money to breed so they retain their value

[Desade]

You say that "we should all be able to get all of the creatures": You absolutely can get all the creatures, and it can be done without spending a dime of real world cash. It simply takes time. With nearly fifteen years worth of creatures, it's not a goal that can be achieved overnight. It is, however, very much possible if the effort and time is put into it. Just like with anything else in life, anything worth doing takes time.

Exactly. You can get any creature you want with time and gold.

[froglady]

I love it when people say that sites should have no cash shop or paid features. I suppose we should all be able to go to the grocery store and take anything we want. The people who work in the grocery need to get paid, the owners need to pay the utilities and rent for the building plus buy the stock, etc., so money has to get into the system somehow.

I think that there are a lot of misconceptions about websites in general. People unfamiliar with the industry don't realize you have to pay to be online. You have to pay for an IP/DNS address and space in the cloud/on servers to store your database. You know how you get a certain amount of data on your cellphone and have to pay more or get cut off if you go over? Same for websites. You have to pay for your bandwidth (the amount of data transferred to and from your site). That's just to get a space online to do your thing. Now you need a site to put on the address. That means coders and artists and writers, not to mention the time it takes to actually sketch out your ideas and make them something concrete and test them and tweak them and finally get a product you can put online. And because you're running a business, you're probably making use of legal services to protect your intellectual property and to write contracts to grant you the rights to the art/code/writing that the staff you employ creates and to guarantee a certain compensation to that staff for their services.

I can't afford to buy donation pets right now, either. So what? There are still hundreds of creatures to collect before I even get to the issue of "needing" donation pets to have a complete collection and by the time I get there I'll probably have enough gold to buy some of them. With the new shop selling old donation pets every month I don't have to "keep up". I can put $2 in a jar every month, buy a $25 gift card for myself for my birthday and eventually save enough to buy the ones I want. There are 15 years of pets to collect and more released all the time, and I don't expect to get anywhere near all of them in less than 10 years.

[Rhia]

Exactly. You can get any creature you want with time and gold.

Or, with a bit of luck, from a Doni giveaway or maybe a Doni raffle at Zocalo.

[Katnilb]

I love it when people say that sites should have no cash shop or paid features. I suppose we should all be able to go to the grocery store and take anything we want. The people who work in the grocery need to get paid, the owners need to pay the utilities and rent for the building plus buy the stock, etc., so money has to get into the system somehow.

I think that there are a lot of misconceptions about websites in general. People unfamiliar with the industry don't realize you have to pay to be online. You have to pay for an IP/DNS address and space in the cloud/on servers to store your database. You know how you get a certain amount of data on your cellphone and have to pay more or get cut off if you go over? Same for websites. You have to pay for your bandwidth (the amount of data transferred to and from your site). That's just to get a space online to do your thing. Now you need a site to put on the address. That means coders and artists and writers, not to mention the time it takes to actually sketch out your ideas and make them something concrete and test them and tweak them and finally get a product you can put online. And because you're running a business, you're probably making use of legal services to protect your intellectual property and to write contracts to grant you the rights to the art/code/writing that the staff you employ creates and to guarantee a certain compensation to that staff for their services.

I can't afford to buy donation pets right now, either. So what? There are still hundreds of creatures to collect before I even get to the issue of "needing" donation pets to have a complete collection and by the time I get there I'll probably have enough gold to buy some of them. With the new shop selling old donation pets every month I don't have to "keep up". I can put $2 in a jar every month, buy a $25 gift card for myself for my birthday and eventually save enough to buy the ones I want. There are 15 years of pets to collect and more released all the time, and I don't expect to get anywhere near all of them in less than 10 years.

Food and a privately run video game website are very different things.
Access to food is a basic human right; if someone cannot afford food it should be provided free at point of service. That does not mean food suppliers should not get paid for their work but human needs should always be prioritized.

The costs for the technical things you mention are probably less than you think:

IP addresses are either very cheap for ipv4 (Usually ~£1/month to ~£5/month) or are actually free for ipv6, at least in my experience.

By DNS, if you mean a server hosting DNS records that's usually also free. For example; my email provider, domain name registrar, and webhost all offer such for free - as did all such services I used in the past. MagiStream uses CloudFlare's DNS, which is free.

If by DNS you mean domain names, then that's about ~£10/year for a .com

Storage space is also very cheap - I doubt MagiStream pays more than ~£20/month for storage. The site does not have a particularly large amount of data from what I can see, though backups could potentially make this much higher.

As for bandwidth, it varies. ~€1.19/TB at Hetzner is the cheapest I've seen, though Amazon Web Services are much more expensive here at up to ~$92.16/TB, though the first 100GB/month are free. Banning mining likely dropped costs here, as has using CloudFlare as a reverse proxy for caching. This is all outbound from MagiStream to users. Bandwidth from users to MagiStream is free at AWS and would be at many other hosts too.

Compute could easily be a big cost though; AWS are not remotely cheap. I would not be surprised if MagiStream paid ~$100/day or more given the site likely runs on a virtual machine with 64 or more cores. (There's a reason I don't use AWS. Other reputable providers are much cheaper.)

phpBB, which MagiStream runs on, is free too, though the additions to turn it into MagiStream are probably a mix of free work by Madd at the beginning, and paid work by Rosehill later on. I do hope that paying the staff and artists is one of the bigger costs MagiStream has - I think they deserve to benefit from their work (and I'd much rather they get paid well than AWS taking all the funds), though I suspect there are no full time employees as I doubt the site could afford it.

As for legal costs, I doubt MagiStream pays anyone for protecting intellectual property. Copyright is automatic and free until a legal dispute occurs. Business registration is also not too expensive most of the time but depends a great deal on location and how you register. I don't know much about such in the US, though it's cheap in the UK - but MagiStream would find a UK presence very, very costly in other ways - there's a reason there's no GeckoFort.

It's also really nice that MagiStream is available to all of us equally whether we donate or not, with the exception of donation pets. I'm glad this place still exists even though it's been a while since I donated. The people here are lovely and kind - MagiStream feels a bit like an oasis in the middle of a dessert when compared to much of the current internet.

[froglady]

I agree that basic human needs should be free, I just made a bad choice of business. My father worked in the grocery for 50+ years, so that came to mind first. I should have said clothing store or computer store or something, I guess.
US websites need legal representation to incorporate and legal disclaimers that users must agree to so that they don't get sued off the web for things that users post, etc. (see the TOS--that was written by a legal professional).
I'm sure that the artists and coders all must be compensated somehow for the forfeiture of all rights to their work in favor of ownership by Magistream.
No matter the actual costs, my point is that you don't just sit down one day and magically put a website on the internet with 1500 unique works of art plus all the written lore and quests and shops and mating and hybrids, etc. plus all the coding that goes into making it work for absolutely free and just put in a cash shop to be mean and get rich. Most of these sites run on a shoestring after all the business expenses are paid.