Premium account

Platform Evolution
#1

This is a continuation of discussion started here and in chat.

Many people voice concerns that CG team is lately more focused on the tech.io side, delaying even seemingly easyfix issues for months. The go to answer to those concerns is that this service is provided for free and so end-users are not entitled to having their issues given priority.
Alright, so let’s discuss the most obvious answer to that.

I’ll first address the elephant in the room - no, I do not propose pay-to-win in any way or form. Whatever improvements the premium would entail, it should benefit the platform as a whole.

So what I am proposing is introducing a premium account feature with a reasonable price (?), that provides some cosmetic and/or QoL features (?) with funds from it going strictly to improving competitive side of CG. For example (this is the list of features everybody would get, including non-paying):

  • More/faster servers
  • Higher timeout tolerance
  • Better contest end times
  • Anti-cheating system in contests
  • Rework CP calculations
  • Release referee code for older multis
  • Migrate older multis to league system
  • Additional leagues for more popular multis (looking at you, CSB)
  • Support for ML/RL based bots (at least file i/o)
  • Additional prizes in contests
  • Better submit history (tagging, renaming, diffs, …)

To me competitive bot programming is a hobby with CG providing the best service on the market for this niche and I personally have no issue in paying a reasonable price to ensure it’s given the priority I’d like to see.

7 Likes
#2

I would gladly pay something like 10 or 15 euros every month. As a profesional developer with a stable job, it is normal to me to pay for my main hobbies.

I’m not for this one. It would change the contests/puzzles design. Restart from scratch at every game is part of codingame state of mind.

2 Likes
#3

It’s a pay to win (ie the one who pays have less timeouts for example), I strongly disagree.

5 Likes
#4

That’s literally the first thing I address…

#5

I don’t understand, would the listed features be available to everyone or just to the people who pay ?
In the former case, it’s definitely a pay-to-win idea.

1 Like
#6

Added clarification. The list of features the premium users themselves would get is left under (?), it would be up to CG to figure that out.
Personally, I’d be willing to pay even without any bonuses if it would ensure CG woud fix some of the more annoying issues with competitive side.

3 Likes
#7

I don’t think the timeout tolerance was really an issue of paying servers (although, it might have contributed). I think it is also a way to give heuristics and interpreted language a chance in contests.

Other than that, I agree with the list of points. But my only concern is that if the amount of “premium money” collected for this is not sufficient enough to buy servers or employ someone to fix what’s asked by the community … then what happens ?

#8

Thanks for the clarification. I see one problem with that :

Only a few hardcore-CG-players would be ready to pay each month. I don’t think that would be enough to pay for all of this. Moreover, a subscription can be cancelled at any time, it’s not a sustainable source of profit.

#9

Why not make a part of their platform public to some of the regulars of CG and open those to pull-requests ?

I believe more in a free contribution/help of the users than on a subscription.

1 Like
#10

I’m not sure it’s really a problem of money for cg to improve the platform.

This should also fit their business model. Premium account might lead to loss of participants which can have big impact on the way they make profit.

Personally, I prefer to pay with merge requests instead of money. :wink:

1 Like
#11

I’d prefer to call this donators, contributor or supporter account, not premium ones as you won’t get any unfair or extra benefit among normal players. This will also reduces the negative POV of premium accounts, usually linked to pay to win scenarios.
Maybe you can create two polls, one about the most needed features and another about people’s interests in donating/supporting, and how much.

About helping by opening the platform and merging code, I don’t see it a viable solution. I think it will be a lot of parts involved on these issues, and if I were CG I won’t make all my platform public.
It seems many of you have a negative feeling of tech.io about taking too much time from devs, detrimental from CG, but where the community can contribute more easily is by creating courses. I know that won’t fix any problem in CG, but it’s right now the best way to contribute to CG as a whole.

4 Likes