UGCS (http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu) has the same problem. The main draw of UGCS is the fact that accounts are permanent instead of only lasting until graduation, and that it permits many things that the campus IT department doesn't allow (e.g. CGI, colocation, substantially larger quotas, etc.)
You might want to ask the other student clusters listed at http://www.student-computing.org/
https://dpw.threerings.net/projects/splat/ (written by the wonderful people I work with and BSD-licensed) hooks into LDAP, allowing for the storage of public keys for SSH access and other niftiness. We use it for managing passwordless SSH-key based access to the two dozen or so servers here with great success.
35k subscribers, but since there's free play, what do you think the ratio of freeloaders to paying customers is? 1:5 or 1:10 might be reasonable guesses...
Your estimate is quite definitely off. Can't say how much, but I can point you in the right direction to come up with good figures. http://www.puzzlepirates.com/status.xhtml has up-to-the minute concurrent user counts, which typically range from 3k to 6k at any time of day. Go do the math making reasonable assumptions about average session length and you'll end up in the right order of magnitude.
Oh, incidentally, the 2 mil figure is total number of account registrations, so no need to divide by 15 there (although there might be a few people with multiple accounts).
The beauty of it is that you don't -have- to buy anything to contribute towards the game's profits - if you exchange ingame currency for microcurrency on the ingame exchange, you create demand for microcurrency which drives people to purchase it. Indirect, sure, but very worthwhile.
elizabeth@threerings.net
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UGCS (http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu) has the same problem. The main draw of UGCS is the fact that accounts are permanent instead of only lasting until graduation, and that it permits many things that the campus IT department doesn't allow (e.g. CGI, colocation, substantially larger quotas, etc.) You might want to ask the other student clusters listed at http://www.student-computing.org/
https://dpw.threerings.net/projects/splat/ (written by the wonderful people I work with and BSD-licensed) hooks into LDAP, allowing for the storage of public keys for SSH access and other niftiness. We use it for managing passwordless SSH-key based access to the two dozen or so servers here with great success.
35k subscribers, but since there's free play, what do you think the ratio of freeloaders to paying customers is? 1:5 or 1:10 might be reasonable guesses...
Your estimate is quite definitely off. Can't say how much, but I can point you in the right direction to come up with good figures. http://www.puzzlepirates.com/status.xhtml has up-to-the minute concurrent user counts, which typically range from 3k to 6k at any time of day. Go do the math making reasonable assumptions about average session length and you'll end up in the right order of magnitude. Oh, incidentally, the 2 mil figure is total number of account registrations, so no need to divide by 15 there (although there might be a few people with multiple accounts).
The beauty of it is that you don't -have- to buy anything to contribute towards the game's profits - if you exchange ingame currency for microcurrency on the ingame exchange, you create demand for microcurrency which drives people to purchase it. Indirect, sure, but very worthwhile. elizabeth@threerings.net