The funding promise
Free today. Fair for everyone.
The aim is a world I want to play myself and share with a community: casual-friendly, with room for different playstyles and no way to buy character power. My full-time job lets me fund it as a hobby and a childhood dream. I want it to cover its costs; earning money is not the reason I am building it.
One rule that will not change
Real money never buys gameplay power. No paid gold, gear, refinement aids, packs, boosts or donor advantages. Everyone plays under the same rules, and people and AI receive the same gold allowances.
PWI ran on a cash shop. My original idea was closer to a WoW-style subscription: pay for the world to keep running, then earn your progress by playing. Having a full-time job made me realise I could first try to offer that world for free.
How I hope to keep it running
Privately funded. Payments closed.
Same rules. No paid power.
- Today: completely free to play. Payments and donations are closed; I cover the costs myself.
- Preferred future: voluntary support. If donations can sustain and grow the project, I would prefer to keep the shared realm fully free to play. Support would buy no in-game advantage.
- If support cannot cover the costs: a subscription. I will need to switch to a subscription to keep the world running. Any such change would be explained in advance, with its terms. There is no subscription price or start date to announce today. Character power would remain off the table.
The working budget is about €500 a month (working estimate) for hosting, development and maintenance. This is an approximate project-wide target, not an invoice total, an amount due from one player or a subscription fee. The actual cost ledger below stays separate.
If there is a little extra for flowers and dinner with my girlfriend after all these late nights, I would appreciate that too. A sustainable world and a happy community are what I am trying to build.
Recorded monthly costs
Amounts come from invoices or labelled measurements. Some invoices have not been entered yet; the total appears only when every line has an amount. The working budget above does not fill those gaps.
| Item | Per month | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Dedicated serverthe game world and every AI player on one machine | invoice to be added | invoice |
| AI coding agentsthe subscriptions the agents write and test code on | invoice to be added | invoice |
| Language model for the AI playersconversations, names and personalities; from our call log: $2.44 for 19-26 October, scaled to 30 days and rounded up | $10 | measured |
| The livingpw.com domain | invoice to be added | invoice |
| Website hostingCloudflare Pages free plan | €0 | free |
| Total per month | the total appears once every invoice is in | |
| Donations this month | donations aren't open yet |
My own time is not invoiced here. The language-model estimate is recorded in the currency in which it is billed.
Want a world with different settings?
I am open to discussing a separately funded realm for a person or group who would like different rates, an era or other settings. We would agree the configuration, running costs and availability before anything is offered. Funding a separate realm would not buy an advantage on the shared realm.
Get in touch to discuss an idea. For the current test, the most useful contribution is playing and giving honest feedback.
Why the code is closed and the data is open
If the project runs on support, it's fair to ask why its code isn't public. Here's why:
- The game server and client aren't mine. They're a ready-made server package from the player community that I build the world around. It isn't mine to publish.
- In other hands, the AI player engine would be a ready-made bot farm. It runs on any server: for gold farming, or for a clone with a cash shop on top.
- Protection. The server is built from an old package, and I'm closing its weak spots. The source of those fixes and of the abuse checks would show an attacker where to aim.
What lets you check that it's fair is open instead: how many AI players are in the world and what they're doing, the rates, the gold rules and the costs. All of it is on this site, updated from the server. Drop tables and market prices come later.