Premium upgrade ideas

[Trilexium]

Just a suggestion that I thought about last night as I purchased premium.
Rather than having to buy new premium membership when you want the next rank up, maybe another rank could be added to the donations page as an 'upgrade' to the next rank?
I'll explain it a little bit more;

If, say, you're an Iron donor, and want to upgrade to Gold, you could purchase an 'Upgrade from Iron to Gold' with the value of $15 and get upgraded. Same thing for Gold donors looking to upgrade to Diamond, they could buy an 'Upgrade from Gold to Diamond' with the value of $50.

Another idea is a $10 donation to add another month of premium to your rank. Say an Iron donor saw his time of Iron was running out, he could buy an extra month and get the month added to whatever his remaining time of Iron was.

Just some suggestions.
<Thanks to DoFlamingo for the simplified version of my idea, edited this post to make it more concise>

 

[DoFlamingo]

Or there could be a Gold to Diamond Upgrade in the shop which will cost 50$ and you need to have purchased Gold already to buy it.

 

[BoostMeGaming]

Yes

 

[Perkins]

Something like this is being implemented for players wishing to upgrade from diamond to the new platinum rank; perhaps they'll extend that system to the rest of the ranks? Definitely seems like a good idea, especially since it stops you from having to wait for a lower donor rank to expire before you donate for something higher (without wasting money).

 

[Col_StaR]

snip....
If, say, you're an Iron donor, and want to upgrade to Gold, you could purchase an 'Upgrade from Iron to Gold' with the value of $15 and get upgraded. Same thing for Gold donors looking to upgrade to Diamond, they could buy an 'Upgrade from Gold to Diamond' with the value of $50.

Another idea is a $10 donation to add another month of premium to your rank. Say an Iron donor saw his time of Iron was running out, he could buy an extra month and get the month added to whatever his remaining time of Iron was.
....snip.

We've done upgrade systems before, especially after Buycraft was added and we revamped the rank system. I did 50 in one day once; that was a lot of coupon codes to make.

Here's the thing that people don't realize with Iron and Gold ranks: the value of those ranks diminish over time because they are not lifetime. A $10 Iron rank with .5 of its time elapsed (15 days) is only worth $5, and an Iron rank with all of its time elapsed (30 days) is worthless. Would you want to spend a full $25 for a Gold rank that has 3 days left on its time? Of course not!

Well the same goes for our side of things, and that's why the upgrade system suggested won't work. Let's say that you have a player who has used up .67 (2 months) of her Gold rank, and they just saved up enough money for a Diamond rank.
According to the "static-value rank" system, that would work: The $25 Gold rank value + $50 added value = $75, the value of a Diamond rank.
But with the actual "diminishing value rank" system, the true value is less so: $25 gold rank * the proportion of time remaining (1/3) = $8.33. $8.33 Gold rank value + $50 added value = $58.33, which is under the actual value of the Diamond rank. As such, you'd need to spend more money ($16.67) in order to reach an equivalent value for a Diamond rank
But Buycraft doesn't work like that with dynamic price changes, nor does it offer the ability to compute rank prices like that automatically. For that reason, every trade-in rank upgrade we do must be done via the Support Team.

On the latter suggestion, again, it's a Buycraft thing. Buycraft doesn't append time to a player's subscription: it just starts a new one based on when the purchase was made. The Support Team would need to be notified in order to make time appended, or you could make it easy on yourself and just wait for your rank to expire before rebuying it.

Hope that all made sense.