"This zone is brought to you buy X" lol
Would anyone be brave enough to host Athica? i bet that would take a lot of strain off the server.
I'll host Thaz, Emberflow, ToT.
O look another guild is in there *reboot* ....ooops.
How about like... Cafepress stuff? Tshirt's, coffee mugs, that sort of thing. Might help a wee bit.
If they supplied their own hardware they could get rackspace/bandwidth for just a few hundred a month. The real cost is when you pay for managed systems.
Also as far as distributed zone servers, that is kind of how EQ live works. Each physical server only ran a few zones. High pop zones had a dedicated machine. They all run (ran?) on Windows NT 4. These days they may have consolidated, but most likely with server merges they just keep using the old systems and dedicating more complex/populous zones to their own machines.
How about: The no-bs Buff bot: For $25 a month, you can hail XYZ-NPC and instantly get fully buffed!
This is pretty damn controversial, but seems like a great way to generate funds.
It won't... ever.
Actually the GM was partly right in that situation. chinga/chingas would be the slang he was referring to. It just so happens that chinga+different endings are used as various slang terms in Mexico for tons of things. Honestly you shouldn't name your character after common slang word that can mean any number of words ranging from tame to completely inappropriate.
It's not the Gm's job to say oh in "insert language","word"="bad word" but "word+random letters"= "tame word". you don't see people named Shitake or Crapple or guilds named Pen Island Lovers for a reason