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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arkhandus" data-source="post: 5532536" data-attributes="member: 13966">I don't see any trace of your old posts from prior to 2007, unless you had a different name for the setting back then or something.  They may have been lost in one of the rare server crashes or just deleted one way or another after many years of inactivity.If that material was so vital, why did you ignore it for so many years and not even post a bump to your old threads using a public computer or friend's/family member's computer or something?  Or, y'know, copy and paste and e-mail it to yourself over an online e-mail service like Yahoo! or Hotmail, so it would be preserved in your Inbox on the Yahoo! or Hotmail servers.Maybe you can search E-Bay or Amazon or in some local used-books store for cheap, used copies of some of the books you need for your game.  Or you can find or get in touch with some old friends, or find another gaming group in your area, contact them, and ask to copy some important details on those prestige classes for your own game while hanging out with them or something.  Sharing among friends is understandable while limited in scope, but pirated material just spreads and erodes the chances of game designers to actually earn a living through their creative works.This site wouldn't even be around anymore if not for Morrus shelling out his own money to keep it online, and community supporters paying a few bucks a month to help cover the server costs and all.  EN World doesn't have a major corporate sponsor like WotC, and it isn't as easy anymore to get advertisements sufficient to keep a website running.  The Internet/dotcom bubble burst years ago.The site is still free for everyone, precisely because a few of us choose to donate a bit to keep it online for the general community.  Search functions and the like require more processing power, and electricity, than just viewing the site.  So they're part of the community supporter package.  It's not unreasonable.  It's only a matter of paying a tiny bit for some added convenience rather than spending a lot of time manually paging through a forum to try and find one old thread or another.Hard work has value.  Creativity has value.  Artistic talent/skill has value.  Ideas have value.  Ideally, everything would be free and everyone would share the basic resources we needed to survive, like food, water, and shelter, but that's not the way of the world as of yet, so we can't get something for nothing all the time.  Ergo, game products have a material cost in most cases, and rightly so.  As long as the game designers can't just survive on manna from Heaven or the goodwill of others, they need to charge something for their time and effort, like any other working-class people.If you think you should just get the fruits of their labors for nothing, then shame on you.  If they aren't offering it for free, then they obviously need that tiny bit of income.  In case you haven't noticed, even Wizards of the Coast isn't rolling in dough.  They do alright, because they've had a decade and a half or so to build up a decent reputation and develop or acquire a few popular product lines, but they've still had to lay people off in the last several years because of the economy (and perhaps bad management in a few cases).Gamers are not a particularly wealthy bunch, for the most part.  We don't generally have a lot of disposable income, and that means we don't send a lot of money to the game-companies through our purchases.  RPGs and such are still a niche industry, though slowly growing.  Much as we hate to pay 30 or 40 bucks for a book, there aren't that many of us with the cash to buy a lot of game books (even if they were to cut the prices to 10 or 20 bucks), so they can't really sell a lot of copies.  So they have to set the price at a level where they can cover the cost of labor, printing, shipping, and such, given how few copies they can realistically sell to the relatively small number of likely consumers.</blockquote>

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