People don't hate you so much as they are amused by you.
Anyway, Rhialto used to have a donate link when the game was more popular, but it didn't carry over to the new website after the game came back up the first time. The service he used was through Amazon and if you used a direct link you'd see that the account was shut down (I would guess that had something to do with his no longer working there). So donations clearly didn't cover his operating costs otherwise he wouldn't have done away with it and, in fact, he regularly talked about losing a bunch of money on the game all throughout that period of time. Therefore, if it wasn't working when Wyvern had a large(r) playerbase, it's not going to work now.
You might get higher value donations with the promise of the game, but I suggested he do that the last time the game went down and he didn't acknowledge it. So, as I've told other people who brought this up, you're welcome to try suggesting that to him again (he doesn't read the forums so posting your ideas here does nothing). Just keep in mind that there are even less people around than we had during the last downtime and keep in mind that server costs are an ongoing problem. You can maybe raise enough money to buy a new server, but once the game comes back, there's a good chance people will become complacent with donations and that wouldn't do Rhialto much good when those monthly server bills come in.
Cash shops, meanwhile, are something Rhialto has always wanted to avoid. It creates an unfair unbalance between people who can't/won't pay and those who do. If he had to charge money for things, he always said that he rather stick to non-important items like the right to have a hof image. Again, if you want to try to change his mind, feel free. However, again, keep in mind that the playerbase is pretty low and a bunch of work would need to be done to increase it to the level where a cash shop would be effective. You not only need to be able to attract a certain number of people, but you need to attract the right people and most of the few still around played Wyvern because they wanted a free game, not a money sink. The bigger problem, though, is that money is only part of the issue - It really boils down to time and he's not going to give up his job at Google to update Wyvern so he can try charging people for it or things in it.
Oh and btw, look, here's a thread that actually had to do with your topic. Doesn't your post fit so much better here than being put in a thread that was just designated for a very specific [and different] topic to undo a derailing effort by a certain someone with poor spelling?
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