Before I start my rant...I just want to let you know that I HAVE paid...for numerous reasons.
I notice a LOT of people drawing comparisons between the different screenshots that were posted earlier in this thread.
I would just like to point out that he states that the shots were taking with compression ON..._IF_ he had done the screenshots with compression off, then the difference would not have been so pronounced.One of the first things we noticed when we were testing patch W21 on our server was how crap our skins looked...after posting on the bug report section of the Test Patch thread, somebody suggested we turn compression off....bingo..the skins looked better (at 512).
Also, why are you tight buggers ( "Pay for skins? NO WAY!") crowd..so against Scavier getting some dosh? I know that they look on LFS as their 'baby', but at the end of the day, they are trying to make a LIVING out of it. What has gone unsaid here is the fact that until S2 turns into S3, the sales are at a low point at the moment, income has probably slowed, therefore they not only have to find a way to increase revenue, they ALSO have to find a way to decrease expenditure. Making people pay a SMALL contribution to offset the increased bandwidth costs seems like good business practice to me, and if they make a few pennies extra out of it, then its even BETTER business practice.
I suppose all of you that don't wish to support the devs in this way would be quite happy to see a post from ScaViEr one day saying "Sorry Guys, but the cash has dried up, we cannot afford to pay for the servers, the kids are going hungry, so we are shutting up shop and calling it a day".. Will you begrudge them the extra £3.00 then??