This would not work for several reasons. Some of this, such as cursor control, is client side; if it were enabled, someone that wanted to be malicious would be able to make a world for which they can send a "lock the cursor" message to clients without actually having paid for a "special Dream Maker."

The whole idea behind Byond is that everyone has access to everything important for free. You can make games for free, you can play games for free. If you make a special Dream Maker that could have more features, you very well might have people demanding lots and lots more features for it all the time, then there becomes a large gap between the free and the not-free versions, not to mention lots of development time would have to be spent on something that few would benefit from.

What do you even mean by "better map editor features such as creating objects on the map without using code"? You can add any objects you want to the map, and this has nothing to do with security either, so it wouldn't be part of a "pay for special Dream Maker that circumvents security issues" but rather would be part of the normal Dream Maker anyway.

Then there's also the issue that, if this is a one time payment, it probably would not be worth it for Byond as it would cost more money than it would generate. If you had a few hundred people get in on it, there's some thousands of dollars, but then you need to have people keeping track of all this extra information you're talking about. And you said "supply contact information and be 18+" which presumably to make it so you can start legal action against anyone who engages in illegal activity, which is why you're suggesting the special Dream Maker to begin with, but then that's more money spent if you have any plans to enforce that. If you don't plan to spend gobs of money to legally support this, then you don't need contact information nor to be 18+, which means there's no way to track people, which means there's no reason to pay to circumvent security, which means that the whole reason for doing this in the first place just went down the tube and now it's just "pay Byond $$$ for extra development abilities."

On the surface your idea doesn't sound so bad, but I don't think it would work in practice.

Strange. You only listed negatives, you never listed the positives. Your post seems biased and suffers because of it.

I'll wait for more people to discuss. Only 2 people isn't representative of the collective byond community. Or is it? >_>

It's similar to a Jail Bond system, where you trust the court with your money so you won't break the rules.

It's used in many systems to ensure a user doesn't try to break rules or cause a security hazard.

That's the only reason money would be involved.

I don't think locking the software to develop new games that can potentially bring more people to BYOND is such a good idea. I think it'd be a better idea if there was more merit for developers to add features for BYOND Members. Perhaps making money off of a royalty gig where subscriptions net BYOND a certain percentage for being the middleman.

People already expressed annoyance at the popup that is visible when joining a BYOND world whose hub has the "this world has member features" checked, including the hub authors themselves. Perhaps this restriction should be controlled by the holder of the hub entry. The popup could still be forced, but the hub owner can specify how long? The hub owner can set this time to 0 seconds to make a "Continue" button appear instead of waiting, which is what some of us want. Perhaps the hub owner can also influence the message displayed when you log into their game (if they can't already; didn't really use this feature much)?

BYOND is in desperate need of more new and exciting games. Making people pay for the tools is not the way to achieve this result. Not to mention we lose one of our strongest aspects: Anyone can make a game for free.

Trying to sell Dream Maker would probably put BYOND deep into the soil.