Disagree with you...
A) Never said C2 would be included in subscription. That is a pay once, get liftetime updates
b) According to the blog post, the multiplayer plugin will be an additional subscription fee.
Call it a paid extension.
c) It makes no mention of signalling server. It clearly states it will be for he plugin itself.
[quote:qhbn1a41]a low-cost subscription for the full version of the multiplayer feature upon its final release. This is planned to support extended features, including player logins and data storage (e.g. for players to accumulate inventory, achievements, ranks or experience points in a multiplayer game), leaderboards, location-based matchmaking, and possibly relay servers to help connect users who are behind extremely restrictive NAT and would otherwise be unable to connect
The subscription for the multiplayer plugin will support developmental costs (past and future).
And I'm totally good with that. As for A) I didn't specifically say you were saying that the cost would be part of C2 and thus C2 subscription. I was saying that the grammatical implication indicated as such.
Thanks for quoting Ashley's comment. However as I previously mentioned. The subscription charge will be for the signalling server. As your quote points out "Inventory, Achievements, ranks, XP...." must be stored on a dedicated server. This dedicated server will be Scirra's server and not MP functionality accessible to personal dedicated servers. If you could host your own server then there would be no need for the cost. However I'm pretty sure there would be no access to inventory, achievements, ranks, xp.
However and this is a big point. It seems that the plan for the MP Plugin has changed. Where as in the original posts that Ashley made; the MP Plugin will allow us to write our own signalling server to use. This however seems to have changed. Instead Scirra aims to provide the server for us at cost(which I'm ok with). We can technically reverse engineer the messages, but eh I'm not up for it. Paying tiered connection scale is fine by me. Saves me a lot of hassle.
So if MP is built to only interact with the Scirra servers. Then for the most part they are one in the same. However as Ashley points out in the last post. Scirra is in there rights to maintain and make money off hosting hardware for us to use. So At this point I get the feeling that your seeing the cost is on the Plugin, where I see it as the cost for the Scirra servers.