[imported_Jiraiya]

First, I never even insinuated that you guys were catering to a specific player. I was talking about making the shard appealing to everyone. This is a game remember, its supposed to be fun, and I'm sorry to say mining 300k igs and smithing 150k daggers is in NO way fun. There are the players like rab who will look at it like a business and seek to maximize their profits and put in the work to do just that.

But I'll say it again, its a game, not a job. And a very old game at that. We've all spent the time gm'ing skills on one sphere incarnation or another and had them again taken from us when that shard inevitably goes down. Thats just how it goes.
I dont recall ever hearing a player say, "Man I really miss the old days back on XXX shard when I spent a month afk while macroing that skill."
While I commonly hear people speak of the great pvp or rp or fun events of previous shards. Its the interaction and community which makes the shard fun.

I've tried to get quite a few friends from old nos a9 etc. to come play here. The reasons they wont are as follows: 1. Playercount is abysmal. 2. Skillgain is very time consuming. Not hard, not difficult, just time consuming. It took me about 3-4 weeks to get 26x gm. I did basically nothing I havnt done before as far as macro's go, other then having to use a horse to gm melee skills because none of my uo mates would even play here with me cuz the pop was so low.

The main reason I havn't logged in for a few weeks now is simple. I came across a post from about 12 months ago which detailed everything currently wrong with the shard which you guys are working on now, and a gm had posted several times on that thread saying it was being worked on, fixing it up(loot tables etc). Which of course you are right about, this will probably solve most of the economy problems with the shard.

But obviously nothing was done then, so until this stuff actually is fixed I dont see it being worth investing more of my time into the shard. When I joined there was 30 players on at peak, now its what? 10? How can I try to justify playing a game I love for its multiplayer aspect and pvp when theres no one else there? This whole post has probably come off too harsh on you staff, for that I'm sorry. I definitely have respect for ya and do appreciate you all providing your time and resources to putting this shard up. So hurling negativity about isnt my intention but Im also not going to coat my opinions in candyfloss for you.

I still think this shard has the potential to be every bit as fun as some of its predecessors. I mean the pvp system is obviously uber, and I think you did a fantastic job with it maka. But its pretty clear a lot of people have lost confidence that changes that need to be made, will be made.

From reading my posts talking about skillgain, most people would probably assume I want smithing or taming or whatever made easier for myself. But this isnt the case, I've never been the crafter type just because I dont find repetition to be fun. However I do find pvp and interaction fun, and so many people have been put off the shard because of skillgain and the scarcity of stuff like mounts.

I just think the value of things should come from the time it takes to aquire the item, not the time to aquire the skill. For a suit of blackrock I think you should be paying for the time of mining the ore to make it. Instead you have people with thousands and thousands of blackrock igs because they got them all while looking for iron to gm smith, then they keep it back from the market or they will flood the market and the value of each set will drop. This is simple economics in a monetary system.

Of course plenty of people probably disagree with me on this, but seeing as its the opposite of what you have now, and your server pop is basically zero, why not give it a shot. Its not like you could possibly lose any more players :/

J