[imported_AptaR]

what kind of economy are you going to maintain with 10 people active??? the fact that people find ways to make money off bullsht macros is what ruins an economy. they are essentialy farming money

[Eighty Swords]

I have to agree with Shade about the economy... Just take scroll and potion sell prices and you have proof of this. Right now 50 mana potions sell for 4k (80 gp per potion) and cost 65gp to make each potion (4 eyes of newt * 15gp + 1 bottle * 5gp) that's 3500 gp to make 50 mana potions so for every 50 mana potions you sell you only make 500gp! That's pretty sad since it costs over 150k to GM Alchemy and 1-2 weeks of your time, plus what you spend making the potions once you GM it.

That's why there has to be a certain difficulty to training skills, so you stand to make money off training it and by making them difficult not everyone will want to do them so this helps the people who spend all the time and money training the skill.

[imported_Shade]

what kind of economy are you going to maintain with 10 people active??? the fact that people find ways to make money off bullsht macros is what ruins an economy. they are essentialy farming money

While I have issues with our current afk resource gathering solutions, making the gathering harder won't really change much. With so many third party programs out there, its just a matter of time before people find ways to beat whatever we do. Personally I am just going to start punishing people who take rules lightly. Rules are in place for a reason after all and if someone thinks its a joke to ignore those rules then I am sure they won't mind coming back to their computer to see they are in jail and lost all their ingots. I really hate to do that but if afk resource gathering continues to be ignored I see no other choice, examples must be set for those who take our rules too lightly and care so little about the well being of the shard.

Also you cannot just think of the present when making changes. Assuming that the shard will always have 10 players and making changes according to that is no way to build a shard. We must make sure that everything is balanced for the future. Making changes to appease a small player base would only accomplish maintaining a small player base.

[imported_AptaR]

money will always be inflated. people find ways to make money quick and easy all the time its impossible to avoid it. what i was saying make the skill gain easy but resource gather hard. make ingredients come from monsters so u have to actually do something. people will get that general satisfaction of gming a skill but truely it will only be half way their. like make the logs for elven bows come from monsters instead of normal trees so people just cant make an easyuo macro. i always thought makas tailor scripts were good back in the day but these easyuo scripts r nuts.

[imported_Shade]

Skill gain is already easy and if it was easier people will only become self reliant. As for resources being on monsters, well we already have some craftables that require resources that are only found on monsters.

Not all crafters like to hunt though. Some people simply play just to be a merchant. They should not be forced into hunting for all their supplies just because some people like to destroy the economy and ignore rules.

Anyway, its already been decided that craft skill gain will not be made any easier.

[imported_LudaKrishna]

i think a lot have people have mentioned that something must be done because honestly....u can make up all the excuses "vacation" "summer" etc but i'll be honest and mark my words unless something is changed (i'm not pointing only at skillgain) the shard will continue as is imo. Many people have brought this subject up and whoever does it gets the "Your too lazy, it's alrdy ez" speech.

hell muto had an event 2 events today and we had 4 people in them.....ONLY 4!

its sad when me and monk are considered one of the best active pvpers currently, i'll be honest.

its sad when i can run around in Black Diamond AR in a chaos guild and not even get targeted in any towns (and i'm not super friendly with everyone either, ask blake lol)

I'm done posting about shard growth because really when concerns are brought up they are disregared with bs excuses and how we are in the wrong and we don't think right

[imported_Malik]

Thing is, we agree with you. If things stay the way they are right now player count isn't getting any higher. What I personally don't agree with is the reason.

We had high online count at one point and there was a lot of players hunting, crafting, ganking and doing events. We had always 10-30 in 1v1 regs and all was good. Just check the PvP ladder for past tournaments and see it for yourself. Ladder wasn't even there when we had our highest player count. That means most of those players had a PvP ready character to participate with. Not all of those players had a transfer either and that was without a skillstone and skillgain back then was a lot harder too. In the end, what brings more players and what makes them want to stay is having a stable playerbase in the first place.

We have a plan. At the moment we can't say how it's going to unfold though since there are factors that we have no influence on. What we believe is that we need to get those mails out to our old playerbase as soon as possible since that's what we need to give this shard a jump start. No player who wants interaction will want to join a shard with low client count unless they have friends playing there or they know for sure that the player count will get higher in the future.

Issue with sending those mails at the moment is server hardware. Even if we would get a high playerbase it means nothing if we can't keep those players. Lag is one of the big reasons many players left in the first place. If we send those mails out and can't support all the players most of them will end up leaving again and probably won't even consider coming back when we send another mail saying we have a new server now and lag issues are fixed.

There has been numerous discussions about this issue so go ahead and search the forums for those topics. Conclusion in the end was that we need some better hardware. Issue with getting new server is money and a possibility that our current server is getting a hardware upgrade in the near future. Our current server is provided by xs4all and has no monthly cost. At least now we have relatively stable server and no running costs that we have to meet every month by getting donations. If you have any new ideas that haven't been brought up already we welcome them. However, before doing so please take the time to skim through the old topics to see if the suggestion has been made before and discussed already.

[smoke]

Thing is, we agree with you. If things stay the way they are right now player count isn't getting any higher. What I personally don't agree with is the reason.

We had high online count at one point and there was a lot of players hunting, crafting, ganking and doing events. We had always 10-30 in 1v1 regs and all was good. Just check the PvP ladder for past tournaments and see it for yourself. Ladder wasn't even there when we had our highest player count. That means most of those players had a PvP ready character to participate with. Not all of those players had a transfer either and that was without a skillstone and skillgain back then was a lot harder too. In the end, what brings more players and what makes them want to stay is having a stable playerbase in the first place.

We have a plan. At the moment we can't say how it's going to unfold though since there are factors that we have no influence on. What we believe is that we need to get those mails out to our old playerbase as soon as possible since that's what we need to give this shard a jump start. No player who wants interaction will want to join a shard with low client count unless they have friends playing there or they know for sure that the player count will get higher in the future.

Issue with sending those mails at the moment is server hardware. Even if we would get a high playerbase it means nothing if we can't keep those players. Lag is one of the big reasons many players left in the first place. If we send those mails out and can't support all the players most of them will end up leaving again and probably won't even consider coming back when we send another mail saying we have a new server now and lag issues are fixed.

There has been numerous discussions about this issue so go ahead and search the forums for those topics. Conclusion in the end was that we need some better hardware. Issue with getting new server is money and a possibility that our current server is getting a hardware upgrade in the near future. Our current server is provided by xs4all and has no monthly cost. At least now we have relatively stable server and no running costs that we have to meet every month by getting donations. If you have any new ideas that haven't been brought up already we welcome them. However, before doing so please take the time to skim through the old topics to see if the suggestion has been made before and discussed already.

#1 the high playerbase count was at the beginning of the shard when we had 150-200 clients and that's because everyone first started trying out the shard and you might not want to hear this but most people left because the skill gain was too hard and people didn't like the pvp.

#2 of course nobody will want to join a shard with low playerbase but whats there to do? you guys tell us to wait paitently and don't fill us in with any details on whats going on it just makes more people want to leave

#3 well that depends on you needing to fix the server hardware and were suffering because nothings happening and therefore more people are leaving while we wait for emails to be sent out someone needs to step up and get that hardware fixed or get a new server

#4 i didn't read this because i really have to go play cs with my team now sorry lol

[imported_Shade]

#1 the high playerbase count was at the beginning of the shard when we had 150-200 clients and that's because everyone first started trying out the shard and you might not want to hear this but most people left because the skill gain was too hard and people didn't like the pvp.

That might be why the people you know left but that is not why everyone left. Personally I have heard lots of reasons for players leaving, not once has a player ever told me they would stop playing here because of skill gain. As a matter of fact, when this shard was supporting 100+ players a majority left because of the lag.

#2 of course nobody will want to join a shard with low playerbase but whats there to do? you guys tell us to wait patiently and don't fill us in with any details on whats going on it just makes more people want to leave

#3 well that depends on you needing to fix the server hardware and were suffering because nothings happening and therefore more people are leaving while we wait for emails to be sent out someone needs to step up and get that hardware fixed or get a new server

The server update is totally out of our hands. We do get this hosted for free but at the cost of them not giving a crap really. I mean, all they do is make us look like idiots by saying an update is coming, we try to relay the message and nothing happens. Honestly all we can do is wait if we stay with them.

The only other choice is to take the server to another host but that costs money. Even if we received enough money through donations, there is still no way to know if thats a dependable source. Those people from INR can vouch for that, even though the players donated completely for the shard to be hosted, it couldn't last and people made false promises.

[smoke]

That might be why the people you know left but that is not why everyone left. Personally I have heard lots of reasons for players leaving, not once has a player ever told me they would stop playing here because of skill gain. As a matter of fact, when this shard was supporting 100+ players a majority left because of the lag.



The server update is totally out of our hands. We do get this hosted for free but at the cost of them not giving a crap really. I mean, all they do is make us look like idiots by saying an update is coming, we try to relay the message and nothing happens. Honestly all we can do is wait if we stay with them.

The only other choice is to take the server to another host but that costs money. Even if we received enough money through donations, there is still no way to know if thats a dependable source. Those people from INR can vouch for that, even though the players donated completely for the shard to be hosted, it couldn't last and people made false promises.

shade you don't disregard the fact that pvp may have driven people away but yes how many times i've seen it that skill gain is too hard and that's why people left also you can't just say they left because of the pvp the merge had an effect on both shards that forced them to quit and no i can't really prove that because they dont play here anymore, but it's one of the reasons since day 1

im not saying to make all the skills easier i'm jsut saying allow the pvp skills to be trained easier

EDIT: were grasping at straws here it's not like were gainning any players, we need to act fast and what do we have to lose by enabling this?

[imported_Shade]

Hmm, lets say the pvp and skill gain were the main reasons we lost players. Skill gain is now WAY easier and yet we have a low player base. That says to me that something else needs to be changed/fixed.

Skill gain is not going to fix anything at all, it hasn't the last two times we changed it and it won't if we change it again.

[imported_LudaKrishna]

lmao always the pvp fault excuse, here we go again

let's recap all the excuses again plz