[imported_Gibran]

Greetings and salutations people of IN-X,

As you may already know we have been experiencing a downfall in the player base of the shard for quite some time now. There comes a time when things need to be done and changed in order to keep up with the demand. There are many things that make IN:X a playable shard but there are also many things that the shard lacks. The old saying of Imagine Nation “Be a part of something better!” requires us to make a change to become better. Being better does not happen without hard work and it is time for someone to put in the effort that is required. Lets start with addressing the good things about IN:X and after lets discuss the bad things.

Good things about IN:X

In no particular order these things that make IN:X better are,
* The Staff - We have very dedicated and bright staff that are very helpful in bringing us answers, events, and ideas to help IN:X achieve a great environment.
*The Developers - We have two great developers that have put in a lot of man hours into creating a custom and unique shard.
*IN:X History - Imagine Nation and Xtreme Ultima Online has been around for many years and that is a true testament of commitment. Thus evolving into a great shard and becoming IN:X.
*The PvP System - As IN:X says it is a challenging and rewarding PvP environment. It is very unique and is unlike any other shard that has been around in the past 15+ years of the games release.
*The Skill Gain - Skill gain at IN:X is nearly perfected. Your main skills that you depend on, whether it be crafting or resource skills are somewhat difficult to gain, but these skills will pay off in the end and will give you a much better playing experience.
*The Roleplaying - The roleplaying at IN:X is a unique trait that IN:X has developed and it is not enforced but it is welcomed. From the roleplaying questing to the roleplaying dungeons, IN:X has delivered a fun playing environment for those certain individuals that like a challenge.
*The Events - IN:X has a dedicated staff team that is constantly on at all times of the day hosting tournaments ensuring that the players are looked after and are enjoying their experience on the shard. There are many events here at IN:X that relate to PvP'ers and even PvM'ers.
*The Players - We have a lot of dedicated players that contribute all they can and know to the shard that make it a very nice playing environment. Whether it is our roleplayers who contribute by making a interesting environment with their imaginations or whether it may be our hardcore PvP'ers that keep you on your toes by challenging your playing ability skills, Or whether it be our PvM'ers and Crafters that give us the knowledge and resources that are required to be a successful player on this shard.
*Player Vendors - Having player vendors in IN:X was an excellent idea to creating a trade system for players that allow us to achieve wealth and/or give us a way to collect resources for whatever may be needed to build your way up in the game.
*IN:X Forums - The forums are a great database with plenty of knowledge about IN:X and the great community of IN:X is that of smart individuals with senses of humor and a little bit of edginess that creates a unique community.


What IN:X Lacks

*The Hunting - I could spend all day talking about the problems of hunting so I will go ahead and spend all day addressing the problems of hunting. lol!
First and foremost this is a critical aspect of ensuring a well balanced playing field for players. I am going to copy and paste my old reply suggestion to save me some time. First of all, when you are new the first thing you want to do is make a little bit of gold and this is very hard because most monsters do not drop enough gold and are very hard to kill or use up more gold in resources to kill. It is a very slow process but these need to be addressed and tweaked. Another thing with hunting is, a lot of caster type monsters have insta cast and this makes it extremely difficult for new players, beings that they don't have bs scrolls or money to purchase resources and have to resort to melee. Some of these monsters are not worth your effort, time, and resources because they generally drop 100g roughly. This is not a high enough value of gold beings that it will take 1-2 ev's or 5-10 bs just to kill this monster. For example, the Spider Drone is very easy to kill but 40g is not even worth the effort. The Spiderwoman is a moderate monster that insta casts and takes atleast 1-2 ev's to take down. The picture to the right are moderate creatures that only drop 50-70g and they too also insta cast and will not go down so easily. There are many monsters like this that should be tweaked and these are just the few that I have concerns with. I have talked to Taran and Shade about these monsters and they agree that this is a top priority in ensuring a well balanced shard. But it is very hard to have to go dungeon to dungeon monster to monster and check all of these and figure out for yourself what needs to be evaluated and what does not.
*Hunting Loot - I believe having more rare items in monster loot will add to the value of hunting and this will give people a reason to hunt anything and everything. For example, I played on a shard that had rare unique unis which were 1/100,000 drop rate for instance and also they were craftable with the required materials through tailoring and what not. These unique unis were sometimes a cloth material that would raise your skill .5-1% and with enough of these rares your skill would be a little higher and would ensure better crafting and sometimes allow you to craft some specific rare items that required a skill of 110% and what not. This is just an example and you do not have to imitate or replicate another shard, I am just using this as an example and from there you can create your own ideas.
*Active Developers - Every shard needs an active developer that is constantly working on the shard and to only have 1 semi active developer makes the process long and strenuous. Of course these developers would have to donate their time for the love of the game and community since we do not pay money to shard or to these individuals.
*The Economy - The economy is in ruins and we are in a recession. We have no one buying from our vendors and have no choice but to lower our prices to dirt cheap. There is also not enough to sell to players other than resources, weapons, armor, mounts. We need to have more rare items that you should be able to get from hunting and what not to be able to sell to players and help pick the economy up. I don't have all the answers but we need to start coming together and use our brains.
*Crafting - As many players have stressed that we need much more rare craftables that require hard to get materials in which will help the economy and also bring more uniqueness to the gameplay.
*Weapon Balancing - I know this has been already discussed and put on the back burner since I believe Maka was going to address this order until we lost him. This is an issue because there is only one weapon in PvP that is overused. This takes away from the uniqueness and individuality of the players and it makes them have to choose this weapon in order to be competitive and challenging.
*Dungeons - Most of the dungeons are extremely hard to navigate and require a lot of time and effort in order just to make a little bit of gold. This is not always worth your effort and time as most of us do not always have hours upon hours to explore an entire dungeon which does not produce the desired amount of gold and items anyways.
*Autosupply Events - These type of events are necessary however these events in excess take away from the shard because you are not required to have to work, hunt, or craft in order to participate in events. So this does not promote working, hunting, and/or crafting. If there were less autosupply events then more people would buy resources,armors, and weapons from player vendors, which in turn would help the economy gradually and give crafters a priority to work to keep up with supply and demand.
*Duel pits - This is a great idea and it gives PvP'ers a place to always PvP which is necessary, however it takes away from the world PvP and thus making world PvP non existent. I will not give any solutions to this b/c I do not have all the answers but I do in fact enjoy the duel pits but it should not be always accessible in some sense.

Essentially if we want a "Better" shard we need to work at it and we need to be open to change b/c we can not be a better shard without change.
As my President said, "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." We need to think like a business and take ideas from everyone and even from our competitors from the present and even the past. The new players need to be spoiled so they will make the decision to play here and enjoy their time here and thus creating a dedicated old player that is loyal to the shard and spreading the word to more people. I thank all of you who took the time in reading this and I respect all of your comments and suggestions because it is you who make the shard what it is and everything is valued. Thank you to all the staff for considering this and taking note and us players and the community enjoy doing business with you and we look forward to creating a nice game for everyone and let the good times roll.


-Gibran

[smoke]

holy shit i agree with everything you said and i'm pretty sure people have been saying these things for a while too nice work actually putting it all together to be looked at and in a real detailed way. Maybe staff will now see it from another persepective

[imported_kcslic]

I am not trying to correct you or say you are wrong or anything but I will say this... In your eyes and some other players eyes these are all reasons for player drops. But in my eyes these are not. In my experience with uo I see it as a game that people play because there is so much hate, so much harrasmant, so much degrading and enemys, so much fun playing together, the list goes on and on... These are all parts that make the game of uo better. Sure the shard doesnt have very man players but in tarans eyes everything in this server is to his liking and that is all it needs to be. Obviously there are players that like playing here if we had 50 people online a few days back. It is possible people dont like playing here anymore because they are getting bored, and of coarse it is the playerbase. But why does the playerbase go down? It goes down because alot of the people are very racial. If you have noticed most of the percentage of spanish have stuck together and most of the percentage of englsh have stuck together. Now im not saying this is a bad thing, but for a server with 50 players or less. Everybody should be helping out everybody, and no matter how mad everyone gets you should not ever take ANYTHING personaly in this game, and if you do then you should probobly take a break from uo and think about it. 90% of the players here take things to personaly when items are lost or they are betrayed or they get looted ect.. As a small community we shouldnot have this much greeve for eachother. If everyone were to pull together and help out new players and help out not noew players I believe this server would grow a great amount. Take for example a new player that joins, sure there are some people that help them out a small amount mabey giving them 10k or so to start out but if the new players here dont have anybody to talk to or any freinds, most likely they will leave. Now I have personaly played on this server with 0 freinds and ejoyed it a tremendose amount, ONLY because i do not take anything personaly. Now i dont even know what my point is so dont ask me, I just wanted to get all of that out and share my opinion. Thanks for reading!

[imported_phobia]

I am not trying to correct you or say you are wrong or anything but I will say this... In your eyes and some other players eyes these are all reasons for player drops. But in my eyes these are not. In my experience with uo I see it as a game that people play because there is so much hate, so much harrasmant, so much degrading and enemys, so much fun playing together, the list goes on and on... These are all parts that make the game of uo better. Sure the shard doesnt have very man players but in tarans eyes everything in this server is to his liking and that is all it needs to be. Obviously there are players that like playing here if we had 50 people online a few days back. It is possible people dont like playing here anymore because they are getting bored, and of coarse it is the playerbase. But why does the playerbase go down? It goes down because alot of the people are very racial. If you have noticed most of the percentage of spanish have stuck together and most of the percentage of englsh have stuck together. Now im not saying this is a bad thing, but for a server with 50 players or less. Everybody should be helping out everybody, and no matter how mad everyone gets you should not ever take ANYTHING personaly in this game, and if you do then you should probobly take a break from uo and think about it. 90% of the players here take things to personaly when items are lost or they are betrayed or they get looted ect.. As a small community we shouldnot have this much greeve for eachother. If everyone were to pull together and help out new players and help out not noew players I believe this server would grow a great amount. Take for example a new player that joins, sure there are some people that help them out a small amount mabey giving them 10k or so to start out but if the new players here dont have anybody to talk to or any freinds, most likely they will leave. Now I have personaly played on this server with 0 freinds and ejoyed it a tremendose amount, ONLY because i do not take anything personaly. Now i dont even know what my point is so dont ask me, I just wanted to get all of that out and share my opinion. Thanks for reading!

man the only reason i play this shard is because i hate a few players. if i did not have that hate i would never log on. P.S. if you see Technquie flam strike him for me

[imported_LudaKrishna]

I also think that some people aren't very realistic.

I mean a lot of people expect to get 100K without doing anything. That is another downfall that needs to change but I think that only the players can change that.

[imported_Hilbert]

Let's not discuss about this anymore man. why should we . you can go on and on about what the server lacks. but the truth is here. onley the ones that left have the answer to the question why they leaved. but they arend here anymore. my geus is well whatever i already made a topic of that

[smoke]

they leave because they don't want to deal with the bullshit and stupidity some rules are lame they don't like them some situations are handled stupidly people get jailed for nothing sometimes it's another situation in game

theres many other reasons

[Eighty Swords]

I more or less agree with what you said Gibran, here are my comments on what else I think.

Roleplaying
I think it's great we give players the opportunity to roleplay but from what I hear from some roleplayers it's hard to get into roleplaying when there aren't many roleplayers around. Maybe hold a shard wide competition where the best roleplayer gets a really cool prize like a statue to put in their house, or something really really cool that would make everyone want to try it out.

Now before someone says that's a dumb idea because some people roleplay all the time and are used to it so they're automatically better and will win, that's not necessarily true. All it takes is a bit of imagination coming up with what kind of character you want to be and acting like them.


The hunting & loot:

-Monster loot needs to be increased because there are too many useless monsters.

-I don't think adding a 1/100,000 chance of getting a rare will help because these things will sell for millions of gold each and they won't raise the value of the items that aren't selling, ie armor, scrolls, pots, etc which is what most players do sell. But I guess to some degree these things will sell a bit more since people will have more of a reason to hunt and in turn use them if rares are added.

-A little while ago Taran suggested spawning Trammel and each time you enter a dungeon you get a choice of 'regular' and 'crazy'. Of course one dungeon will have better drops but this should ease the transition new players have from fighting all the useless monsters to our full out crazy dungeons. It will also give them an opportunity to earn more gold then they were earning against the useless monsters. I know some people might not agree with this idea but you have to admit adding a dungeon harder then rats but easier then the existing dungeons is better then nothing getting changed.

-I agree with your comment about instacast and how this makes it nearly impossible to fight some magical monsters that are even in little groups of 2-3. A possible solution is allowing you to cast through their spells. Ex: I start casting a blade spirit, at the same time a lich lord casts a flame strike on me, my bs spell should not fizzle. Let me either fizzle it myself to heal or let it finish casting and then I'll heal.

-Another change that would help is if you can cast bs and ev on any tile without an object. Me and Lederoil were fighting in the monsters in that brit graveyard area that opens now and then and we couldn't cast bs and ev on any empty tile. Why? Who knows... In fact we had to cast it ON the monster in order for it to work. Usually if you cast a summon spell on a monster you get a system message (the messages in the lower-left corner of the screen) that says 'that location is blocked' and you have to recast the spell somewhere else (usually next to the monster).

-Another thing I don't like is how 90% of the time when you cast an EV (even right next to a monster) it comes after you! Why?? Hunting is hard enough as it is with monsters chasing me down, I definitely don't need a super melee monster chasing after me too. I could understand if I cast it next to me or I'm the only thing within 10 tiles of where I cast it, but like I said, 90% of the time it will come after me even if I cast it next to a monster.


Weapon balancing
-I don't think what you said here is true, and I assume that when you say "there is only one weapon in PvP that is overused" you are referring to the bardiche. If you've looked at some tours recently you would have seen people using other weapons like a large battle axe, hammerpick & shield, etc.


Autosupply Events
I agree that autosupply should be used on a minimal basis but what I think are the most commonly hosted events (CTF & REP) require it. It's not required in REGs and FFAs but personally I don't see these hosted as much as the others (maybe I don't notice them since I don't join them though). Anyways, whether I see them or not the fact is autosupply isn't required for REGs and FFAs.


Duel Pits
Back on XUO the duel pits weren't open 24/7 which seems to be the case here. We'd usually open it for 1-2 hours at a time, usually late at night when activity would go down to a handful of players.




We have a good thread going here, and I know we all have a tendency to start insulting others when our opinions clash but lets continue to discuss this in a mature manner (whether you're 10 years old or 25 years old).

[smoke]

you can easily do reps non autosupplied no idea why it's needed here on n*ovus they hosted 1v1 reps non auto and 2v2 reps non auto all the time and many people joined the GMs would just give played hued robes

duel pits should stay open it's good for dueling and practing and it draws attention lately it's all we have left and it's like a dailey routine now dules in the evenning

although the dungeon option thing may be harder to script than you think due to scripting abilities it may be harder than it looks and not to mention most people would just use the better loot difficulty part of the dungeon also it would cause a delay to enter dungeions which would be lame for ganks outside/inside dungeons to dodge fses

tbh what we need for new players is a wicked cool newbie dungeon that stands out that has all kinds of types of monsters to lets say up to dragons or ancient wyrms so they can get use to them there and there all in different catagories like cages just like the old times

oh and yes weapons need more balancing I'm pretty sure while maka was back he was going to start working on them but then with all the arguments he left and now were kinda stuck

[Eighty Swords]

I only said Reps require it because when we tried doing reps without autosupply back on XUO a lot of people complained that they would use tons of supplies to kill off 5-6 guys for a prize worth 10k. And for the same prize worth 10k someone not as good at pvp would die fast and get the same prize. And in the end people stopped joining non-autosupply reps. If everyone is now willing to fight through a rep with their own supplies, by all means lets host them without auto supply.

[smoke]

they also had entry fees to join tours and the pot would go to first and second depending on how big it was so it was well worth it

[imported_kcslic]

I agree duels need to be opened at all times, But the free duel area is very crapy, it makes alot of poeple crash and it is very crappy lmao, Move it and create a new one.