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Do you have any plans to further develop the shard? Are there plans to add active staff members?
The population is getting smaller and smaller every week. People notice the lack of staff members in-game. New players do not stick around long.
A simple yes or no will suffice, or just no reply at all will do.
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shut up begar lol. i have the same question towards it
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Short answer is that UO server populations are unpredictable and as far as I know there's no secret to instantly draw in hundreds of players.
I still think that the SW:TOR fallout combined with no other good games out at the moment was the cause of our huge growth. The fact that we took out advertising right when it was happening was also a huge benefit.
The problem is, as has been repeated, is that UO is an old game and most people only play out of nostalgia. The stars aligned right and we got a huge influx of players looking for something to do, then they lost interest when new games came out, Diablo 3 being the huge one. Soon it'll be Torchlight 2.
As far as I know, we have no plans to take the server offline since it's super cheap to keep it up. If we get a huge spike in playerbase though, I doubt it would be due solely to what GM/Admins are doing. It would most likely be the effect of the gamer population's movement as a whole.
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Oh I am one to call bullshit. There are plenty of people out there that cannot stand Diablo 3. It's a terrible game. I am so sick of hearing that summer and D3 are the root causes in why this shard has died. This is a dead shard because of the lack of development from staff, as well as the over-development and horrendous ideas that have since been installed into this sever. You had a huge player base, everyone was fit and ready to keep throwing money away to your pockets and you screwed it up, there really is no other excuse. Yes, please keep preaching IN took yet ANOTHER dive due to newer video games and current weather. Face it, IN has died time and time again, you obviously do not know how to run a UO server. There are still servers with a ton of players out there. It would seem D3 and the summer months didn't affect them, why would that be the root cause of decline on this server? Especially since it's one of the few widely known servers that has been remade over and over, and one of the oldest around. Please, face the music, continue to play D3 since you would rather spend time on that than this, and stop making excuses. IN is dead. But this time, really, you should just let it die.
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As far as I know only admins have access to donations. I doubt it was ever shared around the staff team. By the way, nobody was forced to pay, thats why it's called donation. It wasn't necessary pay-to-play either. Why *****ing if you didn't have to throw your money in first place? It's a shame that Taran didn't sacrifice himself in the sake of the server... The guy should definitely input all of his freetime into IN... No, all of his time in general! Thats what you do when you get a hobby...
If seriously though, thanks to his hobby - I and a lot of other people had plenty of fun time spent here, and it didn't cost me anything. If it wasn't him, there wouldn't be a server at all...
Hey man, why don't you script, open up and run a server which will be better than this one in any single aspect?...
(This post was last modified: 06-17-2012, 12:19 AM by
Irrelevant.)
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1) The server is still here if people want to play, we can't force people to play. We'd love more people to play but we're limited, despite what various people believe turning the staff into slaves and destroying their real lives to push the playerbase up by 5-10 isn't feasible or sustainable.
2) I really do think when D3 and the summer weather start to pass some players may return. Generally when it comes to UO most players play when they feel nostalgic, it isn't a new and shiny game anymore, and nostalgia goes in cycles. It also tends to be more prevalent when players have less other things to do, i.e. no massively popular other games, sunny weather and so on. Plus, as sad as it is for all of us, we (the players of UO) are getting old, we're not young teenagers any more, and I suspect a lot of players can get carried away with UO for a few weeks then remember the mortgage, job, wife etc...
3) A big playerbase tends to attract more players so whilst the playerbase is low it will probably grow slowly, but it may (hopefully) snowball again at some point after the summer.
4) Darken, why are you still here? You whine a lot and claim not to play, so quit wasting everyone's time yeah? If you have it all worked out then please go ahead and make your own UO server somewhere. Just because you hate D3 and having nothing else to do but bitcdh on a game server forum where you don't even play doesn't mean the same applies to the rest of the players who are not currently playing.
5) I believe only Taran has ever had control/access to the donation money, most staff (myself included) don't even know how much there is or who has donated. But unless bribery can make people play on the server there isn't much that can be done with it even if there's a lot, we've done advertising, it worked pretty well (as Eru said) but it was probably a case of right advert at the right time...
6) As someone already pointed out, donations are donations, we never charged anyone to play and donations always went towards things that helped the server (e.g. support for the ingame/browser chat, advertising, the website etc.) if anyone thinks running a UO server is a good way to make money they need their head examined. The scripting and customisation on IN represents thousands of man-hours of work by dozens of people, if we all went to Burger King instead and manned the drive-thru we'd have made a hell of a lot more money than all of the donations combined.
Edit: I should say I only say this (point 6) to allay the conspiracy theorists, I do not mean to sound ungrateful to those who have donated (which has undoubtedly helped the server to keep running as long as it has).
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Loki Wrote:1) The server is still here if people want to play, we can't force people to play. We'd love more people to play but we're limited, despite what various people believe turning the staff into slaves and destroying their real lives to push the playerbase up by 5-10 isn't feasible or sustainable.
Arg! You keep saying that. People aren't asking the staff to turn into slaves. They're asking for one or two active staff members. Hell, even a semi-active staff member will do. As it stands, there are NO active Game Masters.
You keep saying there are, but there aren't.
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Lots of things said...
But the original question was still never answered, only a bunch of stuff that wasn't asked... Those things where addressed in another thread.
Any chance we could please get an answer to the question asked in original post? I, amongst many are rather curious to know.
Mister Pickles Wrote:Do you have any plans to further develop the shard? Are there plans to add active staff members?
A simple yes or no will suffice, or just no reply at all will do.
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Only two people can answer the original question, one of which posted up here and thats what he said
Quote:As far as I know, we have no plans to take the server offline since it's super cheap to keep it up. If we get a huge spike in playerbase though, I doubt it would be due solely to what GM/Admins are doing. It would most likely be the effect of the gamer population's movement as a whole.
I'm sure Taran could add up to this, but the lots you speak of were said by people who couldn't answer Pickles question anyways, so...
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Irrelevant Wrote:Only two people can answer the original question, one of which posted up here and thats what he said
I'm sure Taran could add up to this, but the lots you speak of were said by people who couldn't answer Pickles question anyways, so...
I'm aware of that, but even what Eru said didn't answer the question asked. While it does have some relevance to the question asked it does not actually answer it, which is what a lot of the players are looking for. While I'm fully aware only 2 people can answer the question (the title of thread points to such things), one of which has taken the time to reply but while he did address some concerns (which have been address in another thread recently as well) the actual question originally asked got left unanswered. It's not a question of if the server will get shut down but more a question of if development will continue to happen (or more so, any time soon) or will the shard remain as it is for a while (or forever) and also if there are any plans to add some more active (even semi-active) staff members to the roster as most (not all, there are a couple still semi-active ones answering pages and such) of the ones listed are no longer active.
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it's very aware that none of you are slaves which is why this topic is constantly brought up. It's easy enough to say were always on but you cant see us. Make it obvious your online, i named five simple quick fun events on one post to do and Eru created it quickly. The deed was done, all had fun, how about some more. But i guess i went away from the question so back to the topic. IS THERE GOING TO BE AN ACTIVE STAFF MEMBER, that we can all see and host events, made known that IN is going strong!
