I see. Well if you felt that free action was legitimately useless you should have let us know. That's something we could have looked into. I can't properly speak to this as it's the first time I'm hearing it, but if it is as you say it might have needed to give you a few seconds of immunity or there might have needed to be more methods to resist slow. Or not. Again, I would have had to look into it.
On a different note, does everyone here get that the reason we worked on balance in the order that we did was because the playerbase was already shot? If we had 60-80 players still we would have had to handle things in a whole different matter. The problem is that doing it that way would have been a lot slower and since we were seeing numbers in the mid 20s during peek hours it was the perfect time to get all of this stuff done in as timely a fashion as possible. The numbers were not going to radically change until Rhialto got the server fixed and so the goal was to quickly get through the balance period so we could start putting out new content as fast as possible.
From the start, we told people this would be difficult at times and we appreciated if they stayed around to help us test things, but understood if they wanted to take a break and come back later. At its worst, this led to us having peeks in the low 10s. However, as I've said a million times, we got back into the 40s at the end and there was nothing on our list at that point that would have severely inconvenienced people so that shouldn't have fallen unless more server problems asserted themselves.
Before we started we found that it had gotten so bad that we'd have significant lag spikes when we had 30 something consecutive people playing at once. It's therefore hardly surprising (to us) that player numbers settled in the 20s. The server problem was not something that we could do anything about. We had to wait for Rhialto to get around to looking into it. In the meantime, the best we could do was to look into game functions that put too much strain on the server's already limited capacity. Hence, Contrare made changes to things like ball spells and teleport. With that we were able to make the game playable again with more than 20 something people playing, but we were unlikely to be able to get much higher than we were until the server was fixed.
Unfortunately, people love to exploit dips in peek playing numbers to justify whatever they don't like. This is not something new. For example, people have been trying to change the narrative regarding what happened after the enchant bug was fixed since around 2004. At the time peek hours dipped to around the 80s and between then and 2006 it dipped all the way to the 60s. So opportunists decided to pop in and try to claim that the reason we no longer saw highs at around 100 (although really, they'd exaggerate and claim we used to regularly have highs of 120-150, which wasn't true) was because we fixed the enchant bug. Of course, in reality, the enchant bug was fixed in March of 2003 and it wasn't until the summer of 2003 that Rhialto's work on the server allowed us to get those 100 player highs. There was legitimately a dip after the fix, but it didn't last long.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. People do it with everything. On the forum, Unknown is the king of popping in and trying to claim that things he didn't like from years ago are the the reason for then current playerbase states. Below is one of his many highlights. You can follow the link to see my reply.
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I think the main mayor failure of the game, was when you desired to take off the “GIVE” and the “PICK UP FROM OTHERS”... I know people was using this to cheat... i did it, having a character with 11 in merchant that was the “seller” of my party... but you know... THATS WHAT MADE THE GAME FUN!!! You where able to help new players, help yourself grow fast and strong, try new stuffs easily. My point is... it used to make the game from my point of view more fun... and yeah some players were able to get HOF in 1 day... so what? They loved the game that way, we used to see over 50 connected most of the time... (KEY WORD... most of the time, i remember lots of time over 100 during this time)
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http://www.wyvernrpg.com/forum/showt...?t=2146&page=5
More recently people have been trying to lump our balance changes with the dip that followed the game's return. A lot of you here have heard me say this before, but when the game came back we had an overwhelming number of people playing that shocked even me. However, it made sense. After such a long hiatus there were a lot of people from different time periods who had different levels of engagement with the game who wanted to play for nostalgic purposes. Thus, they did so as much as they could (what I didn't expect was for word to spread that quickly, that widely).
If you've been playing the game for a year you might get down to logging in a few hours a week or skipping some weeks entirely. If, on the other hand, you've been dying to play for 15 months you might be highly motivated to spend all day every day (for a period of days) logged in (or as much time as you can fit into your schedule). However, there's going to be a natural drop off as the excitement wears down and people return to the other games that they've started regularly playing during the hiatus. We could have done a better job of trying to encourage that group to stay around, (by we I mean Rhialto) but a drop off was inevitable.
Compounding that, the server was in a horrendous state. At 100 consecutive players people were putting up with lag so bad that the game would regularly crash. You can put up with that if you're on for nostalgic reasons, but you can't put up with that if you actually want to get back into playing the game. The best Teshuvah and I could do for you guys was to get Rhialto to once again cap the number of people who could login at once (it was at 50 when I came to Wyvern in January of 2003; this time we had him put it at 70). With player numbers in the 60s the server would only occasionally crash, but the lag was still very bad. People waited around for Rhialto to fix it and when he didn't they dropped off.
What about the 2008 spam healing change, you ask? Yes, that never should have happened the way it did. It was one of the last things that I got Rhialto to do before he dropped out entirely on us again. The only way that you guys could play the game without ac and enchant working under normal condition was with spam healing. With the server issues, not having it made the game unplayable with 60 people taxing the server. The numbers were already falling and would have fell further without that change, but between the server woes, the state of spam healing, and losing all semblance that we were going to have an active lead programmer again they fell all the way to the mid-20s.
Had you all been able to continue spam healing (as opposed to giants being able to dominate with full heal) the numbers probably would have stabilized in the 30s or 40s. It would have been laggier, but people would have put up with the lag if they could survive a little better. So, yes, that was a problem, but the problem was not that we wanted to fix it, it was that it was not fixed properly. I had a long chat with Rhialto. I explained the whole situation to him and what I thought needed to be done. I wanted a break between castings then, but Rhialto was hesitant to do that and instead decided put those max levels in place. We discussed how this wouldn't solve all the problems and that we needed to address things like giant healing, ac, and monster stats next.
Rhialto was hesitant to make too many radical changes all at once because, ironically, he didn't want to there to be a significant wave of people complaining/quitting. Hence why full healing, for example, was not addressed at that time. The idea was to do things in stages, so we could gauge the results and players could have time to adjust. We were both agreed on that and everything was fine until I went to try to seek some of those follow ups and I couldn't get Rhialto to do them. If you played during that period and you thought you were frustrated, imagine how frustrated Teshuvah and I felt as we had to deal with your complaints while unsuccessfully attempting to get things out of Rhialto.
Nevertheless, there are people who like to say this demonstrates why spam healing should never be touched when really it only demonstrates how bad it is to not follow through on fixes that are designed to happen in stages. After the game went down this last time there were people who tried to link the changes we made to spam healing in 2009 with what happened in 2008 after popping back in. Some of them had no concept that ac was fixed, that the level limits were taken off, that enchanting was being worked on, and so on. Others know good and well that we made additional changes, but they never bothered to actually get used to them and so they still link the work we were doing and the state of the playerbase with what happened in 2008.