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Old 10-18-2012, 05:58 PM
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Arilou Arilou is offline
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heh You heard wrong. After being down for 15 months, the game returned in December of 2007. It then remained up (with the exception of short outages here and there that lasted no more than a few hours to a few days) until March of 2011, one month after we threw a large 10 year anniversary event. At that point, the game had experienced a two year period of active development. Meaning we had been regularly fixing bugs, working on balancing the game, and we filtered in new content as time allowed. The anniversary event, in particular, was all about introducing new content, including a complete redo of the Minath Monster Arena (you can see a video of the new arena here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPCNdjEYDJU). We had been planning to follow up on that with more of the same when the game went down again.

You can see the news for all the progress that was made on the game during this time by clicking here and here. Also, if you are old enough to have been around for the Summer Feast event of 2003, you might be interested to get a glimpse into the sequel we did during your perceived 6 year downtime. You can, additionally, see a bunch of screen shots from that day here and, speaking of screen shots, here is the screen shot section of the website that we updated after the game returned. It's meant to show how the game progressed since 2003 as opposed to how much it progressed during the period of time that it was back. However, you'll see some new stuff in there. Finally, this thread will help you find all of the Wyvern videos made, if you're interested that sort of thing. I may be mistaken, but I believe all except the Garoodude ones were made after the game came back up in 2007.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to get across with all this is that you missed the most active period in Wyvern's development since 2003. So, you really should have tried to find the forum during that first downtime, but sadly you were far from alone in thinking the game was gone - We lost much of our playerbase because of that.

---------- Edit ----------

Let me see if I have your narrative figured out: You're on the Fantasy Online forums and someone starts talking about Wyvern. You hadn't bothered to look into its status in 6 years, but finding out there was a forum peeked your interest and so you came looking for this site. You then make this thread with the same misinformation you gathered from that person's post, correct?

Speaking of misinformation, there's a lot wrong with what this pocketmouse person said...

Quote:
A long time ago I played a game known as Wyvern, by Cabochon. It had a heavy player invovement too, creating sprites and items, and even areas that were chosen for implementation from time to time.

The players who had contributed the most and demonstrated sufficient responsibility gained the position of 'Arch-Wizard', as all content-creators were known as 'Wizards'. They really weren't that different from mods here, but despite not being paid staff or someone whom the developer knew beforehand, they were heavily involved in creating really prominent new content, organizing game events, and rallying the wizards to create themed items for the community. The developed didn't have to put much effort into planning events at all, the community did it all themselves.

It was an old downloaded graphical MUD, and the graphics aren't as cute as FO's today, but in every other aspect, I'd have to say that if it were still up, I'd be playing it instead.. now, 5-6 years since the first time servers went down without ever coming up again for more than 2 months, and then only once or twice, people are still interested in the game, and one of the most active Arch-Wizards there was still at a forum maintained purely by ex-players on free hosting separate from the developer in ever way, explaining that the gamer wasn't likely to come back to hopeful returning players.

The gameplay interface really wasn't very different from FO, but of course builds, battle mechanisms and things were rather different I really miss it haha. And if anyone here has ever played this game, I think that in terms of the development methodology, that really is the potential that FO has.
1) In this person's time, Arch Wizard was a position that only Rhialto and his friends had. There were three of them besides Rhialto; Kiz, Caius, and Legolas. Kiz and Caius helped Rhialto in the early, pre-development stages of the game and so they had full, arch wizard status. Legolas came along a bit later and did work his way up the wizard ranks based on the quality of his work, but he only knew about the game because he knew Rhialto and he only became an arch wizard because of that same association.

At the time, Elder Wizard was the highest rank someone who went from random player to wizard could hope to achieve because Rhialto wasn't going to trust giving access to the entire game to someone he didn't know. He only went against that a year after the game came back up (in 2009) because he had been so inactive for so long and trying to get anything done was like pulling teeth. The people he opted to trust, at the time, had been around for years and had been managing the game as best they could with their limited access. But, it was not something he did lightly and one shouldn't think that, when the game comes back up, if they just work hard enough, arch wizard is an obtainable rank for them.

2) I take issue with the notion that the community planned events (events being lqs, not players yelling for people to come join them in a pk arena). Yes, we promote most of our wizards from within the playerbase, but wizard is not just a fancy title for a player who works on the game. Rather, someone who is made a wizard is taken out of the playerbase and, although they are allowed to maintain player accounts, they primarily become a staff member (people who put being a player first were usually banished - we always looked for people who were serious about joining our team). So, Wyvern really isn't a player content driven game in the traditional sense (granted, it's on the cusp so I can see why someone would hold that view).

3) As I said before the edit, that 2 month thing is flat out wrong. But it's funny that this person also thinks the game came back only once or twice for a brief period of time as it was consistently up (with only minor outages) for a little over 3 years. I can't even fathom how someone would make that mistake - What did they see that the game was back, play for a few days, experience an outage that lasted a weekend, and then decided that the game was being taken down for months again and that he shouldn't bother checking back in?

4) This forum is not maintained by ex-players. I maintain it and, while I have play tested the game, I was never a player - I came to Wyvern to apply to be a wizard, not to play it. In fact, I had vowed to quit MMORPGs a month before I did so as I had burned out very badly on one. So I had zero interest in playing the game at the time and then I came to know too much about how it worked to have much interest in playing it after being a wizard.

Although, perhaps this person meant ex-wizards since I have repeatedly said that I will no longer be working on the game. But, I am a retired wizard, not an ex-wizard as it's not like I intend to delete my wizard account.

5) I have never said the game is unlikely to come back. Actually, I confidently believe that it will return, I just don't think it's likely to come back any time soon as I think Rhialto will continue to drag things out before deciding what to do (even though he supposedly said he made a decision 6 months ago) and then being motivated to do it. I also have no expectations that anything will change, in the post-downtime era, so that something like this doesn't happen again.

6) This is not free hosting. I pay a monthly fee to keep this website up (hence, it having its own domain name). Also, neither I nor any other wizard has said anything about keeping the forum separate from Rhialto. While it is nice that it won't go down when the server goes down, (whether it's for an extended downtime like this or just a few hours) as players can come here and find out what's going on, the reason it is separate is simply because Rhialto never opted to put a player forum up on Wyvern's website. So they had to be created elsewhere.

...

Bottom line - I'd be wary of anything this person tells you. His sense of things (at least in regards to things that have happened in the past) is quite off.