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Old 03-13-2009, 04:39 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by drewskee View Post
In my opinion...
a) Fix the healing spell so players are satisfied with it
I've discussed this countless times. We had a plan to fix spam healing in a way that was balanced and wasn't all about nerfing you guys but rather, taking things from one area and giving back in another. The game was never intended to be played in a way where everyone had healing and everyone was jamming their healing alias while sitting next to monsters until they died. However, at the same point, it was never intended to be played without ac on armor working and we recognize that players were using healing to get by in light of that bug. So the idea was to fix all these things around the same time, but not to do it one big bang so that we could gauge the effect and properly make follow-up tweaks.

However, Rhialto only got to the first stage and when it got time to continue with the other things we discussed, he became preoccupied with other matters and hasn't gotten back to it. There's nothing we can do about that. We've prompted him about it several times since, but he remains busy. When that changes, continuing with properly balancing spam healing is near the top of the list we will give him.

What you have to realize is that this ties in to previous statements I've made about the only problem the game having right now is that Rhialto is not actively working on it and that when that changes, things will begin to return to normal. This is not an example of us being wrong, it's an example of something that Rhialto didn't finish and something that only he can do. We have an inactive lead developer - Complaining that anything else is the cause of the current problems the game faces is absurd and uninformed.

Quote:
c) Let people give away whatever they want, or pick up anything from the ground. I believe the reason this was put in was to stop transferring alts? Look, people still get around that, just have a friend log in, buy your item off you and then have your friend sell the item to your alt. Why in the world cant we transfer items between alts, most mmorpgs try and make it easier with some sort of storage system that can hold your entire account's (or IP address) items.
Doing that is against the rules and therefore something that will result in administrative actions against the individuals trying to do it. Since the system is more restrictive it is easier to police and as such we catch people doing it all the time... both when it happens and anytime after since there's a tag on items that displays the name of the original owner - Without getting into too many details, we can easily catch someone who has items that belonged to their alts in their inv. So if we don't catch the actual trade going on, we can still catch you a week from then, a month, etc. If you have items in your inv that belonged to your alt right now, for example, and you've been getting away with it, at any time we may decide to randomly or purposely check your inv and that will be that. As a result, the system has been rather effective, despite what you may think.

As to your other point, the game makes it easier for you by allowing you to keep so many more items by storing them in bags that you can carry anywhere with you. Your weight determines the limit, so your choice of character makes things a little more interesting but, aside from that, it's not all that different from storage systems in other games. In fact, I think it's better for the players.

Other games tend to have a limit on the amount of items you can store (only it's a fixed number) and they tend to make you go to certain locations to recover your items. But with Wyvern, you can pull your items out of "storage" whenever and wherever you want, with no restrictions on how many you can get from your current location. To want a bank vault type of situation on top of this is greedy, unnecessary, and takes away a bit of the uniqueness from Wyvern's gameplay experience.

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d) The chat rules. You log on and play the game...and whose talking...NOBODY! I understand people cant be cursing and saying obscene things left and right, but seriously loosen up. I got booted for saying something on a Wednesday at 1 in the morning, honestly i don't think many little kids are playing right about then.
The chat rules have nothing to do with how active the chat is and this is beyond silly to bring up. You're making an argument for why the game has so few players and then using something that is totally and completely a result of having so few players as a topic in your argument. When there were more players, the chat was much more active, when there became less, the chat died down...Obviously.

Also, the chat rules have very little to do with children. This is yet another point I've previously addressed - It's all about providing a nice and friendly playing environment for people who want that sort of thing. Lots of other games let their players say and do what they want to varying degrees, while we cater to the type of gamer who gets stressed out or annoyed by that type environment.

We do, however, provide private chats which we do not monitor and instead leave it up to individual players to censor by deciding if the person they are talking to is someone they want to talk to privately or not. We may expand on this in the future, (e.g. by making private channels that you have to sign up for) but the main chat is only going to get more restrictive as the playerbase grows (in large part because a global chat in a game with a massive playerbase can't exist without certain restrictions).

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and one more time what is the point creating a game that nobody wants to play, that nobody will play, regardless of how "perfect" you think it is?
You may not want to, but Wyvern does have a target audience which I think do/will enjoy what we're trying to do. In fact, when we have our lead developer actively working on the game, we've seen how successful the game can be. All our current problems mostly focus around bugs which only Rhialto can fix from ac not working to spells freezing/server crashes when there are too many players on.

We've been here before - Whenever the playerbase dips, there are players to try to exploit it by blaming whatever addition to the game they, personally, do not like. While it's true that players do leave over updates they are not pleased with, if done properly, most tend to come back once they get over their initial anger, while new players quickly take the place of those few who do not come back (such is the world of beta testing - many drastic changes need to be made, but there are players who don't like change and don't get that they are allowed to play to help us test things). Spam healing is an example of something that wasn't as effective because the follow-up changes weren't made and as a result, the game has remained in a state where the gameplay is more difficult than we want it to be for certain players.

But the main reason for playerbase declines has to do with server performance. We've watched the game grow in 2003 when Rhialto was actively working on the server (so it could handle more players at once) and we watched it begin to drop when he stopped and unresolved issues begun to build up.

Eventually, the game went offline and came back again with a lot of people trying to play it despite the constant crashes. We had to put a player cap in just to make it semi-playable for those who could get on, while those who couldn't left. Meanwhile, problems continued, more players begun to leave since those problems weren't being resolved, and eventually things stabilized at a high of 30 or so players online at once, which is consistent with our observations of the server lagging at around 40+ players online and it getting drastically worse after that.