Main Server Dieing slowly???

[Chicka-Maria]

as you all know the server has changed quite a bit, but changed wrongly for other players. after talking with quite a large population of the main server we agreed things are being ran wrong on tmw. some of you might disagree with this well known fact but ill give out my opinion anyway. As some know i have great admiration for freeyorp and a few others and their work its a amazing addition to the server and they have great creative ideas along with alot of the other players on the game. I personally think people should be given a chance to see how it works and be given a fair shot of their ideas being put on the server. In my opinion again i think the ideas being put right now are not a great addition to the server at all. Bat wing prices have gone down and i can understand that due to botters but thats what GM's are for. their for server police they knew what they were getting at when they accepted the responsibility of being a GM. Other words not just the prices of items players usually sell had gone down but prices have gone up on items as well making it harder for new players to enjoy themselves in the game. I Believe there needs to be someone reasonable in charge of the server and what goes on it someone deicated to the server itself. taking in what the players say about it and their comments and ideas towards things. thats how tmw should change for other players needs and challenges. To be honest i barely see the Devs who have put the latest things on the game try their own ideas. they dont see how difficult it is for new players or even some low leveled old ones. Sometimes alot of players feel the devs dont play they just make it difficult for the players that do. i know devs can be busy and be working on stuff but they should still be dedicated to making the server players happy not just satisfy themselves.

I know this is quite long xD but this is my opinion on things and what i believe needs to occur in change for the server to stay alive, other words if things dont change it will be dead very soon.

post your opinions below and dont judge others for their beliefs towards the server. thanks =)

Regards,

[MrDemonWolf]

I agree with you things need to change. Now I've not played TMW long (only played for a little over a year) so was around before the restructuring of the economy and I know stuff wasn't perfect then either but was easier. The thing i think most bothers me is how hard things are now.

1:prices are crap for items that new players need to make money I.E.(bat wings and teeth)

2: the crap that is the way between tulimshar and hurns thats ridiculous i mean its not easy for new players to make that money it takes time so they are basically isolated unless older players take the time to go over and guide them which does happen but not a lot.

3:what the heck is the deal with the ridiculous amount of time and money it takes to get armor I.E.(warlord plate, setzer, warlord helmet, and steel shield,) why should items that a new player needs be fricken ridiculous to get until you get to lvl 60 or higher.

Now those are some of the major ones that I personally don't understand and don't see what they accomplish. Now I'm not one to complain but when new people have to beg to get items they need because they can't get them there selves because they are to low of a lvl then its pitiful and most of them just give up and quit because people aren't going to charge less for items that they know people need to have I know I wouldn't. Put simply I think the economy modifications that were made just plain suck I think if your going to make changes make sure they work in game yourself ask other players who play the game also instead of just throwing something in and saying its good. I don't know who made the changes but learn how to run things first before you just throw game changes out there otherwise your going to lose all of your players.
Well theirs my rant/opinion have at it!

[DarkWater]

What the current powers that be can not begin to understand is to have a full economy you need all aspects of an economy. We do not have either, so any attempt to fix the economy will fail. They do not even understand what is ruining the economy. All they want to do is to make socially engineer their way out if a game mechanics problem. Any game you play with pen and paper, you take way 99 dollars for every 100 given. This game has no take away and all give. But of course it is the botters that breakers the game, because it is botters that are to blame for everything. If they continue that idea system this server is lost. Placing power hungry idealist in control was by far the stupidest thing this server has done. Out of a long list of bad ideas that is saying something.

[yourmistakes]

i think this server is definitely on it's last legs. i can't wait to make level 99 and quit.

[WildX]

The game IS dead. Devs puts new stuff but they don't care if it makes problems for new or older players. They saw that the GY inn sink is impossible to reach but they don't change it. They know that the bat wings price makes difficult to collect money but they don't change it. In the last months i talked to many new players and they always say they have problem with collecting money to get armors and stuff, these players leaves the game after 2 weeks because collecting money is hard and boring now.
I understand that devs are busy and they don't have time to see the problems of the community but reading this topic takes just a minute.

[Reid]

I admire Wombat for how he keeps up with all the unreasonable drama almost everyone produces. I don't agree with everything he does, but at the end someone has to deside. On everything there are always different opinions.

Do you want a promotion?

Thing are not ready to die chicka, until new player will come everyday that will not change, its only because our old friends are gone and that now you become a 'old player' that you think that the game die, playing during 1year the game everyday and always searching new stuff is hard for an amateur,(its not me that say that, its crush that said it some month ago) you want all to much thing from a little game, if you want a 'real game' you should all play in wow or such game like this, but if you want more stuff, you can start to script... It's an opensource game, dont care of who is the chief, he is only here to enter new work in the server, nothing more, he is not payed, not evil(need to verify), and he want too to change the game in the right way, wait the new update of Xmas that Pjotr do and some quest that Wombat did, and after say that the game is dead if you dont like it ^^.

edit :sorry for not pressed 'enter' key u.u

[WildX]

focusing to much on bat wings makes a monotonic game play.

There isn't anything else to focus on, make an higher price on other monsters drops then.

Thing are not ready to die chicka, until new player will come everyday

And leave every day.

that will not change, its only because our old friends are gone and that now you become a 'old player' that you think that the game die

The main problem are new players.

wait the new update of Xmas that Pjotr do and some quest that Wombat did, and after say that the game is dead if you dont like it ^^.

The game is dead anyway, after the events nobody will be able to collect money again. But thanks anyway for the new updates.

[Cecil Burrow]

At some point, a number of people became convinced that there was too much 'inflation' in the game. This seemed to involve two separate concerns:

(i) the full armor set was too easy to obtain
(ii) the price of rares (e.g., top hats) was going up

Almost every attempt to control these problems has resulted in a game which is, quite frankly, more tedious and boring to play than the game prior to those changes. Money is now very hard to come by, but more money is needed to play the game - heck, you need money even to travel between the two cities. Certainly, it's a grinding game, but that doesn't mean that there is no distinction to be drawn between fun games which require some grinding and boring games that needlessly force the player to grind. The recent changes have resulted in TMW moving from the first category towards the second category. Just to give one example, I'm much less inclined to travel between the cities helping people out, because at the end of the day it costs me money, which has become harder to get. I have no idea how new characters are able to get to a decent level. I imagine many leave the game in frustration. I am not surprised that I find far fewer people logged on nowadays that I did a year or two ago.

So what is the solution? First, we have to agree what the problem is. Frankly, I don't see why we should care about the price of rares - issue (ii). Most players have as their main goal leveling up, getting the best armor and weapons they can get, and fighting the most difficult monsters. Only a small percentage of players really care about rare hats. To significantly reduce game enjoyment for everyone - especially noobs - in order to try to address the needs of the tiny percentage of people who are upset about the price of a top hat strikes me as a very serious error. Even though only a small percentage of people care about top hats, with new players coming in, demand will always increase while supply remains finite. So some sort of inflation with respect to the price of rares seems unavoidable. If you want to have rares in the game at all - objects of which there is a fixed, finite number - then you should expect inflation with respect to their prices. If you don't want any sort of inflation, then I suppose you could increase the number of rares - make them a rare drop (something dropped with a probability of 0.1% by some difficult monster), or something like that. If there is a problem with issue (ii) (and again, I'm not convinced that there is), it can be solved without making the game utterly tedious for everyone.

What about issue (i)? I certainly don't remember the full armor being easy to get, but my main leveling days were before bats even existed. Now that the price of bat drops have been adjusted, I don't see how (i) is a problem any more. Why then do we need all the other inflationary counter-measures that have done nothing but make the game more difficult and boring?

My main point here is that this is a game, and as such it should be fun. It should be continually possible to achieve goals in an enjoyable manner. Presumably the devs - who spend so much time crafting the game - want people to play and enjoy it. Out of an enthusiastic desire to solve some putative problems, the question of the enjoyability of the game has perhaps been overlooked a little. This is a problem, but not an unsolvable one. Perhaps we can all post some concrete ideas later in this thread - I am certainly willing to do so - but at this point I'm just interested in seeing whether there is in fact a consensus that we do indeed have a serious problem on our hands.

[Jenalya]

I agree with Cecil Burrow, so I won't write a long post to say the same things again.

But there is something, that really confuses me in all this discussions:
Why is there this strong differentiation between "player" and "developer"?
Every player can participate in development and frankly, I think every dev should play the game at least from time to time to get a feeling for how changes influence game play, if he/she doesn't play it anyway.

I just did some brainstorming with Pjotr Orial, and one of our thoughts was, that the problem of "boring grinding" could be solved, if there were more different quest types, which might be redoable (well, and more quests in general, but that's being worked on anyway).
Please look here to see more about our ideas: http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/Quest_ideas

Everyone is welcome to add more ideas there or work on some of them.

[alastrim]

I think the prices of rares going up was mostly a result of players abusing of money duplication exploits. I remember very well(a few months ago), in just a few days, suddenly a lot of players were rich and offering 30/40kk for rares like top hat, eye patch, etc. Players that were broke one week before.

So the inflation, in my opinion, was a direct result of people abusing those exploits, not because of the way the game content was designed.

[Chicka-Maria]

I agree with Cecil Burrow, so I won't write a long post to say the same things again.

But there is something, that really confuses me in all this discussions:
Why is there this strong differentiation between "player" and "developer"?
Every player can participate in development .

sure everyone can make things, great ideas acctually some players have. but they are not considered to be put in the game. For example Wombat, from others experiences he has shut down their ideas and faught discustingly with people who had disagreed with his choices of the game. difference between dev and player? Devs get heard players dont. Just like how they might not get heard now and a chance things might not change at all for the server an players in it.

[noelleionscowl]

Personally, I treat it as a two-part universe, one that is assisting other characters in battle, or killing them. The other is a place to sit down and speak to a group of people that's far away.

This inflation crap is just that. Crap. It was designed to prevent people from doing things for free. So they closed the beach passage, and made the ferry 200 times the price that it used to be. Then, they closed the backup route I found. They cut the price of bat parts in ten. And now, their stupid Gak quest is lowering all the drops on normal monsters.

Not to mention Nivalis.

But really. This whole thing was to combat people who exploited bugs, allowing them to get huge numbers of rare items. Inflation only hurts the people who are honest.

I'm level 52. I've been that way for several months. Partly because I can't get on TMW, and partly because you can't gain much in the way of XP and money at the same time.

The most money I've ever gotten from one monster is when it dropped a short bow. Other than that, nothin.

Reduce the price of bat wings? Fine. Reduce the drop rate by 90 percent? Hell no.

I lived through the bat wings. I sold my armor for money. And now I have it back.

But when you people kill the drop rate, I can see why autostacking can be a problem.

Some people I know are already working on a "sensitive" bot that detects GM presence, and whenever the GM speaks, the player stops and walks away, saying random phrases. The bots, otherwise, would run around killing things in the forest, and trading them to a "dump" bot that takes them all and sells select ones from it's inventory. If this bot ever reaches completion, it will be much harder to get money.

I just called him, nevermind. I <3 alex!
He says that the bot will be used to provide a small amount of money to each player based on the number online statistics.
He also says that the profits are mine to control.

hm...

The dump bot has a give feature.
and it says potato chipz when you whisper it.

Well, the bot will give everyone who asks it 5k a day. Hopefully.

And in response to Maria's most recent post, that's quite true. Players are the lowest class.

[Chicka-Maria]

I admire Wombat for how he keeps up with all the unreasonable drama almost everyone produces. I don't agree with everything he does, but at the end someone has to deside. On everything there are always different opinions.

Thing are not ready to die chicka, until new player will come everyday that will not change, its only because our old friends are gone and that now you become a 'old player' that you think that the game die, playing during 1year the game everyday and always searching new stuff is hard for an amateur,(its not me that say that, its crush that said it some month ago) you want all to much thing from a little game, if you want a 'real game' you should all play in wow or such game like this,

You can admire wombat all you want im not saying you cant, and its not just you who doesnt agree with some stuff its a very high percent of the rest of the population of the server thinks. sure theyre are different opinions towards his choices but a majority of the players have the same one which i think should be heard and noticed.



im going to have to disagree with you for my own belief, players come on the game every day yes? but in the year i have been here i have seen major changes such as noobs leaving on their first day or week. i have helped them with a few quests and talked with them about how they like the game so far, they have told me they might not be here long because the server is unbalanced. I personally dont blame them and i agree with them, it is. a real game? just because this game isnt commercialized it doesnt mean its not a real game. This game has players, quests, items, sure it needs to be worked on and its free but it is still accepted as a "real game".
the server doesnt have to die and its kind of sad for devs like you reid to say so because i know you had alot of fun on this server yourself.

[Jenalya]

Devs get heard players dont.

Players are the lowest class.

So the underlying problem is, that players, who want to make proposals or to develop, feel rejected/not be taken serious/ignored by those, who have write-access to the repositories?

I personally never was in this situation, but heard this opinion not only here, but from many people i met in the game...

It's my impression, that here is a lot of potential wasted because lead developers tend to not accept people who want to participate in developing. Why?

[Chicka-Maria]

It's my impression, that here is a lot of potential wasted because lead developers tend to not accept people who want to participate in developing. Why?

There are many reasons you could get this wrong impression. Some of them are:

• People want something that does not fit into this game or does not conform with the master plan.

if your dont mind i would like more information about this. what doesnt fit in the game an what is the master plan?