Preface: I'm the dev that added or approved the majority of the content changes in the past 3 years. (this includes ferry, crypt, towels, annual repeating holiday events, etc.)
Any game or world requires an engine to run. The better the engine the better the game. Currently TMWA still lacks a number of items to maintain the sanity of the few developers who are currently working on it and people who want to help. The main reason we want to focus on the engine part is due to the amount of effort to create new content and the limitation we currently have with creating content.
Whether old or new content it's always been limited by what TMWA could do and by how hard it was to learn. Prior TMW staff to us removed features or added them improperly or hastily or there now exists a better method.We plan to spend our time fixing these backend issues and returning features sought out by new players and the community. This is why TMWA now has a quest log & @pvp. This is why we are trying to reduce the number of custom content scripting languages required to learn and add native guild support back. Then we wish to work on more features one finds (and M+ supports) in a modern MMO.
We have tried all sorts of things in the past 5 years to keep from hemorrhaging players but the market has drastically changed. There are many free-to-play or cheap enough games better than ours on the market that run on all platforms. Search "2D MMORPG free to play" on steam or a app store to see that. These games are often
Freemium and have money to pay for developers/artists to work on content. Whereas all the current services (Hosting, Advertising, Development, etc.) for TMW are funded out of the developers pockets or time.
As a developer I play and played the game. I have alts and mains of different levels. I've played TMW a number of times and had characters get purged throughout the various incarnations of TMW. TMW has been drastically changed a number of times and not just during my tenure here. There are plenty of
Screen Shots to show it. Examples: Snake pit used to be the hatmaker cave, The path to Nivalis was via a npc near a cave by the woodland wedding, Illia is fairly new, and crypts area is new as well. As much as we all like the game, we all know there is much to be improved to be able to compete.
As bad as some parts of TMW are we are not going to throw TMW in the trash and call it a day. Too many of us and people we know spent too much time playing and developing TMW. We've been a doing deep salvage operation to polish the game as it was written over a course of years and years with many different people using many different coding styles. Applying different rules, restrictions and formatting to content, code and scripts. They also all followed various different incarnations of the overall game story that was supposed to be going on as some of the content is from entirely other servers like
Auldsbel. Making TMW's content a patchwork of plot holes, contrary statements or seemingly out of place.
The secret to getting all the important stuff done is doing nothing.
