Renaming TMW Classic

[Reid]

It's me again, over this last year we tried to rebrand TMW's main server into "TMW Classic" to welcome our new port of this server within Hercules as "TMW Evolved".
Porting our current world into a new server architecture takes some time and sadly we are facing some lags that would affect your player experience and has slowed down/stopped indefinitely our progress.

The name change of this server has not be well welcomed from our community and we heard that, this poll will let you choose a new name or to move back to our original name.
This is an open topic, if you have a name proposal, be sure to post a comment and I will update the poll!

The poll will run for 10 days to gather all your opinions.

Edit: updated our voting options

[jesusalva]

The options don't make sense, the poll header contradicts the topic title, and I disagree on the wording, I feel it is trying to mislead a bit, why don't you just ask if you want TMW to keep the "Classic" rather than just roundabout thing?

You need to please anyone's ego here, if you want to drop the "Classic" from the game name and is looking to see what players think about, just ask that clearly.

Making misleading statements, mixing stuff up and trying to find a way to not step on anyone's toes is just making it look shameful in my (rather blunt) opinion.

[Reid]

I currently have some trouble to know whether our main server is called legacy or classic as I see both these names being used on different parts, but the goal here is to know if we want to keep our current name, switch to the previous one or use a different one. I will edit our options to reflect these changes.

[jesusalva]

I currently have some trouble to know whether our main server is called legacy or classic as I see both these names being used on different parts, but the goal here is to know if we want to keep our current name, switch to the previous one or use a different one. I will edit our options to reflect these changes.

(Right now the poll lacks a "status quo" option, so please do)

It is TMW Classic you play. Internally addressed as "TMW Legacy" to refer to using TmwAthena (but you'll also see "TMW-eA" in some more obscure parts, changing from "TMW-eA" to "TMW-Legacy" took too much work so for sake of time optimization, it was kept as "Legacy" rather than going back to "eA" identifier. Not to mention tmwa barely resembles newest eA at this point. Just like no player ever called the game as "TMW-eA", no player should ever call it "TMW Legacy" either, that label is strictly so developers know which tech stack is being used and can and should be used interchangeably as "TMW running under TMWA" which is quite long for most cases. In dev discussions which do not concern the engine, such as maps and quests and art, it is "TMW Classic" in use ─ you don't need to specify the engine powering the game)

By the way, in a sense I'm the biggest liar here ─ everyone who has been around long enough knows that using "Legacy" as a synonym of "tmwAthena" was a gimmick because we had no conditions to remove that from everything at any reasonable time frame and lets face it, there are still over 900 pages using "Legacy" on the wiki as of today. Keeping that equivalence was more out of need/manpower than of some greater design or whatever.

[cuoco]

I personally prefer The Mana World, no Classic no Legacy. The name/brand should stay the same no matter what engine runs in the backend.

[Ledmitz]

I never understood all the naming and don't have a strong opinion. I assumed Classic was an internal term we used too. I also assume most players will always just say TMW, since there is only one TMW. The others are forks and original works mixed in, but we are all under the same umbrella now, so I can certainly see using the term Classic behind closed doors to specify.

[Bjørn]

For the record, since everybody knows my opinion anyway, I think it is not appropriate to call TMW either "legacy" or "classic" unless it had actually been superseded by something else that is now called "The Mana World".

I understand that with projects like rEvolt and Evolved, a large part of the team wanted to replace TMW with something very similar but more future-proof, and for a while branding the existing TMW as "legacy" (even if only internally) might have made sense, but in my opinion it was too early. We can consider this name again when TMW finally does switch to a new server.

[AnonDuck]

I'm with Bjorn on this one. TMW's name has never changed. The other games are not TMW and there is no replacement.

Or.. Maybe it's like New Coke? They released New Coke and everyone hated it so they went back to making normal Coca Cola. They rebranded as Coca Cola Classic for a decade or so afterwards.

Anyway it's really difficult for new players of any of these games to navigate the quagmire of clients, servers, and worlds. They've been tied together now under Mana Launcher which I think makes things worse. I think it'd be a good idea to separate things more so the layperson can understand.

TMW as an SPI affiliate organization can and should continue to support these sub-projects but we need some differentiation in branding or we'll never attract any new players/developers.

[WildX]

The issue I see with "The Mana World" is that other game projects that now exist under the same organisation are part OF The Mana World but not The Mana World the game running on tmwAthena+Mana/Manaplus. So the title "Classic" was really just meant to create this distinction.

there is no replacement

There has been no replacement, but there have been additions. TMW is more like a game publisher than one game now.