Excelsior

Ok. I've got a laundry list of things that are either broken, acting weird, or disabled since the revert. In all honesty, Im frustrated with things here in general, and I'm afraid to list them because I really do NOT want to hurt anyone's feelings here.

Suffice it to say, numerous little bugs, no staff on willing to talk to me about them, or to fix them. Silly things like no skill balls for characters you create which makes it exceedingly annoying to BOD run(and honestly, getting the BODs you need, even in a guild as large as the PWNIES is hard). Dungeons that are half there, no access to the Elven city that we can find, tweaking of gold from 3000+ to less than a dragon without even a post stating why, and a multitude of other things are leaving me very frustrated.

The shard was growing nicely. People were helping eachother out, and it seemed as if we were finally starting to form a nice community here. But now a lot of what I see is people griping about broken things, or ignoring anyone and everyone that talks. It seems the frustration levels are running high, and somthing needs to be done soon to fix it, or people are going to start leaving. I'll be honest, I've been considering it since I've lost a LOT of things due to the revert that I have no interest in doing over again. It may seem petty for me to gripe about losing a fist full of skill points, but its not just the points, its the time lost.

I REALLY want to go off. I REALLY want to blast people. But I know that is not the way to get a positive diologue going. So here I am, ready and willing to talk if anyone wants to listen.

1. The large bods are so hard to get, coz we have too many materials, wich multiplies number of combinations for large bods. If we remove some of the materials people wont be happy. We can remove some of the large/small bod items lik all weapons in BS...

2. Its very very annoying to script million items/special moves/monsters that come with one dungeon. We are planning to open Prism of light & Blighteed groove soon ( they just need spawning, so im looking fora person who saw those dungeons on OSI to help me spawn them). And please post some feedback on travesty/dread horn.

3. Elven city, at least as i saw it on osi, has nothing but numerous quests (wich are lame btw, obtain this that, bring me...). I did create elven vendors that have elven tools tho, but i have some problems with them. So i'll just put all those ml tcraftable things in regular tools. BUT not a single ml equipable item cant be worn, because we need to release a patch that will fix things.

4. There was a very good gold mine in twisted weald. You could easily kill tons of creatures and get around 3k for each. So the amount of gold they drop is now according to OSI.

5. Revert was because our server has problems with 64 bit windows. Its now on normal windows again and things seem to be okay.

I hope that explains some of frustration.

Yes, the shard was going thru some rough times, i'm not yet sure if those times are over but i sure hope so. I didnt get much sleep because things were crashing all the time, i wish i could apologize for the crashes and reverts, but there isnt much i can do, infact if i wasn't here the shard would be offline most of the time actually.

About skillballs - since the begining, those were ment as a boost for the shard. not something that's permanent, but something that gradually goes out of fashion. At first i believe every character got 2x60, then only the first one got 2x50 and the secondary ones got a +10. now we've seen and realized this shard is old enough to take it's little wheels off. but there's complaints so we might reconsider this.

I think morph already got the other things explained.

Well, things happen, sometimes it's happy things (29 online, wow), or bad things (shard crash, dang), but thank you for the complaint, if it's in a written form we can actually do something about it.

I find myself curious, is there a priority in mimicing OSI? I mean if you want balanced risk/reward I'm more then willing to help with testing. Yes, having certain things easier is nice for players, but I understand you have a desire to pace things so that people aren't getting burnt out and leaving in a couple months.

I tend to think of myself as one of the more powerful characters on the server that is capable of doing lots of things all by my lonesome but I'd rather do something harder with a bigger reward with 3-4 other people. I don't think that means something that hits for insane amounts of damage or has insane resists or has obscene amounts of hit points. If it comes down to having something that you need a pet to tank with 2 healers and others doing damage then so be it but I think we can be a little more innovative then that.

As far as the skill balls go, I don't think it's unreasonable to let people GM a skill or 2 right off the bat, infact I think that's a rather good incentive. Yes, skills go faster here, but is it really a big deal that someone is able to be good in a couple of things right off the bat?

I definately think there is a real balance to be obtained between a snails pace like OSI and people blasting through everything and becoming gods of the server and getting bored. I am of the personal opinion that we had a decent balance going before the recent changes I just think we might be starting to swing the other way. But like I said, I'm more then willing to help with testing.

<1. The large bods are so hard to get, coz we have too many materials, wich multiplies number of combinations for large bods. If we remove some of the materials people wont be happy. We can remove some of the large/small bod items lik all weapons in BS... >>

It's not that the large bods are hard to get, I get plenty of them Blacksmith and Taming. My problem is FILLING them. Especially in Blacksmithing, it is damn near impossible. I've been here 2 months, and I've been getting my BODs every time they are available, and I've yet to get even close to filling one. I'd love a set of mining clothing, or Smithing clothes, but even taking every BOD from the Guild collection can only fill certain small BODs. Even when I had my BOD runners, it was hard. I dont know, its just frustrating. If we were talking OSI, I'd be able to buy the BODs from other people, but that just does not seem to be happening here.

Thats what i was talking about. If we delete all small weapon smithy bods, you wont get them anymore, wich means you will get more small bods for large bods.

The thing we try to make some things OSI is that they have everything balanced and players dont do everything solo. Plus we dont have much imagination

a few answers to the questions raised in the public... there isnt an exact list of all the issues, but i hope these might cover most of them.

a. BOD running times for all except taming will be lowered.

b. ML monsters will be updated with loot. Please understand that we're not to blame, we just copied over the "official runuo ML package" into our server - but who knows who made that package, might be someone who forgot to put most stuff in. Also with the elven city and all... it's a big project, that's why I leave it to morpheus to handle that part of the shard. There's numerous of these recepies and monsters and quest items... really a big system.

- the above updates will be made soon, but no ETA -

c. breeding modification. I know it's a shock, but that also depends on how you are breeding... it's a nerf, those are usually not welcome, but over time, without this, we'd get maxed pets that any newbie could buy. i was a breeder once, was breeding ozzies up, and i never ment to sell any of them, but then there were breeders who sold them, for 1-2 mil each... and those who bought them, bred again and sold for 750k, and so forth, it got to 200k or even less. now, having a pack of ostards that kill a champion, or a balron, in 30 seconds, is almost as easy to get as some runic armor. Do you know, that by defaults in this system, it would take you a day to even level the pet to 40?

d. server crashes are, as it seems, history. i've done numerous tests on the new server and it all seems well, to confirm it, the server needs to run with a certain uptime so we can be sure. But as it seems now, 98% that these crashes have stopped. (that includes vanishing items)

and in general... mimicing OSI is the easyest thing to do. We have alot of custom things here, but it really takes alot of time to think any new things in the game thru. There are many shards that are completely custom (not just a few add-on systems, i mean completely remodeled), but, they are not balanced, or poorly balanced, and all the sudden society crashes for some reason. That's why it took 1 month to put the leveling items in, and help from the players who tested it. if i'd just copy paste it in, it would be possible to make a super-uber wepon in a day or two by just casting wither in MOA.

I completely understand the need for balance, I even agree with it. A lot of inbalance means I end up completing things a lot easier and run out of things to do and get bored. Frankly, I'm not interested in that, I played Everquest for 4 years, I have no problem with working for things. But when the reward isn't worth the risk, or even the time, then I'm not going to bother.

I have literally logged in the last 3-4 days and asked myself what I wanted to do for the few hours I have to play, and frankly all I've done is macro skills. I constantly crash in Twisted Weald, dreadhorn isn't functional because you cannot collect the items, and breeding is effectively not worth my time anymore.

I have some good pets for myself to use, and it's not worth breeding anymore. Even at a 5% chance of no breeding on a pet, it's not worth my time. Breeding just up to this point alone, I've already spent 3-6 million gold by my best guess. And that's just in the last month for the most part. I only have my main pets and a handful of back ups incase of stat loss. The way things are now it's not worth the gold for me, and I feel really bad for the people that didn't get a chance to breed before now. Honestly, I could deal with the breeding change so long as there was no chance of having a 0 breed pet. But since there is even that remote chance down breeding becomes exponetially harder.

To your point about the bod running, thank you, I think that is a very helpful change.

The reason I've made the comments I have about OSI and the desire to be like OSI, is because we aren't OSI. We have unlimited skill points and are far more powerful then any 2 OSI characters you could find(maybe more). So if the server tries to fit to what OSI is, things are just going to be a walk in the park.

Also, about the pets and specfically ostards, since I have a pack, they're not good for everything. Anything with high physical resists elminates 90% of the damage they deal, because all they deal is phyiscal. Even with a maxed hiryu, on anything with physical resists, I deal most of the damage. The pet is there to keep the thing from trying to beat my ass, and do a little damage. Hell, depending on the mob, I still out damage my pack of ostards on high physical mobs.

at the server crash we had today, i took the chance and removed that 5% of 0 breedings possible for pets. also, all pets (shrunken and real, and wild) which had 0 breedings left, were given 1 breeding left.
perhaps some other time this can be put in to match reality of some animals beeing barren. but for now all pets have 1, or exceptionally 2-3 breeding times.
if a breeding attempt fails, that does not decrease the number of how many times each pet can breed.

other things will be handled later on.

Thank you very much, I think that will accomplish your goal of slowing breeding, but yet still allowing breeders to make good pets.