Char Wipe DISCUSSION

[Gurluas]

The wipe will not be because we lack content, The wipe will be to make the game better.

 

[Red Cell]

Yeah just start making a new game. You don't even need to keep adding content to this game. Then people will pretty much all migrate to the new version.

Hell just call it MS:C v2.0, with all the changes added to it, it sounds fair.

 

[evilsquirrel]

Neither I, nor MiB, comprehend why people insist that people will end up "right back where they were"... For one, we know that everyone will have "alts" with these changes, simply because sometimes it is more advantageous to play as one class above another... These alts will need just as much training as your main, and just as many quests to find items.

Also, we're thinking of expanding thothie's "Monsters that only spawn with X Hp on the server" system, so that it can pick up on other things too... This will be used in quests, which will likely be the main focus of the scripting department.

The mapping department will be revamping old, outdated, unused and generally "bad" maps *cough*ms_quest*cough*...during this revamping, we will likely at some point get bored and add some more secret areas to find "for the lulz" - and MiB will say "Oh, you made some quest areas?" and we'll be all: "Yes...That's exactly what I meant to put there..."

There will be plenty of change, enough to keep you occupied even at the higher levels without "grinding maps".

 

[Thothie]

I see not only you coming back to where we are now, very quickly, but I see the next crisis being much worse than this one, under your current plan.

Just at a glance of MiB’s 44 spell plan, for instance, it has all the flaws of the current system. You’ve got 11 level’able fire spells, and half as many level’able ice spells, that do half as much damage. Spells cats vary wildly in damage they do, and thus spell sections do not level evenly, then you force specialization on folks (counter to the game’s fundamental game play), and instead of everyone being screwed equally, only those who try to specialize in certain types of magic get screwed. …and that’s just one example.

All this when it would be much simpler to even out the current spells and arrange specific spell policies that’d allow an infinite number of spells down the line.

This focus of development isn’t on fixing the inequities of the current system, but creating entirely new ones. It is not about growth, but giving up.

The proposed system is many times as complex as the current one and will open all sorts of new unpredictable abuse much more rapidly than the original. Keeping the current system, where you know exactly where the problems are already, and addressing them, would at least allow you to continue the game’s development proper, without destroying it. That's something that really should be reserved for a new game.

 

[Glorfindel]

For a long time now, we've been held back from major changes to the game because any changes to the character involves changing the saving/loading, and thus a character wipe. If we do a character wipe now, I can add an integer to the character file that will tell us the Save-Version. With this Save-Version, we can know whether or not to try to pull certain information from the character. For instance, say we add a new weapon class. We simply change the current save-version, then, when an "old" character loads, the game knows not to try to read the weapon class and just use a default value. This means that we can update the character without need for another character wipe!

It should be said again, just for those people who didn't read (Hm, about all of this page?).

Perhaps I can see where you're coming from Thothie, but any amount of major changes is always going to open an assload of doors to future abuses and bugs -- it just comes with the god damn development! If the plan will always be to minimize the damage as much as possible then very little development will ever happen!

Listen guys, if there's ever anything majorly awesome that you've wanted out of this mod in the future, it will never happen if the developers are not allowed to take on the problems holding them back. Apparently MiB says the character save wipe function is one of them. If he does this once, a character wipe will never ever be done again. Or that's how it seems to me.

I however, am thinking that the proposed system IS too much to take on. Deciding to kill the fanbase with a character wipe and then taking on a huge workload, it's just not...feasible. I don't know how many mods I've been on that had the most reasonable ambitions and then just burn out over a winter season. Brian4 may be spewing shit out of his mouth when he says that characters can be saved while still maintaining development, but its obvious he wants to save his character and so does everyone else that put months of time into theirs. I don't care what happens to my character, but I'm sure other people do and I don't think that a character wipe should be done so quickly for such an ambitious redecorating of the mod.

Perhaps MiB, you've got to show these people, including thothie, what they'll be getting with a character wipe. Set up a character with a save version on a different server than FN, then create all of the awesome stuff you have planned on this one character and show what's possible after a character wipe. Then the public will go "Ahh, well I'm willing to ditch this current character for all that awesome stuff!" Whether this is feasible or not, I don't know, but it seems like something that would get the community onboard, shedding away their possessive little husks.

Unless there is nothing that would convince them to relinquish their characters, at which point I'm sure people are fine with what they have now?

 

[evilsquirrel]

Deciding to kill the fanbase with a character wipe and then taking on a huge workload, it's just not...feasible.

No, it's not. That's why we're taking on the workload first, and then when its done - the characters will have to be wiped for the changes to take effect. Or we can have it come up as a "different game" in your steam list (which is actually sounding more and more like what's going to happen here).

 

[Gurluas]

MSC 1.2

Thats the best solution tbh.

 

[The Man In Black]

MS:R is currently looking like the best option >_>