Theres also reasons to why theres less people now, for example - who really wants to pay for this monthly? I thought paying for a lifetime was expensive enough, now people have to pay monthly? that just makes people WANT to quit.

I think that concept is beyond them.
Its far too logical, hence why I don't think developers should be left alone to develop. They tend to just build, to build. They "enjoy" developing, hence why they do it for free, there's seldom any noble cause beyond that.
Its ideal when they're being told what to develop, how, and having their specific duties listed. Rather than them doing so; freely.

Ex. Tim_Rocks.

It's my personal opinion that what needs to be done is specified and prioritised. If the team members just do what they feel is important then that's not really managing a team at all. Though I'm not criticising anybody there since I'm not full aware on the under-the-hood processes of Era development.

The fact that the team is composed of volunteers does not mean it's hard nor wrong to instill a level of structure to the development process either. People volunteer for, say, the British Heart Foundation and it still manages to be an organised, well, organisation.

Agreed.

"I'll send you ___ as a gift on Farmville if you give me $___ on Era!"

Doesn't this money problem happen a lot? You guys really need a new system for money x_x

You should also start looking at the bigger picture and figure out how you're going to prevent these type of things from happening in the future. You can't just reset everyone's bank account every time someone glitches money into the server. That's just not fair. There are probably many people who are rich because they worked hard for it, and probably weren't in the loop with this glitched money, and now they are possibly going to lose all their money simply because there is no efficient method to containing glitched money.

Give him a break, he's only 12.

You're right (though we didn't actually reset bank accounts, we just temporarily removed them and restored them the next day). I've been thinking about a good way to keep the economy more balanced. The real problem is that some people have $2m while others have <$100k. It's hard to work your way into the position where you have enough money to really market items right now on Era, and if we're totally honest, we know most people probably don't really deserve their millions.

The most obvious answer is to balance every gun and create gold sinks, but even this isn't usually effective for long. It's going to be important also to not just think about the economy and also think about competition PK-wise. We plan to have an array of leaderboards for gangs/individuals, and I think those will encourage PKing.

I went off topic, though. I hope to restore the business system to the way it was before, but also involve more NPC shops in a way that won't let business owners make a killing from exclusivity or price fixing with other owners. I'll post more about this soon hopefully. Guns being sold in different shops will reduce their rarity, though I'm not really sure if rarity is a big problem. As long as we keep the amount of money to a fair amount, I don't think we will run into the problems we have run into now.

I'm not entirely sure I answered the question, but I think that covers the majority of my plans.

Well, honestly I am pretty sure that rarity is a big problem.. at this point, Era's economy revolves around rare items, and I can almost gauruntee you that. If you don't have a rare items, or above 1 million dollars, you have nothing. The only way to really get anything of value IS and always has been for the most part, involving yourself in one of these things:

A.) Working Era's jobs for roughly 500 hours straight than combining your money with other friends money to buy a business.

B.) Try and get a job at someones business, and work.. forever. (Slave labor 4 items anyone?)

C.) Find people who have lots of money/items, and attempt to make friends with them so they will let you have/borrow items.

D.) And last but not least.. the most obvious and used method of getting money, abusing bugs, glitches, so on and so forth.

This really is the reality of Era, which is quite frankly, sad and very unappealing to new comers on Era. But yeah.. 'nuff said. :asleep:

D looks pretty

I don't know if anybody has said this but this is what is on my mind.

Why not make people "rent" houses? Like I see a lot of houses that haven't been touched because the owner has been offline for like a year.
What im saying is that each month, make them pay a certain fee for the house so that it can still be on their account, if they are late for like maybe a month that will be their first strike, if they get 2 more strikes they will be evicted :P
and their items will be in a locker (just like the same way the Hotel works) and then someone else can rent it. (but they can still sell it i guess.)

Clearly the answer is a bailout.

We don't need rare items or a limited amount of items it's just stupid. We don't come here to spend hours making money we come here to have fun whenever we have nothing else to do.

This^

I did never really care about what I had, but more about meeting new people or good 'ol pals. :cool:

That was Era.

Me either. Even when i could afford better guns than i had, i never upgraded. The fun of era is when your with friends messing around