Era is Overdue for a Reset (And Why)
 

I'm really surprised that Era has not been reset in years, especially with the revolving door that is the manager position. The server is way overdue for a reset, there is simply too much money and too many items in the economy right now. Inflation is rampant, USDing is way too common, and items as a whole have become progressively worth less over time.

Here is a list of suggestions that I've come up with in regards to what should be done after the reset, to ensure that the economy is kept at a stable level and that player items are appreciated more by the player base. I've divided the suggestions into three catagories. Money making, weapons, and game mechanics.

Money Making
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1) Lower the amount of machines in the casino. As of right now the casino is the best way to make money, which would be fine if it weren't so much better than all of the other methods of making money. Lowering the amount of machines (or alternatively, lowering the odds of winning,) will reduce the player's ability to make quick money.

2) Rocks spawned w/ TNT in the mines should be mineable by everyone. Right now any rock spawned w/ TNT belongs to the player who used the TNT, despite what the signs say. By doing this you'll be lowering the amount of cash a person makes per TNT, and you'll also allow more people to use the blast caves at the same time. This will be especially important in the early days of the reset, when everyone is working. While on the topic of mining...

3) Increase costs of mining supplies, lower returns on minerals. To keep inflation low we need to increase the cost of TNT, batteries, and drills. We also need to lower the money people make from mining, and indeed other jobs aswell. All the jobs should be equalized in monetary returns, so that the player can pick the one they like the most, without missing out on extra cash.

4) Employees of player owned businesses need to be paid on a % of profits made. To keep the amount of money a business owner earns low, the employees need to be paid based on a percentage of money made. The percentage would go up as an employee ranks up. Also taken out of the owner's money made would be increased taxes.

5) Make business owners pay rent. To further decrease an owner's profits they will need to pay rent for each item they sell, and for each hour they leave their store open. Also they will be charged a base fee for owning the business.

Weapons
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1) Remove all weapons and items from the game, except for the following; Ak47, Uzi, Shotgun, and Handgun. All other items will be added back to the game gradually as businesses are released and gangs get on their feet. The Ak47 will by no means be the best gun, all guns should be viable options of Pking and should have their own niche in PKing. Handgun the best damage, uzi has the least freeze, shotgun has the most spread, and Ak47 is a well rounded weapon.

2) Gang guns should have special niches, but should not be the main gun. Gang guns should be worth using, but they should not be the only gun a person uses. With that said each gang gun should hold a special niche. The katana is a perfect example of a good gang weapons. The old one anyway. The katana would be a melee weapon that does the most damage of any melee weapon, and can block bullets. The downside is that it's a melee weapon and you can't equip your gun while using it.

Each gang should have a weapon similiar to the katana. One gang could have a slow gun that does a lot of damage, which would be good for close quarters. While another gang could have a weapon that shoots really fast, and is good at breaking doors down or spamming a lot of bullets at other gangs, however, it would do low damage and/or have a lot of freeze.

3) EC items should not be tradeable. I think EC items are cool, but the ability to sell them hurts the economy and raiding. Items like super elixers and cookies should be reserved for special cases, not average every day raiding. Doing this also allows you to put a really good gun (like the Mp5,) up for purchase via ECs, because the player would need to be really good to win that many events and get that gun.

4) Better guns should be rare, and hard to earn. The amount of overpowered weapons should be controlled, and indeed better weapons than the four starting ones should be only slight upgrades. In order to earn these weapons players should have to win competitions, or gang events. And when they earn these weapons they should have to defend their right to use them, I.E future competitions will determine who gets the gun and if a past winner loses they'll get it taken away from them.

Game Mechanics
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1) Increase weapon freeze across the board. Weapon freeze must be increased. Doing this will increase the skill cap and make better players shine.

2) Make players take hits like they do on classic servers. Back in the day when you got hit by a bullet you'd be immune to taking damage for a short time. This was later removed, and it needs to be put back into the game. The reason for this would be to slow down combat and again, increase the skill cap. How does this increase the skill cap? You can't get lucky and drop 3 or 4 hits on someone in rapid succession, and laming becomes a lot less effective when there is a delay in damage taken.

Last Suggestion
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1) Appoint on Economic Czar to watch over the economy and adjust inflation rates. In order to keep the economy in check, it needs to be monitered by someone who's full time Era staff job is to do so and make adjustments to ensure it remains stable. This person would adjust the prices of all items sold by the NPC Server, taxes, and money made from selling raw materials. They'd manipulate these rates to pull more money out of the economy, or put more in. Based on what needs to be done.

Resets can't just be done by the administration team or manager, it has to be approved by the Playerworld Administration. While I was the manager, the PWA continued to deny my request no matter how many reasons I gave. I really hope this changes, I fully agree; Era is in desperate need of a reset.

If we are not given a reset then Globals need to be replaced where they sit lolol As soon as Dev is uploaded there should be an automatic reset, completely new Era and economy... This has been worked on for so long now, hopefully completed soon and I look forward to it...

I think a reset would definitely increase the player count, giving everyone an equal opportunity to progress.

For the moneymaking section, the only one of those sections that has any validity is #5


Cute list, though

I believe all businesses should be npc ran... Less bull**** for staff and the economy... Business owners no longer! Everyone has free will and the right to work anytime and anywhere they want and no one gets rich off of them!

A reset would wipe everything from the server. Including thousands of hours of peoples hard work. Resetting is almost never the answer because you are just deleting things you didn't work for. Just fix the problem and stop trying to cop out by saying you need a reset. That's the easy way out with benefits only the people who have nothing or lost everything.

Example:

A teacher throws away all your grades (all students) because she feels the grades were way to low. Even the A+ students grades were thrown out. All that work out the window and now they are on the same level as the failures. What will make them want to redo everything? Those are the people that will make the class grades look good, but instead you threw them under the bus and now everyone's grades look bad because they are uninspired to work. Much like era.

Sacrifices must be made. I've never seen you play Era, which means you are unaware that most of this "hard work" you speak of was done through duping, usd'ing, and Alfonso's raffles. Which randomly gave players guns worth 1-2 million, in result further raping the economy. Oh and those student who did well will obviously do well again, aka **** you.

and I have never heard of you. does that mean you don't play Graal? People exist outside of what you see. Here is the deal, rare guns were given out? You can always make new guns which will replace the old rare ones. Many games face dupers, they are usually banned and the duplicates are removed, sorry if Eras staff can't handle that. Usding exists in all games don't kid yourself. Obviously you haven't seen the hard work because you haven't actually put work in. As for the students they get pissed off and think that if the grades get bad again they will just be reset so its okay to be a failure because you will be bailed out.

Such an economy also totally ruins the experience for new players. I definitely agree, Era is in desperate need of a reset.

Make new guns to replace the old rare ones? They tried this, many many times. Each new gun had to be better than the old one, until we were eventually left with what we have now. Extremly overpowered guns, with only several of them actually making you competitive in PKing.

Patchwork will not work here, we need a complete overhaul of the economy. It needs to be reset, and measures need to be taken to prevent the need of a future reset.

Maybe Era should just get rid of it's economy if it's causing all these problems as you describe.

Earn your new guns by PKing and pwning noobs and gang banging like bloodykiller says you should.

mo killing less chillin.

You're clueless, the guns that were given out were some of the lamest guns, the only way to replace them is to do what... release even lamer guns? How about we give all the players an endless supply of Nukes. I can't speak for the Era staff, yes i think they have been a bit soft on dupers and usd'ers. And don't tell me about not putting in hard work, I'm one of the wealthiest players because I picked over 90,000 flowers and dug up 50,000 shells. Yet the player next to me who has only played for 75 hours managed to become as wealthy as me simply by being the "lucky" raffle guy who received a 2 million profit from selling a gun he got for free. There is no balance, nor is there any sort of justice. Era needs to be wiped clean of all this materialism, it's no wonder Era is home for all the scum of Graal.

I did not read anything in this thread beyond the title, but there are many things that need to be done before Era can ever have a successful reset.

Someone may have mentioned this already, but simply pressing the reset button won't solve anything long-term.

betspar me irl?

although i kinda agree with the raffle thing the guns were added, but no cash was. i think the wealth is spread way more evenely now than it was. the point of the gun shops being added as well was to decrease the value of all the overpriced weapons by giving weapons just as good or better for cheap. but era kids are so greedy that the plan didnt work, meaning acr is still 800 or so K yet scar+s6 and **** are way more? um what? and everyone had to go through the same steps to get to where they are whether it be hard work, bet spars, selling potions (newer way but gives options to people who dont have the time for the other two). if anything i say increase the money flow because why does it matter how many items there are? everyone has alot of items and everyone is happy. simple is it not? who cares if value goes down on items when the value of money is also down.... sounds like a win win if u ask me

im the richest player on the server by far and i never usded or duped

a reset would kill era, and im glad that globals realise that
the best thing that can be done to era (excluding improving the gang system) is making earning money pk-based simply because most people play era to pk so it'd be much easier and enjoybale to earn money
fmj you're obviously a noob since higher freeze means that fighting requires a potentially slower button-tapping rate and highly limits your potential, which is obviously ur case

tl;dr

Completely agree with you Sales...

To the rest of you... Instead of seeing all the dev staff on Era abusing the **** out of players. Dev is supposed to be the answer, right? Finish Dev, give us Dev, give us a reset we actually have a chance at making something of...

tk's idea actually does make decent sense for the record even tho u will all shelf it because everyone hates him lol. if killing was a more viable way of earning what u want u could get weapons with points u earn and or cash. basically a second cash system that is earned by raiding/pking and possibly events. both could be combined in the purchase of a weapon or item. that way noobs could spend less time working and more time learning and get upgrades along the way. and i think gun stats are perfect the way they are after wil changed them. nothing is blatantly unbeatable, someone good can still beat someone using say an acr or mp5 with an uzi. any slower than what it is now becomes even more boring. and like i said WHO ****ING CARES how many items people have if everyone has them. make everything more easily atainable. sounds like the people who want a reset want a chance to be the one with all the overpowered **** instead. dont start from scratch, just level the playing field

I totally agree with Sales, the way Era is now we cannot just reset, because Era is all about becomingnrich, there is no cash flow, cash simply appears from somewhere. But you also have to consider that we would never get back to the point where we are right now, because we got here due to corrupted and dumb staff plus duping bugs.

also era dev will most probably not be the answer just a spoieler. .. but then again im a pessimist ;-)

And Stefan said no, to a reset. So, I am gone. Screw Era, screw Graal. A reset was the last hope to see if it would succeed or be dead as it is, and will forever be now. BYEBYEBYEBYEBYEBYEBYE amigo AMIGO!

Era can't reset just like that, without new content, it will just go back to the way it was after time. We need quests, missions, businesses, islands, stuff to do etc. And that is the stuff that is being worked on Dev.

I understand the reasons given as to why Era would benefit a reset, but wouldn't players be a little annoyed to find that when they log on, all of their items, money, guns or whatever else have been cleared? Perhaps carrying out a test to see what kind of impact a reset would have on Era, ask the players if they like what's been said and then if approved by a PWA go ahead with the reset if the majority of Era's player count agree.

Bai now

A "test" reset was one of my first suggestions to the PWA's, this was also denied by the majority of them.

Seriously? Do they give any reason?

The reason I was given was: "It doesn't make you look very confident with your new content". I do understand that, for the most part, but I wasn't really trying to see if players would like the new content or not, I was mainly just trying to obtain permission from PWAs after they see how the majority of the players would prefer the new content (well at least that was the plan). After I was told this, I reassured them I was confident with my new content and just wanted to go through with the reset. I was still denied permission.

Some of the Playerworld Administrators I spoke with were fine with me doing a "test" or full reset, but some weren't.

Looks like you're in a bit of a sticky situation then D:

Some big talk from PWA who have never ran a successful playerworld before.

I'm not really up to date with Era but considering all the USDing from the Vimes era (see dat pun folks>??) and complaints people have had, a reset doesn't sound too bad. The server does need a lot of work though, because to be honest there's nothing too special about the server. I have yet to see real businesses re-released and I recall a lot of development plans that have been long forgotten (car tuning, proper apartments?).

Again, not really up to date, but I trust that people like Sales know better than anyone else. folo his wurd!!

I'ts just another HoudiniMan story, who destroyed Era just a while back, now it's just other PWAs preventing progress to happen

You guys have a great poll system. Take advantage of it a find out what the players want. If the players think it's a good idea surely that should show the PWA's a decent reason for a reset. After all they're here for the players. :D

Do you realize how hard it is to make money right now?

This.
Also, this.

I don't get how HoudiniMan destroyed Era, the reason he came was because the staff then were corrupt and abusing their power

So I guess you are the only one that has ever put in hard work then. So therefore you can speak on everyone's behalf that you want all that hard work reset. :rolleyes:

Just win a raffle yourself then guess what, you are equal. Do we reset the world everytime someone wins power-ball in america? I don't think so.

houdini is the reason era died. you wouldn't get it because you were one of the kids he brought in to replace the old staff team, duh

I'm pretty sure when I was Manager I got Era to it's highest playercount of
Most players 171 (can be found through http://statistics.graal.us/server/show/36)

Not sure what you're talking about since Era was still highly successful when I was Manager. You have to take in Graal's playercount as a whole since PC Graal is always curving downward.

i'm not saying you were a bad manager, firstly. and that's definitely not the highest playercount era has seen haha, how far back do those statistics go?

I remember when the Battle of the Bands first came out with all the instruments... over 220 players at once. in one level.

lmao era was better off without bs like instruments

era mst b srs pk only no other aspect jst pvp pvp pvp pvp and moar pvp i want 2 pvp in my pvp dammit