[Polo]

I'm not really sure who voted that they approve; I think the vast majority of us agree that Classic is far from perfect right now. Let me comment on some of the things you have said in turn.

• The overworld
  With the current player count, the large map simply means you spend most of the time wandering around without any interaction with other players, ultimately making things feel lonely and boring. A smaller map would be preferable. I also feel that the map itself is too 'open'. By this I mean that it feels like a large open space which can be walked through in anyway the player chooses, rather than having a serious of set routes and paths. The overworld should be fun to explore, not just an open sea of trees. For example, rather than simply telling a player that town X is to the east, the player should instead have to be told that to reach town X the must travel slightly north and then take the path through the mountains. Those pathways should be almost like mini quests in themselves; once the player progresses faster ways to traverse the map become available such as boats, the warp ring etc.

• Using the old levels
  When I first became Manage, the plan was to finish up Tyhm's conversion of the existing levels as soon as possible and release them alongside the NPC server. Unfortunately, I only had a short period of time to do this and it soon became very clear that the level of work still required was far greater that the amount of resources I had to achieve it. For what it's worth, at the point I took over, it was not even possible to complete the starting training quest on the development server. For about a month I worked tirelessly with Selflon to make things work, but ultimately we were just fixing things with short term hacks/solutions and still not progressing fast enough. It was after discussing the situation with Stefan that he suggested starting from scratch with a core set of levels, getting them to work perfectly and building up from there. With the time available, the only other solution would have been to take Classic down until everything was converted (and few servers that go hidden ever return). Note that I agreed to allow a group of players convert the old overworld but they 'lost' the levels halfway through the task and never completed things. Also note that as mentioned previously we were losing players with the content immediately before the switch, and so whilst it may be better, it's still not going to help us.

• Quests
  Quests are not a good use of development time. Making an interesting and enjoyable quests is quite difficult, requires coordination of multiple development staff and ultimately leads to maybe an hour or two of content at the end, with no replay value. By contrast, something like an event prize can be made with much less effort but probably keeps a player entertained for longer. Of course, this does not mean that we should have no quests at all; they serve as a good way of forcing the player to explore and can be useful for capturing new players. When a server so desperately requires new content, it's hard not to argue that the time can be better spent elsewhere. As for making quests optional, I cannot agree. A player should always have to do a quest to get the reward from it; I guess core things such as swords and hearts can be put in shorter/easier quests, leaving the larger quests for non-essential items (which the player can then choose to avoid). The suggestion that quests should be easy to find, with each quest leading from one to the next is a good one, and is something we are already working towards achieving.

• Hit detection/systems
  When the decision was made to build up from just a core set of levels, one of the first problems encountered was that bombs and arrows did not work of GMaps, and the default built-in enemies seemed extremely buggy under the NPC server. I originally only wanted to use scripted bombs/arrows, but from discussion with Stefan it soon became clear that to get things working smoothly I'd have to make the entire thing serverside. I'm not sure how bombs/arrows behave under NPC server now, but there's certainly now the possibility to make dual clientside/serverside hit detection which would massively improve things. Unfortunately, we now have a ton of scripts that rely on the current systems, making it hard to add the functionality. This is one of the reasons I want to build new systems up from scratch.

• Player submissions
  Because of the systems now being used, a number of minor things in scripts have to be done slightly differently, and this ultimately makes the checking process longer for player submissions. Because of the need to focus on getting quests or other content up, it was initially decided to restrict submissions to guild houses or other large structures (such as spar arenas). I'd be happy to reopen full submissions if I could ensure that it wouldn't overwhelm the development team. Certainly, if anyone wants to convert some major old landmarks or even modernize some of the old quests they are more than welcome to.

• Heras, health restriction etc.
  Hera's and the restricting of health at low AP were two things which I was never really sure of personally. Hera's worked at first, but suddenly you were required to do 7 or 8 quests just to get a heart, and that could be quite frustrating. Health restriction made sparring and PKing awkward, as I much prefer a longer fight that a series of deaths in quick succession. When I launched the NPC server, these were two of the major thing I asked players about, and the general decision seemed to be to remove them. Ultimately the players have since changed their minds, as they have now voted them both back in. As with all these minor things we just need to decide one way or another whether to have them and then stick with the decision. It's not good to continuously make fundamental changes to a server.

• Nations
  Nations in itself was quite a good idea, but as a player it always concerned me that Classic was moving away from it's 'core values'. I certainly remember that many players complained when races were introduced. Whilst I think it'd be interesting to see the ideas implemented as a new server, I still cant help but feel that if implemented on Classic, much of what originally appealed about Classic would be lost. I guess everyone has their own ideas on this though, and it's certainly possible to try and design some best middle ground that has the variety and flavour of nations, but still retains the same old Classic charm.

I know this has been a long post, but I hope that some of you will actually bother to read it and perhaps understand why certain decisions were made and why certain things have been done. As I said at the start of the post, we're a long way away from the position we want to be in, and a lot of work still needs to be done to rectify that. I'm always happy to take suggestions on what to do with Classic, but you have to remember that I have to balance both what the oldbies and nostalgic few amongst us want, alongside things which are going to appeal to and bring in new players.

Thanks for reading.