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I didn't see it touched much, if at all in this thread, though I may have missed it, is the state of how playerworlds are simply able to be rented now to anyone with the money available. This along with the lack of communication and teamwork in the development community, I think brings actual playable game content production down exceptionally. Even on live classic servers, it is very hard for developers(especially scripters) to work as a cohesive unit of more than a few(around 5 or so) people that work on an active basis, or at least seems to be the trend. This simply comes from people in the development teams naturally having disagreements in direction of a specific server, and people generally aren't inclined to work towards something that isn't in their direction, so more often then not, team members part ways, a lot of times to UC servers where their direction can be more focused on.
While I do understand the revenue the rented playerworlds bring, I feel they waste a lot of our development potential by allowing anyone with the freedom of having the cash to spend, to take their skills and run their own projects. This appears to produce a lot of development teams of one or two developers attempting to produce a server idea in a specific direction. However, 1-2 people are nowhere near enough to build a server alone, so barely any of the rented playerworlds end up reaching completion.(which I consider being on classic tab, or even hosted.)
I do support new ideas and server types, but it seems as if a bit of the projects seem to be of the similar enough theme of an already existing classic server that it becomes harmful to the game as a whole. Not only does the massive spread of development talent get spread away from working on live servers, should one of those similar themed servers, or even a different themed server make it to classic tabbed status, I find that it just spread the current community around aswell.
Theoretical Example: Say xxx modern themed server(similar to Era's theme), makes it to the classic tab. Should the server be of good enough quality, it will 'steal' a porition of Era's community away from Era, but not reach the playercount that Era did previously before that server was released, since its majorly a spilt of Era's community now playing two servers. This ends up damaging Era a lot, and the end result is two smaller communities that as a sum, are probably not as fun to play as Era was originally with its larger playercount.
Spreading the moderate sized communities that are present on live servers, only damages the overall game as a whole, as I feel for most types of servers, the more players you have on at a given time, the more enjoyable the experience on that server with disregard to content. Those that played on servers in the early 2000s that had playercounts above 100, probably hold that to be the most enjoyable period of them playing graal.
I guess what I'm saying in general is that while the server renting system as of current may provide some revenue for Graal on the short term basis, on the long term, I feel this is only harmful to Graal. It both spreads the development talent around, often to servers that never see the light of anything past UC, and spreads the community around as well. Right now I feel that the more condensed we can get both devs and community on live servers, the better the playing experience the players will have on a global level, the faster more live content can be released, and the more this game can grow, as a whole, and that means more subscription revenue. |