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Draft system itself has been ready for a while, but there's a lot of ideas that came up at the same time and the original plan was to release it all as a "package." If you want to see drafts alone, we can do a trial period, but I think if we were to just suddenly switch to drafts all we would do is create another 2-3 weeks of "Oh cool this is new" before everyone realizes that raiding and events haven't fundamentally changed at all so they still think it's boring. That's why we switched back to 4-gang system in the meantime; it was always supposed to be temporary and was announced as such from the beginning. It's at least better than the 15-20 gang system and probably better than the 8-12 gang system, so it keeps things alive while we work on the rest of everything.
We would love to have gang events during the week, but that requires a lot of consistently active staff, and that isn't always realistic. People with a lot of rights need to be trusted, knowledgeable, and mature; most of these are traits of people who have real life jobs and at least some amount of real social life. You end up making the choice of having a bunch of super active idiots or a solid team of people who can only log on for a few hours each day (and take occasional vacations in the Summer). Most of Era's players seem to push for the first without realizing how dangerous that would be.
To Godzilla's points; the reason we have so many admins is because I wanted to empower the people who know certain aspects of the game to make the meaningful decisions and changes without having to constantly run back to what the forums describes as "the same four people forever" (ice, zao, blue, alf). It's worked well so far in almost every occasion; few would disagree that Ish has been very effective with gun balancing, Kat has at least tried to get some business changes rolling (it's rough at the moment because the developers are so busy), Ulti has completely revamped the PR team, and Black was working wonders on ETA right up until the time that his computer died. I will admit that the PSA position didn't turn out quite as I had hoped, and I think Amber started to feel like she was a little unnecessary, so that was a mistake on my part. I need to find a way to give that position more of a voice with both the players and the staff. SM has been active, then inactive, then active again so many times; I am hoping to be able to talk to him and get him around more again, because he really does know a lot about Gangs when it comes down to it.
I agree that we need more mid-range weapons, but it all ties in to the economy issues. What we really need to push through our own heads as staff is that selling 10 guns worth 300,000 is going to take more money out of the economy than selling 2 for 900,000. We don't like to do the math sometimes when we're releasing stuff; assuming Graal isn't totally dead, we can hope to see more mid-range weapons in the future though. |