[Lance]

Originally Posted by maximus_asinus

I have mixed feelings and I feel wrong about dumping my thoughts into this thread, I just have to just so I can clear things up in my head.

Don't worry about it; I'm sure a lot of people have similar questions!

I am going to be honest and put this bluntly; how is polishing a few systems and "cleaning up" the overworld going to do anything? The server has failed a number of times and I don't see how a spit shine is going to keep it from following the same path. The server needs a complete overhaul, from the engine to the paint job. Parts of the server are almost 10 years old and is not current with today's standards.

There is a lot of overhauling going on behind the scenes (it's not just polishing systems and cleaning up stuff), but talking about it gets boring. Lots of things are being made more robust, and we are approaching every job, event, quest, locale, etc. and figuring out what's good, what's bad, and what (if anything) we need to change. We're also adding quite a bit of new content, so you can look forward to that too.

What are you going to be doing differently as a Manager this time around? Why was the server prematurely released, and what has changed that it won't happen again?

The server was prematurely released because S&S decided it should be out at a certain unreasonable deadline. Said deadline gave our small team nowhere near enough time to even fix everything we currently had (we had recently switched to a gmap and the new scripting engine, and a lot of stuff had to be fixed up to work at all), let alone worry much about new stuff. Consequently, our last release featured only a tiny amount of what we had planned. We didn't even have proper kingdoms, we were missing several jobs, there was no job balancing, and many events or areas just plain didn't work. We didn't even have time for enough testing of what we did have. Further, gmaps for classic servers were still relatively new and untested, so there were a lot of bugs that we could not fix but had to work around, and work around we did at the cost of dozens and dozens of man-hours. I've been happy to discover that most of those issues have even been fixed in the last six years! But to make our release attempt even worse, the scheduled date was a bad personal time for me, as I had little free time to dedicate to overseeing the server and putting out content releases. It was the perfect recipe for failure, and I should have said "No, I'm sorry, we can't do it by that date if we want to do it right." Ultimately the lack of time was the main drive behind me quitting just a week after release or so; I didn't want to slow down the server's progress. Oh, irony. I have a lot more time now, which is why I've been able to accomplish quite a bit in just the past week, and even further why I decided that I'll stick around and make sure things move in the right direction.

I love the server, I may not have been a key player in the server's community but I loved it just the same. I just don't want to see another failed project, each time that happens it sort of tarnishes the memories I had of the server.

Nobody wants to see that. That's why we're going to do it right.