A few notes.
 

I guess this would be sort of like a suggestion thread, a few things I've seen and hopefully we can get some good discussion going about the direction of the server.

A little bit about myself for those who don't know me, I'm Damix, I've played GK pretty much since it was created. I led Samurai for a while after it was given to me by Zurkiba and handed it off to my friend Lylic after a few months so I could concentrate more on development.

I'm level 110 and have owned pretty much every item in the game at one point or another. I currently have no nice items nor gold time. I've been logging on recently just futzing around and seeing how things are going.

Anyway, we all know the current issue is player count, GK is a better game when the player count is higher. From my understanding, we are losing players because of 3 main reasons.

Kingdom Activity
Tigarius yesterday posted a thread about the possibility of removing a kingdom or two. My thoughts on this? I agree with it completely, the first thing I did when I was given Samurai was make plans to make the castle smaller.

Have you seen those things? If we had 100's of members of each kingdom all the time then maybe the castle should be that large, but right now you just get lost and have to unstick out.

Going from 5 kingdoms to 3 I think is the best option. Obviously Dustari and CP are the most active, but trying to merge the other 3 into 1 would prove difficult. This is something that needs to be discussed though (and a hat tip to Tig for realizing it.)

3 kingdoms is the ideal amount, there are still alliances to be formed and wars to be raged.

Level Gap
Through various bugs and glitches (and a few very hard workers) we have many power gamers with over 200 million EXP and then the normal players who I would venture to guess are about level 25-33 on average.

Not only does this cause a problem for battling as the power gamers have such a wide advantage, but also for content. There just isn't enough to do when you get near those middle levels, but the majority of players are at the high end or the low end and both want more content there.

Economy
In my opinion, the economy is by far the biggest problem. One of the problems I see is a lack of things leaving the server. Plat is only lost in shops, diamonds in prepping and ECs in the event coin shop. I used to buy an RoW for 500 diamonds, not even close anymore. This becomes another issue, the gap between the 'elite' items and the 'not-so-elite' items.

When I left the game originally, pretty much the only way to get a RoW was to USD it. I sold both of mine and was very happy with the extra $100 I had, so yea I contributed to the problem as well. But now how to get one back. When I played I did an experiment. I used DoPV to get a million plat. It took a long time, but I did it. I then sat around spawning rings. The results? 1 RoE, 1 RoS, 0 RoWs. ZERO! Yes they should be very rare, but that is near ridiculous, I have almost zero chance of getting 1 RoW unless I win an event that gives a large prize and trade it (How often does this happen?) or I purchase one with USD.

I can agree that only the elite of the server should be wearing RoWs, but I believe the step down (RoS) are not good enough to be the only thing close to the RoW. A ring with stats in between (multiple rings in fact, with different variations) the RoS and RoW I think would alleviate some of the need for every decent player to have an RoW. These could be placed in the event shop. Though event activity would need to rise if that were to happen.

Now that I'm done with RoW rant, I can point out other problems. Again the same gap between power gamers and normal players comes in. I am lucky, I can bless for diamonds, write level 107 scrolls for sale or for my own use and DoPV my brains out if I need plat, but people new to the game can not do any of these things. They are pretty much screwed to start and that is why so many do not stay.

If you don't want to read everything I have a quick bulleted list of things I think need to be concentrated on.

• Kingdom Activity need to be risen, either by development of the kingdoms or taking away 2 of them
• Content needs to be developed for every level player, some dungeons where the monsters and the EXP they give depends on the players level would be nice
• Gap in economy needs fixing, more items with just below elite status need to be released. Also new items with same stats as other event items could lower the demand for the 'must-have-items'
• Just in general, no more 'frills' updates for the time being, yes it is nice when things are pretty, but the core is the most important and that is broken right now.
• I'd like to see more event be developed, some classic ones, a CTF would be nice, you can always add little wrinkles to make it original.

I would really like to hear other players thoughts as well, mostly Googi, Stephen and Draenin.

I also would like to give some credit to Tigarius who seems to be very concerned about the declining player count and is actually active.

Sorry for any poor grammar, I'm lazy.

We don't have the manpower to develop that much content in a short amount of time. The fastest solution would be to eliminate the exp reduction formula, and rescale the exp given by current enemies. As I've mentioned before, exp plateaus out at 1,000,000 per level around level 25-30. (Which, luckily, is a great number that's easy to measure.) Put bigworms at a fixed value of 10-20k apiece, and you'll still have to kill about 50-100 of them to level up. If you just take the time to do your math, scaling experience is pretty easy, and you'll have an accurate gauge of how long on average it takes to level up.
The fact that items go out of circulation in Kingdoms is what drives up the demand. I agree with having mid-level gear, but it wouldn't hurt to have high-end gear craftable as well. Put level requirements on craftable gear, and players will still have to work hard to use them. If we keep protecting the values of unique and rare items, they will inevitably fall out of circulation or inflate to unaffordable prices. The only people that make a big fuss about one-of-a-kind items are usually misers anyway. Who cares if an item is one-of-a-kind or one-thousand-of-a-kind as long as the stats are good?
Events don't bring real substance to this server. We need stuff that people can do from day to day, not just on special occasions.
That's exactly right. If you look in my blog posts, I've written an entire article on how to control item values. Prices on everyday goods need to be raised and set at a fixed value so we can destroy more plat. And sell values need to be lowered so less plat is created. The value of our original base monetary unit (platinum) has deflated over the years because more and more of it has gone into circulation, and not enough of it is being eliminated. If there's less plat on the server, its actual value will grow. If there's more, it will shrink. The same goes for any other item. More is less, less is more.
Right. Kingdoms has always been too big for its boots. We have a total of six different maps in the dungeon alone, and how many actually get used? If our community is shrinking, the world needs to shrink with it. Or else the world becomes a very barren and desolate place. And who knows... if our community grows again, we could eventually open them back up. It's all a matter of properly supporting our average server population.

Excellent post.

If each kingdom had access to some type of EM tools, such as the EMs themselves do. And these events can only be joined (programatically) by the kingdom members that EM is in, then a kingdom leader can either himself or appoint someone to handle such things and then can create events more often for their members. The kingdom specific EMs could then have to compete in events dedicated to themselves to earn access to more event games. For instance a new kingdom EM might be only able to access musical chairs, but through EM events he/she can earn something like waterglass. This would also promote the hiring of kingdom EMs between the kingdoms, paying more for EMs who have a larger arsenal of games in their 'toolbox'.
Players would then base their kingdom choice on who keeps them busy with activities, not based on which kingdom is the 'coolest' or which kingdom has the most popular player who has the 'best' equipment that they might one day want to give away so everyone wants to be their buddy in hopes that they might get great stuff for free one day.

I feel angered by Damix's level gap paragraph...
Levelling up is pretty damn easy if i'm honest, i and many others have done it w/o the use of the party glitch (there are few-to-no survivors of that time anyway), so it's not as hard as you think, the main hurdle is the funding needed to attain high levels in certain skills. You can always level hop with agility if you're broke. :p

Why not have daily/weekly shop price updates, hourly once it becomes the norm. And if there were actually valuable/useful consumer goods for sale e.g. hp/mp/grace pots that aren't sold at the peak of a snowy mountain, but in most towns with magic shops; plat would be used more frequently in larger quantities, which would result in it's value increasing.

Events only make Kingdoms interesting for 30 minutes, tops. Kingdoms' innovations need to be consistently accessible. Besides, you can't rely on players.
Great idea... if you want rampant economic instability. :whatever:

These values need to be fixed and carefully determined, depending on what the item is. But even beyond that, stuff like the ferry service could really use a substantial price boost because it's way too easy to afford right now. The key to controlling a server's economy is just that... having control. Buy and sell prices jump around on stuff like rings and blessed swords, and the scroll of shopping certainly doesn't help either since the entire point of learning it is to put more money in player pockets, which is what has made plat so worthless now.