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Time for epicness.
Ok look. Classic is like the Detriot Lions right now, the first NFL team to ever go 0-16 in a season. Neither of us can be any worse than we already are, outside of being removed. The Lions decided to gut the team, draft a franchise QB with the first pick in the draft, and start over. Classic needs to do the same.
Storm has failed. Perhaps the understatement of the century, but it's true. He's had years to try and make classic better, but instead we have slowly been on a course to destruction. He's done some nice things during his time (am I being too kind here?), but clearly it has not been enough. It's time for change.
Thor has only been around for 3 or so months in the manager position. I don't know everything he's done in the past few months, but it wouldn't be right to completely judge him yet due to the horrid condition the server + dev team has been in recently. Thor is a good scripter and a hard worker from what I've seen, though I don't know how good of a manager he can be.
All of that being said, here's my thoughts. Just like the detriot lions, we need to gut the server + staff and start over. We need to find a franchise quarterback (quickly, like within a week or two,) get some pieces around him, and move forward. I don't know who the new manager should be, whether it be thor or one of the other ppl who have thrown their name in the hat. Regardless, we're going to have to find someone and make sure it's a good pick. Once we have a new manager, we need to get some new admins for some of the other staff teams, because inactive admins really hinders the team. Once we have a staff assembled, we need to decide on the direction the server should take and work towards it.
As for what direction we should take, I have a few ideas. There are a lot of reasons classic sucks and has sucked for a while now, but we can only fix a few at a time. The overworld is simply too large and most of it goes unused since most of it is useless. A downsize is needed, but we must be careful because if we downsize too much, it could leave us with not enough to do outside of events. My suggestion would be to cut out everything outside of the mountains that surround the NE and NW of the main island. This means we'll lose all 3 islands, tons of unused houses on the outskirts of the server, and tons of ocean that we can't traverse. From that point, we'll need to start upgrading what is left, specifically with the towns. The problem with classic is that people never leave graal city because there is nothing to do except idle and chat with people when events aren't being hosted. Even during events, there isn't always a competitive drive to try to slaughter everyone and win; many times people idle and chat rather than fight their hardest.
So how do we correct this? First off, we need to give each city it's own identity and purpose. Don't put the same buildings (bowling alley, for example) in multiple cities. Give people a reason to visit and stay at each city. Rather than have guildhouses way out in the wilderness, have them near/inbetween cities. Rather than have quests out in random gnome tunnels and castles, put them in cities. Second off, we need to make travel faster in between cities. We could do one of two things: 1) return the warp jewels so we can warp from city to city, or 2) put a horse stable next to each city. Both options have pros/cons, so the new manager would have to decide which would be better. (Another idea I had was to have a KoM-like "heaven" area which you get warped to for 20 seconds each time you die. After the time had passed, you could warp to any city like with the KoM bases.) Once each city had some value and travel was made quicker, we would have to add tons of quests: small, medium, and large ones. My time on UN has shown me that even easy quests entice players to explore the server in search of them. Rather than spending months on one quest that the entire playercount will finish in a week, we need to keep adding lots of quests as we slowly expand the overworld.
Once the overworld is cut down, the towns are upgraded, travel is faster, guild houses are made attack-able, and quests are added, we can release the server to the masses. A revamped GC team, FAQ team, and GP team will be needed to help out during the first few (hopefully) busy weeks. How long will all of this take? Well, depending on how quickly we get a new manager and a direction is set, I guesstimate we can have it done by september or october.
Well, there are my thoughts. I don't know whether a conversion to straight up default would be best for the server (though apparently it would be far easier to scripters,) nor do I know how long that will take (many months, apparently.) I'm sure some of you will find fault with my ideas, which is another problem classic has had: too much arguing and not enough action. It's hard for a bunch of people to come to an agreement on things, but this is one of those times where we need to get it done. Classic is simply not going to survive if we don't get working in a new direction pretty soon. |
06-30-2009, 06:54 AM
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