Why Pwi won't upgrade their stuff.

xskysoldier

It's quite simple. Pwi's servers are quite old, not to mention their engine. Of course the majority of the community knows about that but i haven't seen a forum about this so i decided to create one about it. Pretty sure nothing will be done about it since Pwi stopped caring about a lot of things.

bloodedone87

maybe you didnt search enough cause it was mentioned on forums several times before.

dagoddominator

where do people get reliable information regarding the state of the hardware the company uses? they have done at least 2 separate hardware upgrades that they announced in the past year or so. there have been numerous threads that have speculated on the types of hardware and hardware issues this game suffers from including some pretty well-informed observations as to why a game of this age would have those problems.

regarding the game engine, this is an old game. how many other games routinely upgrade the game engine, is that even a simple task to undertake? (i dont think it is, feel free to correct me if i'm wrong)

seriously, this is a game to the players but a business to the ppl running it. i think it is pretty unreasonable to expect this sort of transparancy. the only thing we as players need to know, from their perspective, is how to log in and use the systems in place..... not to receive technical reports regarding hardware and architecture that we have no say (for good reason) in.

catgirldesu

Well, PWI is very old. The Chinese version of the game is even older, I think 10 or 11 years old by now. People simply lose interest over time. Even if PWE had been an excellent company, people would still leave because there are so many games out there, it's bound to attract people that will want to play them instead of PWI. Plus, the genre of MMORPGs seems to be less sought after lately. I could be wrong, but this is the impression I've gotten.

It would be great to have an engine upgrade. I think there were rumors of China wanting to upgrade PW from Angelica II to Angelica III. Correct me if I'm wrong. I don't know how hard and time consuming this process would be though, and the question is; is it really worth it?

When a game is so old, new people won't be interested. There are plenty of other newer, cooler, better games out there. Plus, it's hard to catch up in MMORPGs when you join 7 years after the servers' launch*. Without a good income of new active players along with old players leaving, the game will just die. Developers might as well make a whole new game. Though I wouldn't mind a PW re-make... still I wouldn't play it. Once I quit PWI, I don't want to touch MMORPGs ever again.

I actually think PWI has a pretty decent run. PWE's management has been bad, PWI has been neglected a lot. One would have expected the game to die faster, but there are still a lot of people playing.


* or at least in PWI, considering the absurd amount of dailies and whatnot. If someone wants to play casually, well there are so many other games they can choose from anyway.
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heerohex#3018

xskysoldier wrote: »

It's quite simple. Pwi's servers are quite old, not to mention their engine. Of course the majority of the community knows about that but i haven't seen a forum about this so i decided to create one about it. Pretty sure nothing will be done about it since Pwi stopped caring about a lot of things.

wondering where you got the info about the servers from? PWI is the game I think your talking about PWE who have very limited control over the game. Yes things could be done better yet we survive. The server merge was an obvious result of decline and was an end result. Saying this they prob cut the costs in half making sure PWI has a longer future. They could have just run this out. We have a CM now. Things are looking up this does not look like a company that has given up more to me of needing to learn lessons and try harder.

Time will tell. Ill be sad when this goes. Time Will Tell Story's Les it tells another...​​

dblazen1

heero200 said:

xskysoldier wrote: »

It's quite simple. Pwi's servers are quite old, not to mention their engine. Of course the majority of the community knows about that but i haven't seen a forum about this so i decided to create one about it. Pretty sure nothing will be done about it since Pwi stopped caring about a lot of things.

wondering where you got the info about the servers from? PWI is the game I think your talking about PWE who have very limited control over the game. Yes things could be done better yet we survive. The server merge was an obvious result of decline and was an end result. Saying this they prob cut the costs in half making sure PWI has a longer future. They could have just run this out. We have a CM now. Things are looking up this does not look like a company that has given up more to me of needing to learn lessons and try harder.



Time will tell. Ill be sad when this goes. Time Will Tell Story's Les it tells another...​​

Duh, someone said it somewhere so it must be true, this is the internet *points to my signature*
I do hope people get the reference of my signature though

jabq

dblazen1 wrote: »

Duh, someone said it somewhere so it must be true, this is the internet *points to my signature*
I do hope people get the reference of my signature though

I do not get the reference, can you name the movie/show, so i can watch the whole piece? ​​

dblazen1

jabq said:

dblazen1 wrote: »

Duh, someone said it somewhere so it must be true, this is the internet *points to my signature*

I do hope people get the reference of my signature though

I do not get the reference, can you name the movie/show, so i can watch the whole piece? ​​

Scrubs, season 3 episode 14
"Where do you think we are?"
(the backstory what the episode is about doesn't fit though)

sylenthunder

xskysoldier wrote: »

It's quite simple. Pwi's servers are quite old, not to mention their engine. Of course the majority of the community knows about that but i haven't seen a forum about this so i decided to create one about it. Pretty sure nothing will be done about it since Pwi stopped caring about a lot of things.

Let me take a moment to clear up some misconceptions.

1. PWI does not run on antiquated servers. A few years ago they made some serious upgrades to the many blades each server runs on. (For example, most maps have their won individual server. Hell, even the boutique has it's own server because the activity in it was heavy enough to cause lag when teleporting.)

2. Several times they have made upgrades to the network, both with their ISP and internally. The most recent just a bit over a week ago.

3. PWE doesn't even technically own the software. They are just a publishing company and lease it froM Wanmei, who technically owns PWE. (It's pretty convoluted.) PWE cannot touch the data on the servers. All maintenance and changes to the PWI server software are done by Wanmei in China. (If it wasn't obvious, the same goes for the client software.)

4. The original game that was developed by Archosaur Group was created circa 2004. That's 11 years ago.
When Wanmei purchased the game from them, it was not even completed yet. Wanmei then forced changes and released it well before it was completed. Within about a year, Wanmei had fired the original developers and hired a bunch of fresh noobs that were not familiar with the game.

5. For the next few years, these **** dev's who were not familiar with the source code, made some very **** attempts to finish the original Developers ideas that were partially implemented already. (Hello Tideborns)

6. Then the same crappy dev team, after fixing a few of the really bad bugs they created, put together the Earthguards. We'll never know how close that was to what the original dev's envisioned, but it wasn't all that bad.

7. Around October/November 2013 it was announced/leaked that the original Archosaur Group developers were hired by Wanmei to work on PW again. It was mentioned that they would be working to upgrade the client to run on the newer Angelica III engine.
I'm still waiting for that to happen.
Edit: They also talked about updating the ingame textures, adding mo-cap animations, and updating the skill animations for the old classes.

8. We got the Rebirth system to extend the forced cap of level 105 by Wanmei because they pushed the release before levels 100-150 could be finished, and in doing so, completely broke the experience table so we'd never be able to go past 105. (because of numeric index limitations in the databases.)

So far, it looks like management is more interested in pushing out new content than updating the game engine. the server hardware can more than handle the workload.
It's not PWI, it's not PWE, it's Wanmei. They're making plenty of money on the game as it is.

All of this information is freely available in the forums, if you just take a few minutes to look, and have half an idea of what you're looking for.

Edit: LOL at some of the words they censor. An alternate word for **** that starts with a C and ends with a P.​​

jabq

dblazen1 wrote: »

Scrubs, season 3 episode 14
"Where do you think we are?"
(the backstory what the episode is about doesn't fit though)

Thank you.

Man, this pwi server is so old, it makes cigars look cool .​​

dagoddominator

sylenthunder said:

Let me take a moment to clear up some misconceptions.



1. PWI does not run on antiquated servers. A few years ago they made some serious upgrades to the many blades each server runs on. (For example, most maps have their won individual server. Hell, even the boutique has it's own server because the activity in it was heavy enough to cause lag when teleporting.)

2. Several times they have made upgrades to the network, both with their ISP and internally. The most recent just a bit over a week ago.

3. PWE doesn't even technically own the software. They are just a publishing company and lease it froM Wanmei, who technically owns PWE. (It's pretty convoluted.) PWE cannot touch the data on the servers. All maintenance and changes to the PWI server software are done by Wanmei in China. (If it wasn't obvious, the same goes for the client software.)

4. The original game that was developed by Archosaur Group was created circa 2004. That's 11 years ago.

When Wanmei purchased the game from them, it was not even completed yet. Wanmei then forced changes and released it well before it was completed. Within about a year, Wanmei had fired the original developers and hired a bunch of fresh noobs that were not familiar with the game.

5. For the next few years, these **** dev's who were not familiar with the source code, made some very **** attempts to finish the original Developers ideas that were partially implemented already. (Hello Tideborns)

6. Then the same crappy dev team, after fixing a few of the really bad bugs they created, put together the Earthguards. We'll never know how close that was to what the original dev's envisioned, but it wasn't all that bad.

7. Around October/November 2013 it was announced/leaked that the original Archosaur Group developers were hired by Wanmei to work on PW again. It was mentioned that they would be working to upgrade the client to run on the newer Angelica III engine.

I'm still waiting for that to happen.

Edit: They also talked about updating the ingame textures, adding mo-cap animations, and updating the skill animations for the old classes.

8. We got the Rebirth system to extend the forced cap of level 105 by Wanmei because they pushed the release before levels 100-150 could be finished, and in doing so, completely broke the experience table so we'd never be able to go past 105. (because of numeric index limitations in the databases.)


So far, it looks like management is more interested in pushing out new content than updating the game engine. the server hardware can more than handle the workload.

It's not PWI, it's not PWE, it's Wanmei. They're making plenty of money on the game as it is.

All of this information is freely available in the forums, if you just take a few minutes to look, and have half an idea of what you're looking for.

Edit: LOL at some of the words they censor. An alternate word for **** that starts with a C and ends with a P.

this is why sylen is on my list of forum ppl to trust the opinions of.

i think if they decided to make a new game as the spiritual successor (kind of like *faction battle 2*) i would definitely want to play. them allowing archosaur studios to finish their job and implement smart changes that address the issues PWI had i feel would make for a great game. hopefully they would allow some sort of porting of ... something (again something like *sounds like faction battle 2*) to link your accomplishments in the older game to the newer.

wishful thinking but not really holding an expectation for it.​​

sarrafeline

PWI is a DirectX 8 game, that got a minor update to run in DirectX 9.0C mode.

When will it be updated to run in DirectX 11 runtime? Or should I go back to *** instead?

Unknown

This content has been removed.

sylenthunder

sarrafeline wrote: »

PWI is a DirectX 8 game, that got a minor update to run in DirectX 9.0C mode.

When will it be updated to run in DirectX 11 runtime? Or should I go back to *** instead?

If they ever upgrade it to the Angelica III engine, it should get DX10 support. You won't see, and don't need DX11 for this.​​