Let's talk about the devs.

Sigh.

If we must discuss pservers, let me point out why I'm not in favor of them.

I respect the concept, you see. Y'know, the old chestnut of "the devs/GMs/execs/clowns/etc have their heads up their rears, and anyone can do a better job of running the game for the sake of the community." Thus, most pservers are started with the best of intentions.

And sure, they can fix some bugs... the kind which would be child's play for the official devs to have fixed, if they gave a ****. But then the more dubious decisions come up. What do you do with the game map? The quests? The NPCs? The experience/drop rates? The behavior and purpose of various instances? And how about unreleased gear? Or content that was supposed to make an appearance in the official release, but never materialized? (PWI has a lot of that last one, incidentally)

And there's the rub, ladies and gents. You can't decide those questions with any kind of consensus. Even on a server with the best of intentions, run by the best of people, decisions will be made that alter game content and alienate players.

Just to show you what I mean... here's my own personal vision of what a PWI pserver should be like. It'd have all the updated content (no small feat, I know), but APS would be nerfed to 3.0 or maybe 2.5 so that sins will cease to be the problem they are and class balance would, by and large, be restored. R8 would be restored to its place as a revered goal rather than a common standard, R9 would not exist, and packs would have all "gear opportunities" taken out of them (if they exist at all). It would revert TT3 to its original form, and provide the option to play FF both in its current form and as the gear-farming instance it started out as. It would have a tweaked exp and drop rate, but only for the higher levels... making the early levels essentially as leisurely as they always were, but allowing high-level grinding to still have some value to it. "Easing the curve," if you will. Quest rewards would be tweaked upwards in a similar manner.

That's my dream server right there. But it'll never happen, and frankly it shouldn't... at least, not under an individual's leadership. What right do I have to decide all those things? I'm sure there would be some people wanting me to expand the map (I probably wouldn't), or restore APS to 5.0 (hahaha no), or release a whole bunch of new gears to keep the game from stagnating, or any number of other things I didn't mention. You can't please all those people, and if you ignore their valid opinions, you just come off as egotistical (and so maybe it's no coincidence that many pserver owners are).

At the end of the day, we aren't just playing PWI. We're playing a framework - an experience - within which PWI runs. Here, on these servers, PWE (and to a lesser extent, the dev team) makes that framework. Do I agree with all their decisions? Hell no. But it's like citizenship in a country. I may not agree with everything my country does, but that doesn't mean I should run out to the nearest uninhabited island and proclaim it to be the glorious haven of "Anyone But Those Guys," of which I am conveniently the dictator. I could do it... and I could have the best of intentions in doing it... but that still doesn't make it sensible, or productive, or even viable.



I'll stop talking about this for now, but here's the tl;dr. You've got to have a damn good reason to be making a pserver (and no, "those guys are dicks" is not a reason), and even if you do, you still have no authority to be making any game decisions except that which you prescribe to yourself. And in most cases, I just can't get behind that kind of leadership.

*waits for any responses before continuing*

Blade_aether - Lost City wrote: »

Remove Assassins and Psychics.
Make weapons that can hit over 2 APS not able to have GoF or Sac Strike.
CAP APS at 4.0 (Honestly, without S.S. and GoF 4.0 is not so scary)

Nooooo. No no no no. *headdesk*

Okay, sorry, just had to get that out of my system. :P But I cant stand it when people say remove sins or psys entirely. I mean, cynicism aside, the fact that we got new classes with RT and Genesis should in theory be a good thing. Sure they have problems, but most of it can be tweaked without removing the classes entirely.

Sins are the perfect example. Imagine a sin who couldn't go above 2.5 APS. People on these boards talk like this character would be a steaming pile of fail. But it's not. A sin is a DD, and it has the potential to be the same kind of DD that Archers or Wizards were before the APS craze hit - natch, one who can deal respectable damage but still has to moderate said damage to avoid stealing aggro from the tank (Barb or BM). As a barb yourself, I think you can understand where I'm coming from here. Without the absurdly broken ability to become a cleric unto themselves via Bloodpaint, a sin is left at the mercy of... well, (a) the actual cleric, but more importantly (b) the two brain cells necessary to adopt an attack strategy other than "mash autoattack and spark."

My sin is 90, and his only APS boost comes from Demon Spark. This is by design - the whole point of the character for me is to see how the class was designed to work (a topic nobody else seems interested in, quite frankly).

Blade_aether - Lost City wrote: »

I can honestly say that even if you neglect these awesome changes that I suggest, that certain players like myself would be happy to go an extremely extended period of time with NO new updates, as long as old content was getting fixed.

I would be totally on board with this. >_> If they capped APS at 2.5, I would be willing to trade at least a year's worth of new updates in exchange.

I mean, how 'bout it devs? Make one five-minute change and you can take the rest of the year off. Sounds good to me. XD