I appreciate the search for a middle ground. I can tell you from my perspective that If my gens, my looms, and my current level 37 main were taken from me, I would be incredibly pissed and my desire and love for this mod would be removed from my conciousness. 160 million experience to get to my level. 160 million fuckin experience. Think about how many hours that is. I could have retired like 30 fuckin times. 30 loom points. You are entertaining the thought of taking our base, the core players that still consider this mod to be a main game, taking those players and saying to them: forsake your years of dedication. forsake your hours of gameplay. Forsake everything that you strove for over those years. Forsake it all because it breeds a possibility that some new players may start.
Yes our population is down. Yes we are getting to the end of this mod's wonderful life. But the solution to this is not in alienating the core base of players and asking us to sacrifice all the time we have dedicated towards the mod for the gamble that it may bring some new players in. James is absolutely correct when he says that we should focus on fixing the problems which caused the decline. These problems were not too many high level players. Us maxed out players love fighting each other. The problems were a lack of a dev team and a lack of fixes for clear problems. Give us updates. Give us patches. These will be a much more reliable method of bringing back more of our maxed out players who we all love fighting with. If it's advertised as James suggests, it can even bring in new players.
Give us some maintenance. This is the first solution we should attempt rather than running the risk of alienating all of the base players who still love the game. A wipe is an absolute last ditch solution and I refuse to admit that we are at that point. Not until we attempt some lower risk solutions.
To be clear, the idea I have is a "temporary wipe". Players would retire 3-4 (or some number,
could even be 1) times and, by that point, have all their looms back. Yes, it's going to take some time to get back to that state. But, this gives us the opportunity to try something new, or at least something that hasn't been done in years. In my opinion, that's exciting. It's interesting. It's something that can pull in players, old and new. Most importantly, it is
temporary, especially so if servers are set to x2 XP.
Additionally, I support some form of wiping in order to fix a problem with cRPG: the lack of goals. For some players, once you get 40-50 looms or so, there just isn't much of a point in playing. With a wipe, these players can once again have goals to attain. Ideally, strat will be fixed, and the endgame of cRPG will be improved, but until that happens, a temporary fix is better than no fix at all.
Of course, I'm also working on other solutions to problems that cRPG has. After I get a response from chadz, the next major patch should be about ready to go.
