This sounds pretty interesting, I've always imagined in my head that the death realm is super massive and that the people who get lost and don't find their way out lose clarity for one reason or another. Looking forward to reading it. 

Offscreen Villain Forces Geoni and Sarras to Undress for Gold - Unreal Developer (2018)

All jokes aside, nice to see this coming along.

New skins and clothes make the game more alluring to RPers and that has been the base of this community for most of its existence so paying for those things would hurt its niche factor I think. But yeah 1-3 are alright.

Edit: I am kinda on the fence about #3 though. It needs to be impressive enough, visually, to be worth it. Most games don't ask money for increased visuals. The engraving and stuff maybe!

Hi,
at the moment in our bank we have about 4000$ which came from donations and sponsorships through the years. We are using the money mainly to pay for websites, hardware, accountants and taxes.

With 4000$ you cannot make an MMO Usually the investment needed is above 10 million dollars, see: https://www.openhub.net/p/planeshift and https://www.openhub.net/p/planeshift/estimated_cost for a total of about 16 millions.

We are honored to still see people playing PlaneShift, when the game is quite obsolete for graphics and limited in gameplay compared to new games. We love you for still be playing !

Unreal Engine is the only solution, we know it, I know it. Will it happen? Possible.

If any of you out there has excessive amount of money and wants to donate to speed up development or to hire me to work full time on PlaneShift, go ahead! Until then we will continue to do what we can, carrying on also our life duties in the meantime. Getting older your duties become more demanding, and I'm no more 20 years old!

In any case don't lose faith.

Talad you considered pulling together a gofundme type of thing? I feel like that might help.

I think that's just the difficulty that comes with it being a volunteer based game rather than having paid developers. Especially if the developers get busy irl with their real job and/or lose enthusiasm for the project. Indeed, seeing a paid developer would change the concept of PS being a volunteer led open source project but has that really helped it a ton in this decade?

As for player counts and RPing, I think it depends on there being player led events that involve people's characters in a way that makes them want to stick around and other roleplayers being able to reach out to newer players who aren't used to RPing. GM assisted player events, ones that spawn custom NPCs, would be a cool idea if it can be figured out in a way that makes NPC creation faster. Also, make guild housing easier to obtain and more up and coming guilds may feel more enthusiasm.

In general a lot of things keeping people from staying and the player count from being what it used to be is the outdated graphics, a very difficult world to traverse and play non-combat roles due to how buffed all the NPCs are and how awful it is to train to decent levels and stats, and burnout from player DMs who actually do run player events and storylines.

None of this is a new problem or a new set of reasons why though.

then to

 

Look at Larili being the MVP. 

Too bad I'm always asleep market-time.

omg so I forgot that I ever made this thread in my brief attempt to get back into PS in 2015 and started screenshotting all the books in Jayose's library for my own reference upon return in 2017. Aaaand I forgot the blog that Cairn linked me earlier in the thread. So I spent hours for nothing as it turns out. 

I didn't even finish half of the library though so there's that. I might, on a personal level, screenshot-archive knowledge seeker books and the books in the other three libraries for myself unless that's also considered essential?

Nevertheless, good to see this revisited.