Question: how is effort of fixing bugs compared with wipe and rebuild everything ?
- Aldo
There have been many a bug or two over the years that while they were fixed, caused damage to both data stored in the DB and other factors like bloating the player economy for prices of ingame goods and services to ridiculous levels that simply can't be fixed without a full reset of everything to put things back into some type of order that will allow game mechanics to be tweaked to keep a better economy in the long run. We're not talking about one small issue that did this. We're talking about years and years of things all building off of each other to get it to this point where the majority of people involved in the development of this game believe it is time to start clean now that many of these issues have been fixed.
Wipes aren't something to be taken lightly. And everyone, on both sides of the table realize this. It's why the use of wiping the slate idea has been put off for as long as it has. As I pointed out a few pages back, it was August of 2005 when the last real wipe took place. That's quite a long time ago after all. Since then, the dev team has tried to develop the game the best they could without having to cause major issues to the players along the way through the means of tweaking leveling requirements, the cost of goods, the ease of ability to do certain actions, etc. and so forth.
And that may be all and good, but as I stated, there are simply certain things that can't be dealt with unless we consider using a clean slate to do it with. No one likes to see all their hard work just magically vanish. I have some really old characters I will lose due to a wipe. Many fond memories made on them. Many from a time, where common names in game were LordBug or Frisky, etc, that simply wouldn't fly as an appropriate name on the RP server now a days. I can see your side as to why you would not want to lose these things. But for the betterment of the game and project as a whole, in order to keep moving things forward, there comes a time when you must move on and forward. Now that the game mechanics have been fleshed out far more than they have ever been in the past, I am on the side that thinks now is a good time to reset everything back to a clean state. Start fresh, and see how things develop in game.
As someone mentioned WoW, there is a huge difference between it and PS to the point where its like the old saying of trying to compare apples to oranges or some such. WoW is a completed project that you must purchase to use, and as such, you expect some ground ideals as far as what they owe you as a user of their project, one of those being that once you make a character and play for awhile, it'll still be there if you decide to take a break and then come back later. PS, on the hand, is a project still in its infancy, yes even all these years later, and put right out front, players are told this, and that as it is in the development stages, there will be from time to time a need to perform data resets, but they again, will be done, on as truly necessary.
To those that are worried that if we wipe everything now, that everything you do a month from now will be lost in another wipe performed then, so why bother even doing anything at all:
Well, I point back to the track record of the project and how many times we've had wipes thus far. It speaks pretty much for itself.
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