Re: Dear AV
Reply #26 –
And a wipe and relaunch is not needed. No matter how screwed up the economy
is screwed up now, with the low population, it is nothing any reasonably sized
population could not straighten out.
You don't understand the MMO audience at all. People want something fresh so they can feel "competitive". Once people realize "oh this is advertisement for a dead game that's been running for 2 years" they will go play something else. There is a world of difference between that and a "fresh start". Look at what Archeage just did. You think if they started advertising "everybody come back and play on 4 year old Kyrios again!" people would bother? They had to make totally new servers with new progression rules.
Show me one MMO that was successful rebooting their population without wiping. FFXIV is the closest example but that game shut down for a year and essentially was remade entirely in that timespan. Is New Dawn going to do that?
Just face the facts that this server is getting wiped in 6 months or the game is dead in 6 months. Pick your poison.
The only thing a wipe gives is a chance for very dedicated players to catch up with veterans, rest of the casuals are negatively impacted by the wipe and will stop playing game very soon, faster with the wipe option, especially with DnD gear limits where there is little to do while waiting for gear to pop up available(or not as markets aren't really working as soon as people clan up and go to their cities).
As in specific claim that darkfall wipe will help and that you need to show evidence of successful MMO reboot I'll show you an example of 4 or 5 unsuccessful MMO wipe reboots (not sure if RoA wiped on release). Here they come!: Unholy wars, betas and releases of both DnD and RoA.
So yeah don't claim wipe will solve problems as it will only make casuals have a harder time as dedicated players will take over their favorite activities with more dedication.
What solves problems is tiered activities per player progression. Darkfall has this in mild effect already as you don't want to farm lower level stuff all the time and move towards bigger mobs and leave weak and medium ones to new players. Crafting lacks this even thought it was suggested many times. But even PvE layer-ism is still too flawed to be considered having many layers and being as fun as it could be.
A good wipe example is Path of Exile but they also have a huge problem of passing 8-12 hours through the story every time there is a wipe. What they have is ability to quickly gear up and your skills and permanent equipment make a lot of difference and you can obtain them easily by trading. In Darkfall you have to grind roughly the same for the same effect and your gear deteriorates and can be lost. So wipe is such a bad option for such game mechanics.
There is nothing you can do, including wipe, to make 10 year old seem fresh to new players no matter how hard you try. They should focus on returning existing dnd/dfo players instead and wipes don't have much effect as already proven several times.