4. Change the connections within the dungeon so that a character death was more meaningful and desired to be avoided by the players.
It was decided to go with option 4. We did not want to destroy any value the dungeon had, and wanted to encourage continued clever game play, while still providing a speed bump in the treadmill of death that was the TKM warp in and die spawn.
Let me break this down for you, since you don't seem to understand how leveling in this game works, and you seem to want to alienate your players.
First of all, the server currently has a vast disparity between the highest level players (who are all 99 trans) and the slightly behind players (who are all considerably lower level). This disparity was originally caused by the temporary implementation of the dragon kill count quests from your renewal launch events, which more or less instantly 99ed anyone who was playing in those weeks, and left everyone else very far behind. Other players are still catching up, and new players also need opportunities to play catch up as well.
In the current state of the server (as of last week), thors1 is literally the only map where it is viable to level characters in a reasonable enough amount of time to be able to catch up and compete with established players. Changing the map from its normal state severely damages the options of said players, and leaves established players with no options for making new characters or helping weaker players level up.
On top of that, your established goal for this change is to "not destroy any value the dungeon had," but you said yourself that the primary usage of the map is people (not just limited to TKMs, though this is what you pointed out, lord knights and sinx also town warp pretty regularly) warping in from town, fighting in level 1 until their resources are exhausted, and then going back to town. Since this method is the primary usage of the map, making it more or less impossible does, by definition, destroy its value. If you consider this leveling method toxic, you should add options that are more fun or more rewarding, not take away the options we currently have, which brings me to my final point.
Clearly, you guys do not actually play the game, thats fine, I understand it. What your observations of this map may not have made clear is that for many people, or at least for me and my group of friends, this map is the only remaining source of leveling fun on this server. You guys have failed to implement the other fun maps, and have crippled biolabs for so long that nobody goes there, so from the classic experience we wanted all that is left is TKMing in Thors. If you remove that, I no longer have any reason to play, because you will have removed the last fun thing that there is.
Please consider things carefully.
Edited by Tolrin, 02 October 2013 - 11:33 AM.