I think I'm gonna be "that guy".
There are maybe precisely 20 people on the server that care about challenge dungeon at this point. Although, yeah, great, more pvm and stuff to do (which don't get me wrong - we desperately need) it's been so long that people are getting apathetic to it.
But whilst we're talking about non-committal toward things that need to happen.
https://forums.warpp...015-q1-roadmap/
I don't know what it is that you guys do to gauge the activity or interest of the server in WoE, but something i'd like to see is data from the logs of the average player population in castles throughout WoE.
WoE isn't everything... but it is important when it has a knock on effect on the rest of the game. I'd say 80% of my guild's chars are levelled for WoE (when we are almost 50% of the WoE population on a sunday... that should tell you something) but the times are bad and the conditions of WoE are even worse. I talk to quite a few guildleaders from old servers and this is what the leader of what was undoubtedly the best guild on old Chaos told me.
[00:28:02] *******: I just have no motivation to play game that doesn't matter
[00:28:09] *******: no competitive spirt
[00:28:11] *******: no chance to win
[00:28:14] *******: no goals
That's after I sent him a screenshot laughing about getting a double god drop in an uneconned WoE 1 fort. WoE is basically no child left behind, there is no winning or losing or nothing at stake. It might seem stressful when players take part in it and they may complain; but that is why they become invested.
And he wasn't just talking about WoE either!
[00:31:22] *******: over time they just took away too much to make it easy
[00:31:33] *******: easy leveling easy item finding anyone can mvp or summon mvps
[00:31:37] *******: no walking around
This is precisely why I roll my eyes every time we have a drop rate event. It's not really about maintaining power or whatever bs people think my suggestions are tailored toward - it's about looking at the things that keep people playing and I know that if you spoodfeed everything needed to an individual, they get bored a lot faster. There's little need for team work and the community breaks down.
Don't think I'm right? Valhalla is the biggest guild for a reason and the primary people join us isn't the items that everyone whines about. It is because we are an active, competitive community with goals and aspirations.
I don't know what the answer is to drive other people actually play. Challenge dungeon might work for a couple of weeks, but soon it will be another dusty dungeon visited by ~5 people... just like the old one no matter how great it is made. The real problems of Classic really need to be looked at and addressed (without the community turning around and making it about each other rather than the game .
the other thing is that if you make the server an ezmode spoonfeeding server; the game must adjust to cater to those players. You push away the whimsical, hat-in-town explorer and achievement based players at the sake of catering to the MOBA style players and for that to work there needs to be some kind of actual competition. Right now Classic works for neither.
right now the server looks like this
2 large competitive guilds vs eachother and 3 small ones allied + 1 small one that gets bullied by the alliance. There's no chance for start up, there's no fairness it's farmville until my guild and the other one get bored. I'm not defending because we have to relish every moment of action we can get. We're capable... but the stability of the server is SO bad, that we are just taking what we can get atm because the staff don't really grasp the situation nor seem to care.
Yeah it's tldr; but at this stage I really feel like the staff are overlooking something dreadful. I might even dare say I'm more qualified to assess the situation because of the sheer number of players I talk to, play alongside, recruit and work with as a community leader (that is what valhalla is - a community). And no, that doesn't mean they will always agree with me because objectively it's not possible to make people content when you're asking them to compete to do stuff that is currently in a state of non competitiveness. Infact if I'm saying the right things, they should be angry at me for suggesting their toys are put slightly out of reach so they have to grow up to get them!