It will alienate people, however, the silver lining would be they could potentially pick up some new players who would have otherwise avoided getting in late on a game’s life cycle.

I’d imagine the game would have to be pretty messed up for them to do this, as the middle of the road approach would be to consolidate servers then launch one new one to attract new players or folks who want a clean start.

Shadowbane is still running live servers?

Well, learn something new every day. Still not playing.

One of the things I was actually a little happy about was that we didn’t get any of the save files for M59. It was actually nice to be able to make some changes to the game that were necessary and that would have “broken” existing characters. I can imagine that after a few years of “huh, that didn’t work out right” they might want the same chance.

Honestly, their subscriber numbers are probably as low as M59′s at this point, so it’s probably not like they don’t have a lot to lose. The people still playing are probably the die-hardest of the die-hards. It’s going to take a lot more than a game wipe to make them go away at this point.

I might actually give it a shot now, I tried a long while ago but their crappy website wouldn’t even let me make an account and I think the patcher didn’t work either. They would have something like that fixed by now I suppose, I’d hope so.

I got to admit, I think this is cool but of course, if my favorite MMOG did that and I had been a loyal customer for 5+ years, I would be PISSED! Although that anger would be mixed with excitement again. I mean starting over and trying to race to max level and get the cool late level gear sounds fun to do again. Not only that, if the company also did a big revamp of the game at that point, say to the level of removing or adding classes, changing stats all together or just a big bug fix revamp, I might actually praise them for it. You got to think, the company might not ever get a chance to do a Shadowbane 2. How close can you get to a sequel then a world restart!

Still, If I was an SB player, I might be too pissed to want to start over again.

Man. I feel sorry for the CSR-critters. Okay, sorrier (it must already suck pretty bad). No matter how carefully they try to warn their users, a significant portion will log on the day after reset and wonder where the hell their characters went.

As far as the invincible cities go… I would just delete them from the database. Buildings, NPCs, equipment, characters, everything. Mutter something about comets and replace them with a smoking crater if you want to maintain the illusion of roleplaying (HA!). If I were feeling particularly charitable, I would spawn some astrologers and have them wander around the towns warning them of the impending comet strikes so the players could evacuate.

This actually might be the thing to get me to try the game. From what I understand, it’s PvP centric, so being able to go to a new zone and not have to be worried about the highest level characters with all the trimmings coming around and farming the entire populace of said zone is promising. So, well, at least they may get one new customer. It always looked interesting to me..

On a side note, if Jeremy Dalberg is reading, ummm.. Can EA consider doing the same to UO so they can consolidate some servers, adjust the loot tables, and fix the bloomin’ economy?

Yeah, I play a lot of older games.. And WoW too.. I think it’d be great if WoW did this too, though.. Think how many immature players would give up the game over it.. *Dreams*

Dude, I lost a number of hours of sleep planning how I would try to forestall the riots and bomb threats if we ever did that. UO is NOT Shadowbane – there’s no silver lining there.

The economy is a different story. We could easily just wipe all the gold in the world…

You can get to max level in about a week in Shadowbane if you play with your guild (and you must to have a guild in SB). This is not a big deal.

It’s ironic. Every year at GDC Damion Schubert wants me to sit in on one of his MMOG PvE roundtables about how to deal with the fact that some people eventually become uber and other people are stuck being loser noobs. He likes to have me there because WWIIOL is one of the few MMOGs that actually does “resets” to address the winners and losers problem.

Actually you can do max level in Shadowbane in about 2 days with a powerleveler. Expect within a week to see entire guilds leveled to max. I have argued for the longest time that Shadowbane needed to drop their PvE portion all together because it absolutely SUCKS ASS. Just give instant max level characters and let the better part of the game get played!

NGE.

’nuff said.

Blackblade; Obviously that isn’t something that will be known in the long run but I can say this: The Test Server has been hitting all time population highs with this patch. Not only has a large portion of our current community been helping out but a lot of veterans who left in the past have jumped on it (due to the elevated XP and Gold rates) to see what has changed over the last year or so and if it still has that crazy, wild fun factor or not.

Blackblade, I don’t see how wiping the servers would address any of the problems that you originally brought up any better than less drastic methods, and it certainly would change any of the fundamental game design choices that have been made over the past ten years.

PvP games, in my experience, are a little different because the accumulated value tends to lie in reputation, rather than pixels. The accomplishments of the uber leet lie in what their fellow players think of them, whereas in a PvE game, the accomplishments tend to be much more material – houses, rares, highly-developed characters, etc.

Plus there’s the complication that we’ve been selling advanced characters and items for cash for years, and I have no idea if it would even be possible to figure out how to restore that kind of stuff, given that many of those items end up in transferable token form.

“Man. I feel sorry for the CSR-critters. Okay, sorrier (it must already suck pretty bad). No matter how carefully they try to warn their users, a significant portion will log on the day after reset and wonder where the hell their characters went.”

When you’re forced to assume that a large percentage of your population are cartoon characters, you know you’re working in the MMO industry.

“And there was that two weeks we all spent at area code camp…”

Again, sorry, just to respond to Jeremy. And keep in mind, I’m not trying to call you out, or anything like that, ma’am. Just trying to point out facts or opinions as I see them.

1) I wasn’t referring to those issues as what the change would affect. I was simply pointing out that UO has never had a problem in the past adopting systems or techniques used in other games, so why stop here, if it proves successful? Why should “Because UO =/= XXX” be valid now?

But, because you asked, here’s the advantages I see for a decade old game, just off the top of my head. I am also aware of the cons to these pros (as there are with every decision, no matter what), but just referring to what a total wipe can do that nothing else will.

- An opportunity to consolidate servers, condensing a (from my perspective, obviously, not with your factual numbers) a declining population and potentially saving upkeep and operation costs. A denser population can help form stronger communities, which as any UO player can tell you, is the backbone of your subscriptions. (More on this soon.) Start with 3 regular servers, and 1 “Siege” server, and expand as needed. It’ll be nice to see so many players online at one time again.

- A housing wipe so that land can be occupied with houses that are actually USED rather than simply owned by seemingly inactive, but paying accounts, would be a welcome change for existing players. Although I can see how doing so may hurt the bottom line since these zombie accounts are likely not insignificant. This would allow communities to restructure, relocate, and refocus in a way that simply isn’t possible without a server wipe.

- Wiping out all the resources, gold, and items stockpiled by scripters would have an immediate impact on their bottom line, potentially preventing them from revamping operation. And if nothing else, slowing them down so that those who had never seen UO before rampant scripting was so blatantly obvious can see what older players remember couldn’t hurt, since it’s apparently very hard to impossible to outright stop.

- Wipe clean the mistakes of the past that even the UO team doesn’t want in the game in harsh, but even handed fashion with no exceptions. By this, I mean things that were so out of place for UO, they ability to obtain or perform such things was outright removed, but those that have it are grandfathered in, such as the Tok Neon Dye set, and houses placed in illegal locations.

2) Every online game ultimately comes down to community. I’ve seen just as many people earn a rep parallel to that of a PvP’er in PvE games. Some for material, some for prowess. And every game contains pixels people value in different ways.. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a point in playing, now would there? Suggest to Xbox Live fans you’re going to wipe Achievement Points. I double dog dare ya.

As for UO, it’s not the graphics, the open skill system (Which I love, of course, and is rare enough), the PvP or the PvE that keeps players, it’s the community, and the ways you can interact with the world around you. Would the community still be a community without the pixel crack, or their well developed characters? Would the way you interact with the world change?

And for that matter aren’t we, the readers of Broken Toys, a community? Even if we don’t play the same game? We share no pixels here. We know each other by name, and there’s no PvE or PvP involved (Well, the PvP of words, maybe, if you’re cheeky about it). And when Scott wipes it or outright changes it, we all come back anyway

I don’t think UO or Shadowbane are any different. If not, well.. It’s not much of a community, in my opinion, and it’s destined to fail. And one day, all games will have their plug pulled. The community will endure or it won’t.

3) Well, everyone who bought one gets one back for their account.. You guys DO keep track of who buys what from your own store, right?… Right?

But what does this have to do with Shadowbane?

(As in, kindly not argue UO in this thread as it is offtopic and not fair to the UO representative who really can’t respond properly in this context. Thanks.)

Tell you what – take the argument to UO stratics, and we can continue it there – although I suspect you’ll soon see my point about the torches and pitchforks.

To return to the actual topic – I just find this a fascinating experiment in the nature of “persistence” as it refers to MMOs. Is it not what we think it is?

The big challenge comes in perception. Truth be told, half of what we are doing is no different than bringing up a new server in any other MMO. The contention is in what happens to all of the existing data. The debate mostly seems between those who are there for a good fight and those who are “pixel lovers” (that seems to be the term I have seen most thrown around).

Cities are the major focal point in Shadowbane but the thing is, players can already have their cities taken over and even burned to the ground by other players via siege mechanics. So the big loss is characters and their items. And yet, building a new character in Shadowbane is not that difficult; items for the most part are easy to obtain and, outside of Disciplines (multi-classing), character building is quite easy.

Now, in regards to other MMOs, the realization that Shadowbane is quite different than other MMOs has to come into consideration.

The community is behind this just like they were behind new servers, but they all ended the same way. Now they’re down to two servers, and those two will end just like all the rest.

The bottom line is that SB’s city and siege mechanics alienate the medium sized guilds, and you always end up with a few superpower zerg nations. When that happens large scale PVP grinds to a halt so that none of the remaining big nations get destroyed, and PVP ends up being a lot of hit and run small skirmishes that don’t mean crap. If a big nation is taken out, most of their people leave and the rest are absorbed into the survivors. Ultimately there’s almost no one left, and the server dies.

In the summer of 2002′s SB beta, the game mechanics were such that a medium sized guild could create, support, and rebuild a city without it being so crushing that they left the game. The mobile trebuchets and unscheduled sieges also made it so that PVP was unpredictable, so people had to be on their toes. So you had a lot of participants and being crushed didn’t make you want to quit the game.

They made city building and city crushing too painful, made it hard for a medium sized guild to survive as anything other than a vassal to a larger nation, got rid of mobile trebuchets, and put sieging on a timer. The scheduled sieging IMHO was very boring, and a lot of the time the city being sieged set their siege window at BUMF**K A.M. in the morning. Since city sieging could only happen on a set schedule, people spent all their time rolling exp groups for shits and giggles.

So this reset does nothing but further the decline unless there have been changes to make medium sized guilds more viable IMHO.

Clearly the only way to improve on this innovation is 2 bringz b@ck 0l sk00l UO bizzatches!!!!

It’s true, we do not yet know what the life cycle of a long running MMOG looks like, because we have yet to see one actually die. Well, and stay dead. *coughs meaningfully in Brian’s direction* Even if UO, to pick on grampa, were to be shut down by EA tomorrow, the community would keep servers running for years.

With regards to Shadowbane, I would certainly highlight the concerns of Hades before bringing up a new server. If there haven’t been changes to ranking of towns, then the end result will be a paralyzed server, where one or more large guilds have “won teh gaem!!!”

I beta tested Shadowbane years ago, and really enjoyed it. Never had a chance to play the live version because real life got in the way. Just found out that it’s free, so hell yah I’m gonna download it!