[SpielerFrosch]

Wait, what?

You guys have been promising to fix and update the existing realms since ages and what do you do? Say f*ck it and whip out a new server. We can wipe our arses with that. Most players have several max level characters on the other realms by now and are in the middle of farming out the best PvE or PvP gear for them. Why start over on a slow/blizz-like rate server now? Not to mention an already established community, guilds and parties. This was seriously unnecessarry.

How long have we waited for skill fixes on Eternal and Redemption? The two most prominent server? What about Remorse 4.0 and the fact that not even a 3.0 ever came out? That realm is a mess right now, leveling dungeons and roads are put together hastily with the whole process of 1-255 consiting of blindly tapping the auto-attack key in daze for hours, Onyxia's lair can't be entered, bosses both in Nexus and ICC bug out in ways they never did back in 2.0, quests for gear frequently get bugged, events were disabled and the whole gearing up is over-complicated.

What about the population? I remember the times when Eternal had 800-1000 players on while Redemption could show off 1500-2000 and Remorse dragging behind with around 1200 online players at non-eventful weekends. What do I see now? 300 player on Eternal, 600 on Redemption and 500 on Remorse and it's winter holiday break for students and at least a few work-free day for others. And the over-hyped Cataclysm realms? Ruin has 100 players at it's peak and Damnation moves between 40-50. Instead of thinking about how to increase the population on the existing realms you make new one which will divide the player base even further.

I always supported your decisions, encouraged taking your time to fix things and appricated the effort that went into development. But I no longer see that effort. There are huge forum posts filled with big words about magically making everything at least 50x better, fixing things people begged for who knows how long and what not. Then what happens? Nothing. You add some stuff, post a patch log about fixing a few minor things here and there and everything remains the same. People are leaving, disappointed and the community is falling apart.

[Kabekiz]

Bloodthirst fix anytime soon?

I fixed bloodthirst a couple of days ago. I know I put the fix live on Eternal, if it's not live on Redemption or Genesis I'll fix it later.

[Kabekiz]

Wait, what?

It appears you have failed to put any effort into understanding (or reading from those who do) what you are talking about. In doing so I fail to see why I should put any effort in rebutting any of your . But for the edification of others who read your and think "By golly this guy is right!", I'l go ahead and explain.

Remorse 4.0: An effort of such magnitudes you probably think is just "click click, done" but is fact identifying every variable that is unsigned int 16 (limits your values to 65,536) and making sure each variable that touches it is changed to unint32 (limits your values to 4,294,967,295). Custom content with an old scripting platform and updating these scripts to smartyAI.

Did we mention that the core for Remorse hasn't received updates from upstream since December (how about neither has any other 255 fun realm)? There is a reason for that, all the changes required to make a trinitycore realm into the fun realm you experience which has items that wouldn't fit in uint16, and the npc scaling isn't built in.

Remorse 4.0 when it comes out is of such unprecedented magnitudes of developer time that you should say "Hey, maybe it's okay that they didn't spend their time doing ____ and instead put forth all this effort". A thank you would probably be nice too.

Eternal (Redemption): I've taken it upon myself (mostly because I was bored and needed a change of pace / challenge) to fix a few of the class issues that I can. Those same fixes are easily applied to all 3 of our updated realms (Eternal / Redemption / Genesis) with 0 extra work by developers except running 2 commands. Recently new events that Gm's can run have been added that allow for more variety.

Extra realms do not take developer effort from existing realms, as I've already explained. Having a realm that is already under the same codebase as other existing realms with no new custom content makes the developer effort required near 0. Applying updates to this realm is the same as exporting our custom fixes (those not a part of trinitycore codebase) or using git to pull down the updated revisions and compiling.

Population: It's fitting that you should take your measurements at our slow time of the day. (Just like everywhere else, we have peak times, it's usually around 2pm server time). Today: Redemption peaked with ~1200 players, Remorse with just over 1000, Eternal with 800.

Our advertising and promotion efforts: One of the reasons we ask people to vote is quite obviously the "free" advertising we receive on top lists. Staff Admin Lyssaa and Senior GM Lyssaa with the help of our graphic artist DrekVinyard have all been busy putting the word out about Eternal on forums as well as paid advertising and banners.

The sad reality is that the Private Server market is essentially a zero sum game, very few people that we gain as players didn't come from other private servers. The other untapped "market" is people in Eastern Europe and other far east countries. This is the same "market" that Retail WoW is staying afloat on. The "Western" market for WoW is dying. WoW is oldhat to Americans and most Western Europeans. I signed up for retail about a month ago to check it out and every capital was essentially ghost town during American prime time. Expect server consolidations.

too long; didn't read (tl;dr): Your fears of developer time dilution are unfounded. Quit thinking we're at our peak during our valley (5am is almost the lowest player count of the day). We can only do so much to build the community, being a part of that community you are responsible for shaping it as well. Developers don't talk to players because most of the time players act like you do and despite all the effort they put in every day are talked to by unthankful players. It wears them thin. Me, I'm a jerk and while a simple thank you goes a long way I do it more out of sense of accomplishment and expanding my coding skills.

tl;dr the tl;dr: Really, the tl;dr wasn't that long.

[locedafterdark]

true words and 3k thank you s from ppl who log here everyday! but dont spend time to read forums at all....

alsi mattmeck1 explained the whole update thingy very detailed

but ppl rather go nerd rage even while its xmas!

so a very happy xmas from me @ whole staff, I know very well its an unthankful job (sometimes )...

so I decided to put a little feedback to it

[enchant1]

I definitely like the philosophy behind this server - looking forward to putting parties together to do the lower-level instances. But I have some concerns...

We'll open transfers in the future, [ ... ] So, we'll wait until the realm is stable, self-reliant, and ready before we introduce transfers and blizzlike donations.

In the name of all that's holy... WHY??? This is like cooking a perfect steak and topping it with some dung.

So you're saying that once a core of pioneer players dedicate a lot of time to building up the population on that server, you'll let others just bring in their level 80 characters? And then at that point, what's the purpose of playing on Genesis? Just level up a character on Redemption for a day and transfer him over. No need for all those pesky lower-level dungeons, which I kinda thought was one of the major points of this new server.

vomygore made a good point earlier. What kind of assurances do we have that the quests (and instances, for that matter) actually work? On Redemption, it's not a critical issue, because the XP rate is so high that if half of the quests are bugged, it's still easy enough to level up. There are a LOT of quests that have never worked, and instances that are critically bugged (or not working - HoR).

Leave the vote and vip gear OUT of this one realm. Leave it with a level playing field.

[SpielerFrosch]

Answers in red.

Wait, what?

It appears you have failed to put any effort into understanding (or reading from those who do) what you are talking about. In doing so I fail to see why I should put any effort in rebutting any of your . But for the edification of others who read your and think "By golly this guy is right!", I'l go ahead and explain.

So you're afraid that others will read what I have written and go "Damn, she's right because it's true!" as opposed to being afraid of the fact that my complaints are shared by many and you suddenly have not one player but a whole playerbase pounding on Eternal's door? I mean, if all I write can be summed up by "blah, blah, worthless sh*t" then why bother explaining? Everyone but me will see how great things are, no need to get defensive, right?

Remorse 4.0: An effort of such magnitudes you probably think is just "click click, done" but is fact identifying every variable that is unsigned int 16 (limits your values to 65,536) and making sure each variable that touches it is changed to unint32 (limits your values to 4,294,967,295). Custom content with an old scripting platform and updating these scripts to smartyAI.

Did we mention that the core for Remorse hasn't received updates from upstream since December (how about neither has any other 255 fun realm)? There is a reason for that, all the changes required to make a trinitycore realm into the fun realm you experience which has items that wouldn't fit in uint16, and the npc scaling isn't built in.

Remorse 4.0 when it comes out is of such unprecedented magnitudes of developer time that you should say "Hey, maybe it's okay that they didn't spend their time doing ____ and instead put forth all this effort". A thank you would probably be nice too.

I don't really care about unprecedented magnitudes and mind-blowing inventions, a decent realm working as intended is just as fine, thank you. Not asking for a miracle, I and many other are well aware of the limit the codes and scripting (not to mention the core) pose. However, you made a great and most of all fun, relatively bug-free custom realm when opening Remorse.

Then I don't know what happened but half-way through 1.0 the team switched from working on bugs and skill balance to adding another set of gear with +XY added to every stat compared to the previous set, then another, some useless pets and mounts, more gear, weapons, more gear, leveling instances which did the exact same thing as the already existing leveling roads did (both the insanity road and the instance from 80 to 255) just divided into smaller level brackets which is kind of useless seeing as in the already established instance there’s no one to steal the mobs which are all non-agressive, eliminating the need of separation, more weapons and changed the skin of the teleporter from space goatse to valentine goblin.

In the meantime certain classes got overpowered while other underpowered. Warlocks have trouble even getting to lvl 255 because of being absolute weaklings and the butt of many jokes. Hunter gameplay consists of putting a marble on the key you binded auto-shoot to then go AFK while on auto-attack/assist mode. Same thing with Druids just switch auto-shoot to Mangle and you’re ready to go. These are just examples. Instead of sweating over the core you could go for a temporary solution until something better comes along. There are a bunch of custom weapons and gear piece. Add a few new ones, limit them to one class each then give them appropriate stats.

A lot of people whined for a decent healer or spell dps Druid. Make a „Staff of AreYouHappyNow” restricted to Druids which gives x and y heal bonus to Healing Wave then make a „Magical Hammer of ShutTheF*ckUp” restricted to Druids which gives x and y spell power bonus or makes Moonfire dmg x120. Those things dosen’t require Trinity core to be updated and do not muck up anything else if done with some thought to it (like not putting up another wep that gives 2234 x 2345 att power in feral form for the already OP Mangle spamming feral fellows).

Eternal (Redemption): I've taken it upon myself (mostly because I was bored and needed a change of pace / challenge) to fix a few of the class issues that I can. Those same fixes are easily applied to all 3 of our updated realms (Eternal / Redemption / Genesis) with 0 extra work by developers except running 2 commands. Recently new events that Gm's can run have been added that allow for more variety.

Extra realms do not take developer effort from existing realms, as I've already explained. Having a realm that is already under the same codebase as other existing realms with no new custom content makes the developer effort required near 0. Applying updates to this realm is the same as exporting our custom fixes (those not a part of trinitycore codebase) or using git to pull down the updated revisions and compiling.

The codes are the same, the patches are the same. But the new realm still needs the attention of developers and GMs. You can’t just click okay to a new line of code –so to speak- then go, watch a movie. You have to be present on the server, listen to player’s complaints or wishes, look into bugs they report and so on and so forth. And knowing the limited amount of staff I’m afraid that this attention will be taken from other realms. Matt himself said that Eternal lacks developers and GMs right now. It makes little sense to divide that work force even further at times when the other realms aren’t doing so good either.

Population: It's fitting that you should take your measurements at our slow time of the day. (Just like everywhere else, we have peak times, it's usually around 2pm server time). Today: Redemption peaked with ~1200 players, Remorse with just over 1000, Eternal with 800.

I picked several measurements, usually all of them on non-eventful weekends then looked at the average statistics. But okay, if you want peaks then play it your way despite peaks lasting a few hours and in no way inform us about the AVERAGE population which most of us encounter on an average day at an average time. Redemption peaks with 1200. Great. I actually remember times when it peaked between 2700 and 3000. Eternal peaks with 800? Nice. That was 1500 at it’s peak a year ago. Remorse 1000? Fabolous. Too bad there were times it was twice as much.

Our advertising and promotion efforts: One of the reasons we ask people to vote is quite obviously the "free" advertising we receive on top lists. Staff Admin Lyssaa and Senior GM Lyssaa with the help of our graphic artist DrekVinyard have all been busy putting the word out about Eternal on forums as well as paid advertising and banners.

I never said anything about advertisement. The website’s art is appealing, the forum is easy to use can be read without logging in/registering which is a nice feature if a new player decides to take a quick peek at the community and GMs dicking around there before joining the server. No, the problem is with the massive amounts of people leaving. Not all of them burn out from WoW. I had a lot of people on my friend’s list one year ago whom I actively played together with. What of them now? Most deleted their chars and went inactive or just plain went inactive and immigrated to another server, telling me to follow. People get bored of constantly getting told great things then seeing nothing coming true of those. Not to mention the feeling of being left to your own devices all the time. No GM presence, no help, events barely ever done and even then they’re done at the same times, screwing over Europe.

The sad reality is that the Private Server market is essentially a zero sum game, very few people that we gain as players didn't come from other private servers. The other untapped "market" is people in Eastern Europe and other far east countries. This is the same "market" that Retail WoW is staying afloat on. The "Western" market for WoW is dying. WoW is oldhat to Americans and most Western Europeans. I signed up for retail about a month ago to check it out and every capital was essentially ghost town during American prime time. Expect server consolidations.

too long; didn't read (tl;dr): Your fears of developer time dilution are unfounded. Quit thinking we're at our peak during our valley (5am is almost the lowest player count of the day). We can only do so much to build the community, being a part of that community you are responsible for shaping it as well. Developers don't talk to players because most of the time players act like you do and despite all the effort they put in every day are talked to by unthankful players. It wears them thin. Me, I'm a jerk and while a simple thank you goes a long way I do it more out of sense of accomplishment and expanding my coding skills.

People wouldn’t act like total dickwards if someone talked to them. Okay, there are exceptions but what can you do. You see them getting pissed off and comdemning the developers to eternal suffering in hell because no one tells them anything, they are thrown a bone with posts like „coming soon” „already working on it” „will be done when we finished testing” which wouldn’t be a problem if these weren’t said for months straight. Gives you a Duke Nukem Forever feeling that you just can’t shake off. If it won’t be done for half a year then fine, it won’t be done. But then tell that and don’t use the words „soon” and „development” in one sentence.


tl;dr the tl;dr: Really, the tl;dr wasn't that long.

I love how hurt everone gets the instant you don't praise whatever the developers or GMs do or plan to do. I’m as thankful for a good server as the next guy over there but if players continue cursing Eternal staff on global chat, party chat, guild chat and basically everywhere because of the bugs and lack of work then come on to the forums to lick boots and make an ass out of their mouth, nothing will ever change.

Developers and GMs will be happy that everyone loves them and the server, players will continue to pour their frustration to public chat channels and there won’t be any kind of honest communication between the two parties involved. I say what I see and think, you can dislike that as much as you want. After all, opinions are like testicles. You kick them hard enough, it dosen’t matter how many you’ve got.

[Denzo]

I must be honest, I really don't see the point of this realm.

People will just lvlup fast, since is 2x, is slightly faster than normal... The only reason why SOME players will do dungeons here, is because they are smarter than others and will run these dungeons to lvlup even faster than doing quests.

Once players hit 80, they still will be doing ICC, JUST ICC... You cannot change that, even with a new realm. As long as the realm is PvE, people wil STILL do ICC... You may think "let's close the raid then", that's even worse, people will just quit there. If they cannot get the best gear, and feel (for a week or more) they are the best players, they will just quit, nevertheless, they will just quit once they get this gear, and it's all their fault, because they hurry to get them, and no one ENJOYS a good raid, or a good dungeon.

I repeat once again, I don't see the point of this realm, at all... stupid idea imo.

Don't get mad, or feel insulted for what I said, also I'm not being negative, it's just my opinion.
I really value your work on these, but for me, is just stupid.

Regards.

[enchant1]

Once players hit 80, they still will be doing ICC, JUST ICC...

With what? The green items that give them a gs of about 1500?? Not likely. It's going to take them a LONG time to get to lvl 80, and you're going to have to hit the lower level dungeons along the way to get the gear you'll need. Once at level 80, it's going to be a LONG time getting the gear that will allow you to even consider ICC.

[SpielerFrosch]

Once players hit 80, they still will be doing ICC, JUST ICC...

With what? The green items that give them a gs of about 1500?? Not likely. It's going to take them a LONG time to get to lvl 80, and you're going to have to hit the lower level dungeons along the way to get the gear you'll need. Once at level 80, it's going to be a LONG time getting the gear that will allow you to even consider ICC.

On a different server with a slightly higher rate (3x) realm I got to 80 in a month without even trying and with only having time to play on weekends not to mention constantly getting PKed. It was a PvP server. People will skyrocket to 80 in no time here as well and then comes the sad reality of Redemption and Eternal where everyone tries to Fos/Pos/Icc but can't get into enough raids due to ridicolous GS requirements and lack of active player base. On that 3x realm I farmed reputations (Ebon Blade, Argent Crusade, Oracles, etc.) to Exalted to get good enough gear for Pos/Fos in what? 3 weeks at max maybe? It's not that hard and slow if you know where to look and what to do instead of aimlessly running/flying around. Peeps will get bored fast just like on the other realms.

[PandaPals03]

The GMs aren't here to make friends we are essentially the police force of the server. we are always the butt of jokes and we are always the first ones that get complained about even though we have no control over bugs.....
As for the developers, let me assure you that they are working night and day to come up with fixes for the existing bugs we have < which mind you are minimal compared to 99% of any other private server out there>. This new server might take up a total of say 5 to 10 minutes of a single devs time < to put in updates> but it is going to be so little that it really don't even count. Yes the new realm is going to take up GM resources to be there and do what we normally do on the other realms but we are also getting in tons of new gm applications every day and so we are doing a good amount of hiring and training new mods ( more mods means eventually we will get more gms and so on and so forth> meaning quicker answering of tickets / handling of donations. We are essentially doing our best to bring you guys a quality gaming experience on our end. The opening of the new realm, while it might look like it is just a distraction to some, is going to bring a bit more players into the Eternal community and hopefully will give some players that are bored of what we had been offering a fresh new place to spend their time without leaving eternal.

As for transfers its just an option we are looking at we might not end up doing it. Nothing has been decided on 100% yet. But if it comes down to the realm needing population I wouldn't see anything wrong with allowing guilds transfers < from other servers and possibly even our own> but it's just one of those things we are going to have to sit back and wait and see what happens before we make any decisions.

[Cyph3r]

Answers in red.
Population: It's fitting that you should take your measurements at our slow time of the day. (Just like everywhere else, we have peak times, it's usually around 2pm server time). Today: Redemption peaked with ~1200 players, Remorse with just over 1000, Eternal with 800.

I picked several measurements, usually all of them on non-eventful weekends then looked at the average statistics. But okay, if you want peaks then play it your way despite peaks lasting a few hours and in no way inform us about the AVERAGE population which most of us encounter on an average day at an average time. Redemption peaks with 1200. Great. I actually remember times when it peaked between 2700 and 3000. Eternal peaks with 800? Nice. That was 1500 at it’s peak a year ago. Remorse 1000? Fabolous. Too bad there were times it was twice as much.

I wanted to respond to one thing, which kind of completely invalidates the whole premise of your argument. Your numbers are not factual..., but instead based in some kind of alternate reality. I watch the numbers more than anyone, and even if I humanly made a mistake (I do), I have the entire history of our realm populations in the form of graphs that are updated constantly. The EXACT highest player count Redemption has ever had was 1631, and that was for exactly 30 seconds. The more realistic peak was about 1500 for one month on Sundays at 1PM server time. Outside of that month, peaks at our best were around 1400'ish on Sundays and currently it is around 1250 on Sundays. A reduction? Yes. A mass exodus? Not hardly. Same thing with Remorse. Highest 20 second peak was 1447. Normal Sunday peak during best month, 1300. One of the things Redemption has lost players to is our other launched realms. Cannibalism of your own product by another product that is also yours is not a bad thing.

Since you care so much about averages, let me give them to you... Exactly... Eternal: 495.36, Redemption: 879.73, Remorse: 645.19.

That being said, we've lost some players and it's frustrating. So have *almost* all of the servers I've been looking at, save exactly two in my mind. Regardless of the rest of your post which has already been responded to and to which I find parts I mostly disagree with and some parts that personally motivate me to want to try even harder... The core staff of this server pour their heart into the server, and I don't believe as a whole we could have tried harder. Sure, we can nitpick about specific areas where we could have done a little better, but hindsight is always 20/20, right?

Regardless, I appreciate your comments, that although they came off a bit harsh, I can tell the right spirit of constructive criticism was behind it.

We will keep trying hard, and some of your criticisms - specifically more frequent updates to the custom realms - are things we've been focusing on resolving in the last month or two. Case in point, Remorse and Eternal... But that has already been detailed in other threads.