First of all, thank you for all the feedback, many good point and ideas. We are considering everything and we do make notes of the greatest ideas. They might get implemented too at some point! I personally love the idea of adventures similar to the hive instance with IP limit..for some special treasure..
Let me begin with this, there will never be a server state that keeps everyone happy. We know that from experience but regardless we would like to make as many players happy as possible. That means we would like to support solo gaming, boxing and yes, even raiding for social guilds. It's also important to understand, THF is not a solo server and while we offer a lot of solo content, you will need a guild or at least few friends if you would like to 'see it all'. We are all different and we all play in different style so there's no point in arguing about what we do and how we do it, we are all here to have fun.
Now, to the point. Lately, we were looking at other servers and we came to the conclusion that something is different, we are loosing numbers (even more than others) and that means something is not right, something that we might be able to fix.
Since THF is live you can box as many character as you like, itemization concept and donator items are the same as always been in terms of item power vs. content difficulty, overall population on eqemu is still pretty much the same. So what did really change?
We believe that the issue is content difficulty and the reason is pretty simple. We allowed MQ2 usage a while back and it opened up a new world for some players in terms of power. We kept making content harder and harder to entertain around 5% of the playerbase at the top tiers. These players were able to play 40+ characters together just 2-3 of them with MQ2, (and let's be fair with some real talent) they kept defeating everything and it lead to even harder content. This difficulty for the majority is simply not fun or at least it's not something they could overcome without frustration.
We believe that this is what we did wrong. Everyone or at least mostly anyone should see the end content, without having to box 40+ characters or recruit 40+ real person to a raid. Our top tiers are really awesome. Vaion is doing a great job creating these fun tiers. I personally believe that when it comes to custom content, they are exceptional eqemu-wise.
The other mention-able issue is difficulty gap. We don't want players to get frustrated with difficulty gaps either.
After a long debate (we also have a developer round table running :p) we came to the conclusion that a maximum of 18 men (be it real players or boxers) should be the most required to conquer the highest tiers. We would also like to remove any and all huge difficulty gaps to eliminate any kind of 'frustration factor' anyone would experience. These are our two main focuses now.
Now, we won't do anything that would ruin anyone's fun or would make anyone upset. We won't 'take anything away'. We will keep doing what we did until now, supporting solo players, boxers and raiders. We are making the content smoother, definitely not dumbing it down, but making it more linear in terms of progression. We would also like to lower (where it's needed) the top tier difficulty so it won't require anymore armies of players (or boxers). A few tweaks will hopefully achieve this goal so please keep posting if you would still have any suggestion.
As for donator gear. We will not let our server supporters down and there will be no nerfs at all, ever. We listen to some concerns that some players think they are mandatory for the high-end gaming but the recent changes will hopefully address these concerns. Also, we rather would like to think of donator items as precious shortcuts to a greater power than something you have to have to be able to progress. Now that being said, we don't want to make these items obsolete either, so they will remain in great power and stay useful as they always were and they will keep showing our appreciation to the ones who decide to support the server. Thank you once again for all of you.
Server lag and desync is another hot topic. Please understand that it has rarely anything to do with server hosting. The server is in a world class datacenter (in Europe). This datacenter also hosts one of the top 10 visited website/conent provider in the world (yeah, it's adult content if you are wondering..). Moving the server from point A to B would only change your ping, if anything at all.
Now that being said, lag and desync can come from many sources. We made several posts about it so not going to repeat all of that now, but let me mention one thing. If the you do experience lag, in a given zone, during a given raid while others also experience it the same way you do now that is something we can look into fixing it (code, quests, server setting, etc). We are constantly working on this so please keep reporting it if you would exprience it.
Oh, those distillers.. We keep running those Prize Wheels. We plan to introduce something similar to the prize wheel but more fun (treasure goblin tba
). We will also lower the in-game distiller price from 150 to 75 AA points. We will also offer a new package for server supporters (including a token to summon unlimited distillers along with a portable augmentation sealer). We hope all of these actions will help the distiller topic at least a little bit.Lastly. We really appreciate all your feedback and I am personally really glad to see all the posts even from players who are taking a break or not playing anymore. It shows that our community is really exceptional and THF is a special place for all of us. Thank you guys! Please keep the feedback coming, we'll do our best to make as many changes as needed to make THF a fun and enjoyable place for the majority.
/cheers
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