Greetings Fellow Istarians and developers,

As some may have noticed in the Order thread, I am leaving the game for the foreseeable future. While I have enjoyed my time here and will miss the friends I've made and the hunts we shared and the buildings we built...I believe it is finally time to move on. I do not say goodbye, but until next time...

As to next time, and while these points are not what caused me to leave, I can not honestly say they did not make it a little easier:

1) Consider looking and and or streamlining the data transfer/bandwidth, whatever you want to call it. I do realize the new company is small, thusly they have a small development staff and limited resources unlike EVE which I am going to compare Istaria to. I can log into EVE and play for 5 hours and there is less bandwidth used than just logging into Istaria. When I had cable this was no issue, but my location limits me to either 2G/dial-up...and I have very little issues playing EVE...where it can take 10-15 minutes just to log into and load Istaria.

2) Again, I am glad to see things developing in the land and it isn't going stagnant as it did before the great upheaval. I have seen much in the way of fixing little things here and there, currently upgrading Tier 2 areas. There is also the dungeon, yet I am seeing two issues with the direction of changes: a) They seem for the most part to be adventurer oriented, and b) leaning towards group/raid style mobs.

Yes...this is a MMO...but...in the realm of role-playing there are those that prefer the solitary role/play-style, not to mentino those like me that are crafters by heart and adventure to further those ends. I'm seeing nothing coming for crafters, or even hinted at. Not to go into the fiasco years back that affected so many and got people banned, but the items exist...so why haven't we seen some T6 items and formulas? backpacks, scalepacks, etc? Yeah...we've got the cooking knife and I think one other.

3) The NPC exists, and we've heard about the Loyalty Program...but that's been well over a year now and...nothing? enough said there I think.


Over all. I really have to give the development team kudos...they've done a lot with very little. But people don't need big changes (lets not get into politics here) to make them happy...a lot of little changes can do a lot too.

So keep up the good work and...

Until Next Time...

Aaelefein