A Deep Breath and a Step Back.

[Kulamata]

Things seem to be going well. The policy shift towards improving the game by removing irritants, fixing classes,improving the low level experience, and adding a layer of polish does seem to be recalling players and keeping players. And perhaps the ads are pulling in new ones. GREAT!

Ever since the merge,the content that was developedlike Ancient Rite, Tandalar, tier V, and dragon lairs, was all more or less obvious extensions of what went before. Given the challenges of shard merger, plot issues, reduced staff, the bankruptcy, moving and what all, agreat dealwas done with little time to reflect.

With the worst leaks in the dike plugged, it may be time to step back and take a fresh look at the game's overall direction, from a high level perspective.

I'd suggest a story arc. There were indications once that went nowhere. The Lich King; where is he now? The Eastern Continent; did it fall off the map? The imprisonment of DarkStaff; how does he fare? Dissent, turmoil, and backstabbing amongst the WA leaders; who won? The Maggot Lord marched his minions down the mountain; did he march them back again?

If there were a story arc in mind, written down as an internal development guide, there would be less of an ad hoc feel to events.
An example of an ad hoc addition; the new werewolf islands. Gave the constructors a project, brought werewolves back into our lives, gave us mobs with fresh capabilities, probably was a quick but effective development, but it had no story line content at all.

Premerge, with more or less twice the current staff, and using material apparently developed pre-release, we had the tunnels, the reclaiming of Feladan, the dryad event cluster, the islands and satyrs freed,and finally the Vielo and the Novian machine. In eight months.

It will be a while before that pace can be matched again. But if events were connected, with a story line slowly emerging, it would givenew content more impact, and give a bigger bang for the buck.It would also give a sense of anticipation that would help retain players.

[Tryagain]

maybe time for Tulga to do just that.

[Thug]

Maybe it's time to work more on the mechanics and less on the polish.

I can polish a few things I can readily think of.. that doesn't mean I'll like them any better. Although, at first glance, they may appear to be pretty.

And Tulga has done just that with this game... it's very pretty. I'm not going to get into all the problems, but the bottom line is they really need to take a look at the engine, fix the foundation problems and stop worrying about the NPC's grammar and spelling.. fix the loot tables, fix the collission tables/bounding boxes for the selectable entities (such as mobs) so they don't melt into each other and make looting them impossible (especially now that /setscale is going away). Fix the baseline problems and THEN worry about the asthetics and how well an NPC's grammar rates.

:)