Character Wipe: Discussion

[Jfloyd]

3. Because it would be a bad idea to start out a new world if it wasn't on a relatively even plain

I disagree. If everyone eas equal, and had nothing, it'd be just like before. Everyone would be running around making baskets until they could get their first skills.
If we keep players who have all the skills, the newer people would be able to join the towns that would form, and those towns would form a whole lot quicker.

[sami1337]

I am not gonna vote for two reasons. 1) it's usless 2) more than half of the votes are made by people that normally never enter in discussions or actively take part in reporting bugs. They do nothing to help advance the game, yet they vote.

[Fcn]

3. Because it would be a bad idea to start out a new world if it wasn't on a relatively even plain

I disagree. If everyone eas equal, and had nothing, it'd be just like before. Everyone would be running around making baskets until they could get their first skills.
If we keep players who have all the skills, the newer people would be able to join the towns that would form, and those towns would form a whole lot quicker.

This is a good point.

[kaka]

Ferinex's point is even better, imho.
He said just what I've been thinking. :)

[kobnach]

I think it's all been said already There's a major correlation between character age and desire for character wipe. This makes the "vote" rather silly.

Why does it make the vote silly? First of all, it's not official. Second of all, are you saying that everyone elses answers arent valid because they are newer? I would say the opposite: the people are newer so they are relatively unaffected by character reset and see that it's a useful and necessary thing, while the people against it don't care about it being practical, they just want to keep their precious characters

It's silly because the devs can figure out the result by looking at statistics on character age - and in any case they didn't call the vote, and will probably ignore it. Voting for or against the devs' stated plans is pretty useless.

Also, as far as "useful and necessary", the only arguments I've seen in favour are:
- other people are bigger than me, and some got that way using opportunities I don't have. I want a level playing field.
- I expect there to be no more imbalances after the map reset, so we should start fresh
- having all players newbs together is somehow better, at least on a new map, even if it will result in higher level features not being tested for days or even weeks
- I'm bored with my character, and want to be a newb again, so everyone else should be a newb too

The second of these seems unduly optimistic; the others seem to be completely bogus. Hence my belief that the main motivation is "I wanna" (the first reason).

[copyannon]

It's a moot point now, but I think a character wipe would be interesting because of the massive alt storage program going on right now. Let people keep their highest guy and everything he's carrying, but this alt abuse is going to make it so entire towns just pop up overnight. Considering that one of the map changes is going to be about resource distribution specifically, I don't think that's helpful for testing the new map at all.

Another reason for this (and this isn't really a very good one) is it seems that the impending map reset (and perhaps, to a lesser extent, boredom with the relative fullness of the current map) has people just squirrelling resources away on the aforementioned alt vaults instead of doing anything fun with them like some huge ridiculous building project. I like the idea of meeting the end of this world by doing something huge and insane with the player base's vast resources, instead of just holding them over so we don't have to try and figure out how the new world works until after we have footholds.

[niltrias]

It's a moot point now, but I think a character wipe would be interesting because of the massive alt storage program going on right now. Let people keep their highest guy and everything he's carrying, but this alt abuse is going to make it so entire towns just pop up overnight. Considering that one of the map changes is going to be about resource distribution specifically, I don't think that's helpful for testing the new map at all.

Another reason for this (and this isn't really a very good one) is it seems that the impending map reset (and perhaps, to a lesser extent, boredom with the relative fullness of the current map) has people just squirrelling resources away on the aforementioned alt vaults instead of doing anything fun with them like some huge ridiculous building project. I like the idea of meeting the end of this world by doing something huge and insane with the player base's vast resources, instead of just holding them over so we don't have to try and figure out how the new world works until after we have footholds.

This would be a very good reason for a wipe, if altvaults were being fixed at the same time. But as far as I know, they arent.

[Spiff]

Alts aren't the problem. Gods are. My biggest problem is that there are a few characters who due to their age (no fault of their own) and the linear level/power system have essentially become untouchable gods to 99% of the population. This is a huge problem and the ability for this to happen needs to be corrected. To me, after fixing the base problem, it seems that a character wipe to clear out the gods (after the problem has been prevented from occuring again) seems to make sense.

[copyannon]

The alt vault problem is hugely weird at the moment, and I really have no good idea on how that could be fixed. For the new world, though, letting players flag a character to determine which get saved (or having it just go to time played by default) would allow players to keep their main character. I think that would be a decent compromise between keeping characters that, let's face it, we're a bit invested in, and allow this to really feel like a new world.

Edit:

To Spiff: The death of the god characters would be remarkably fitting for a Ragnarok type event, I have to say. I'm just looking for a compromise here that allows for testing the new resources of the new world more fully. As it stands, most towns will probably have enough to rebuild with practically nothing from the new world, so we won't really see what it takes to do that until the next new player wave hits and they try to make a town.

Or, baring that, I could see if I could wrangle some folks to try and make a town while only using the resources available on-map, but that's going to be a hard sell with all the other towns just popping up, I reckon.

[kaka]

If "gods" really are a problem, wouldn't capping the stats at the map reset be a better solution?
If "alt vaults" are a problem, why not clear everyones inventory, and perhaps their equipment, at the map reset?

No reason to strip everyone of everything when you can just remove the "bad" parts.