So Tochy wants a response from an Imm, and in particular from Shorty, since 'This is HIS mud '.
But is it really? Sure, Shorty is one of the Founders, and without him and Kalten there wouldn't even be a 4D. But, let's face it, he kind of lost interest years back and even if he still logs on sometimes to socialize a bit, he hasn't been active for a very long time. And if he hasn't even realised by now that this discussion is going on, he is not likely to have an opinion.
So who IS the owner? Normally the one that has the server or pays the bills for it is considered the owner, so in that case that would be me. Another way of looking at it would be that the Coders own the mud, because they have unlimited access to everything. But to me everyone who puts down significant and consistent work on the Mud - builders and coders alike - is a co-owner, so in that case we have several owners.
Anyhow, here is my own response: (All this has probably all been said before, so regard it as a summing up).
1. The pwipe and the equip wipe are two different things.
We need the pwipe for the new combat system to work, and to revive the Mud, where currently most older players just idle at Recall.
Hopefully the new combat system and the skill trees can bring some new interest and challenges for everyone, old and new players alike. But for it to work, everybody needs to start from scratch. There really is no way to keep your level and still have a go at the new system, it's too different.
The change will have to be playtested before we even think of putting it in the gameport, so for quite a while we're going to run paralell ports.
We need the equip wipe to get rid of inflation, and a number of overpowered 'illegal' objects that are still in the game, but hard to track down, because those that have them guard their secrets.
The pwipe seems to be pretty accepted by most players by now, but some players cling to their belongings, for various reasons; power, status, lazyness, or sheer nostalgia.
2. The equip and house wipe needs to be all or nothing.
Letting some players keep their tokens, houses and perzes would only creates imbalance and resentment, since we'd have to draw the line somewhere, and everyone below that line will suffer the most and feel that they were treated injustly.
It also won't work against inflation. We want things like houses and perzes and heals to be cheaper, so that those things won't be out of reach for the newer players, who are the ones needing them the most.
We tried a half ass compromise the only other time we had to do a major overhaul, the so called 'grandfather clause' that Toch mentioned. I sometimes think that many of the oldbies stopped playing, or started idling at Recall because of the grandfather clause rather than in spite of it, since it gave them such a big head start that they didn't need to make an effort. And most of the players that left had lost interest in the game even before. I also think that the grandfather clause is at the root of our present inflation, because instead of dealing with the problems back then, we just made them bigger.
3. If we do an equipwipe, we also need to wipe all questflags.
Otherwise people won't have the chance to get their stuff back, because nowadays all quests are set up so that you only get the big token reward once.
4. Even with an equipwipe, the older players will have big advantages.
Sure, the older players usually have a lot more to lose than the newer ones.
But in return it will be easier for them to level, because they know their way around the world, where to find useful things and where to fight at different levels.
It will also be easier for them to redo the quests, because a quest is really just hard the first time. Even if you forgot what you did, it will be easier to figure out again. It's like cycling. Once you learnt the technique it never goes away.
Knowledge is the one thing we cannot take away.
So the older players, who choose to actually continue playing, will race right to the top again.
The active players, (meaning the ones that are currently active) will also have big advantages, even if they are lower level, since they will be up to par with the newest zones and the latest changes in the older ones - and the zones will be the same.
I don't see this as a bad thing. It's natural that people should have some advantages for playing the Mud for such a long time.
5. With an equipwipe we'll be able to lower prices on just about everything.
The prices are insane right now, due to inflation, both token and gold are affected.
As an example, a house used to cost 1 gold token. Now even the cheapest house costs 5 gold.
Newbies, who are the ones that really need potions, cannot afford them, while the older players, who use spells instead, just ackumulate gold.
All economies suffer inflation over time, but in some cases it goes out of hand.
In our case, the inflation was caused by mainly 4 things; an unstable code, some crash bugs, buggy quest scripts and badly designed features. I'll have to take a lot of the responsibility for the last two ones myself, since when we started 4D over 10 years back, I was very inexperienced. I went from never even having played a Mud to being Head Builder in less than a year, and as a result I did many mistakes - we all did.
Some bugs were a bit funny, like the Sicilian's 'secret weapon', others, like players deliberately crashing the mud to duplicate things or to abuse features like farming, gardening and lumberjacking, were just plain irritating. Over some periods there was also extensive blabbing about quests, which lead to players having items that they never would have been able to get on their own.
Now we have patched most of the glitches, fixed the bad scripts and removed the features that enabled people to pharm unlimited tokens. New bugs will appear, they always do with new code and new zones, but we know a lot more about how to avoid them nowadays.
6. Nothing will be removed, just put on hold.
We wouldn't delete any player houses, they would still be connected to the world, although they wouldn't be crashproof and everyone would be able to enter them, until you pay the fee for them again. (When it comes to bragging value, that would rather be enhanced than the opposite, when everyone can view your mansion).
Same thing with perzes, the items would still be there, waiting to be rebought, unless of course you'd prefer making new ones.
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In summary; all things considered, I've gone from being totally against an equipment wipe to being in favour of it. I understand how traumatic it would be for some players, but it would solve so many problems in one strike. And we'd never get a better chance of doing it, than in connection with a major code change.
This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance.
We are also lucky enough to have a coder, who has both the ability, the time and the will to put down all the effort needed for a major change.
Let's not waste that opportunity!
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