All righty, here goes... strap in, cause it's going to take a bit of rambling onwards at this point.
First off, subscriptions and store disappearing... Are you seriously kidding mem like for real? Not only would you accidentally force people who spend several hundreds, in total, of dollars to make those investments totally useless [or are you planning on giving them 24 years of account time], but those who actually bought items before, would suddanly see their 3 years of playing, collecting, fighting etc... be gone... I'm fairly confident you'd keep 0 players with that kind of attitude. Yes, things have to be reconsidered, yes cheaters are the most annoying part of online game, but no, we can not go swamps direction with a subscription at least. Lets take the motd as a base here:
Message of the day: Thank you all for your input on this MOTD so far. Remember, these ideas are all just talk, and some of them that are suggested below are just bad. But this is what I am starting to lean twards doing. From what it seems like, there are some who want more realism, food rotting and such, as it is a survival game. Others thretton to leave the game if that system is introduced. So, again, just thoughts and no actions at this time PLEASE REMEMBER THAT, what if we do both. What if when you make your character, or with old characters when the update comes out that would do this, you have a choice to make. A permanent choice. You can choose to make your character a collector, or a survivor. If you choose collector, well, basically you just keep all your items and the game continues as it did before. If you choose survivor, that's when food starts rotting and you have to build structures to store items etc etc, but, but... You get loads of pirks. You can train your character to do things. To have spread with weapons, to make them have longer range, to be able to see farther, to be able to get over 1000 health, to be able to do more damage with certain weapons, to regain energy faster when sleeping, to lose energy slower when walking, to have access to more types of food and other items, and who knows what else we could think of. Maybe fires start at higher health, you lose 15 instead of 10 thirst when drinking water, you can forge faster, etc etc etc. The possibilities could be endless. You wouldn't get them all at the start, but you'd have to work for them, and yes older food and stuff in your inventory would slowly go away. As a collector, you get to keep your items exactly as they are, but the more items you have, the less you could learn other skills and they wouldn't be nearly as effective as we can imagine that all of your energy is being spent passivly keeping all of your items in tact and somehow being a superhuman that can handle all of those items in one place. The choice of roles would be up to you. Would this not give everybody the choice they want, between the old ways of simple item storage, and being able to advance your character? Please give feedback on this idea with /suggest! Original MOTD below.
I'm curious about a certain type of suggestion in particular. We all know that STW's item inflation, mostly due to those with hundreds of DFCs, is off the charts. Regardless of what people may think, I never wanted that for this game. Though of course, we need a server and this game is my only income. I am curious and will be reading the /suggest log, if you were the owner of the game, what would you do to start the process of fair item deflation. Many people say, and currently I agree, that STW is very pay to win. I pretty much agree, though this was never my intention. But I'm curious, for those who think that, what defines winning in this game, and what would you do to solve the problem in a fair way? In my case, I don't really think it is possible to win in a game like STW, but it is more or less impossible to die with the right amount of DFCs, so maybe many people would think that winning is when you won't ever die. As for fixing the problem, some of my ideas include recoding the clothing system to make some clothing act as armor, doing what should have been done ages ago and make old food begin to rot, old pots begin to crumble, old dead animals becoming bacteria infested and other old items in other ways expire. I'd raise the prices of death free cards, but it would be unfair because of those who already purchased them at this price. In an ideal world, I would want the game set up so that a character could only have like 50 dfc's in their inventory, and so that they could only ever get new ones once every 24 or 48 hours. Or maybe somehow making it so that DFC's make you lose some of your items that you have in the greatest quantities if you die. At one point I even considered coding some sort of STW robbinhood, a certain beast that would attack only those players with absolutely crazy amounts of DFCs and items. It's an interesting topic, because so few ways exist to fix this problem in any kind of fair manner aside from making an entirely new game and starting over. I considered making this system where you could get stw points for trading death free cards to characters that couldn't get them. All sorts of stuff I've been considering, and I'm curious to see what other people have to say on the subject of item deflation in STW. Of course the game's most unrealistic point out of all of it's many is that the inventory is weightless and for paid accounts can hold an infinent number of items. I hate how STW isn't really a survival game anymore but is only an item collection game for anyone who has a paypal account and a lot of extra money. So I'm curious of people's suggestions. How do we not stop selling stuff because that would make people rage and it would eventually cause us to lose our server and things, NTM these paid accounts are the last line of defense with cheaters, but how do we also balance things better and fairly get rid of these insanely huge inventories in place for a better player balance and more realism. Keep in mind I'm not saying what will happen or even that things will, but while I'd of course like other suggestions to come in, I'm curious to see what people think on this subject, so please use /suggest with any thoughts and ideas on the matter!
I'm sure everyone is wondering what happened with JohnCina. Unfortunately, looking at logs showed some breaches of the administration rules that were enough to make us have to demote him for the time being. Details on these breaches will not be given, but it was enough to cause a demotion to happen. The delay in this message was because we wished to talk to him about these breaches in detail first before any public announcement was made. These were not very large breaches and there is no need for concern. But out of respect for Cina, we won't publish any details on what happened unless he gives us permission to do so, as the breaches weren't large enough to warrent that. On the other hand though, Amine, one of our old admins pretty well known, has agreed to return once again!
What if, you just get to keep one card and a few teleporters or so once you load up as surviver or collector... while all other cards, and teleporters stay stored for uses next time. You'd still have your paid items, you just wouldn't be able to have them all at your disposal at once. It goes without saying that the playingfeeld would become lots more even that way, because given the current system, if you don't have a dfc, you could use other methods to sircumvent that.
Now to be clear, i'd still want to find a way for older players to not suddanly lose all their items, while keeping the freedom to pick surviver, but that's matter for further discussion, because i'm sort of out of ideas at this point as to how to make it look appealing.
2. Cheaters from a dev / admin pov as apposed to a player pov... For me cheating is:
- finding a way to obtain more "starter" items. As you could figure out on your own "starter" items are ment to "start" you out, not for you to kill yourself over and over to stack more of them and have a more extensive starter inventory.
- quests are meant to be done once per account, resulting in a certain amount of points to be used to buy items. Those accounts are not ment to buy items and give them to any main account, because that technically would mean that main account did those quests more than once, witch is not how things are defined.
- there's a whole section in the rules about cheating, so I'd suggest you to read that to get a fuller picture.
3. Others... There's a saying: "don't judge a book by its cover" so you could have downloaded the update before spouting opinions about how bad things are, maybe they had improved... lol
If there's something i might have forgotten, i will try to reread stuff later on...