Disclaimer: I have nothing against anyone servers personally and everything is just a matter of personal opinion. I understand the difficulty and sheer amount of time required building a server. In order for me to fully explain my point, I have to bring in my past experience of servers (as a player) and my personal opinion based on what I know today. I have played most of these servers myself, so my opinions are not just from an outside perspective.
I think everyone puts the effort into their servers, but peoples judgement and development direction is clouded.
The Problem?
User Count Bloating + Greed
Why?
The direction that some servers have taken over the past few years is clearly shown in the servers and the features that they focus their time on. To best way for me to describe this is give direct comparisons to ideas that I.. feel are personally destroying this game.
Apocalypse V2 - This servers focus was clearly designed to exploit people with gambling addictions, promoting a new sense of P2W that exploits the vulnerable. Allowing people to spend £1000+ individually on hopes of achieving better gear to compete. This became so excessive that it collapsed on itself, which the players found were unacceptable and recalled.
For some reason, this was spun against the players and LOMCN only agreed with the developers in their clear abuse of this game. It should not be accepted to exploit thousands, I can only assume 50K+ was accumulated from this originally before the recalls. At no point were the players opinions ever listened to and it was always them at blame. The players with real life gambling problems, being exploited who were baited into an addiction.. blame them without discussion? Also they thought £2.40 for an HOUR of double exp was acceptable, they even advertised it as 200% even though it was +100% in a way to falsely advertise it in the store. They acknowledged this, but again no care given and nothing was changed as it didn't benefit their pockets.
We have now their developer/s moving onto a NEW server with the same gambling systems, with a non-refundable system to further exploit people. LOMCN have not closed the previous server and are still allowing the advertisement and forum hosting of a dead, inactive, non-updated server that the developers have decided the best course of action is to make a new one.
Artificial Mir - The user count designs on this from launch were insane, it had no connection limit and the primarily source of gold income was through fishing and mining. As a result of this player were pushed into having around 10 separate connections running to fish in a non-PK safe zone that had storm gems, armour casts (BDAs) and pretty much made you rich doing so. Not to mention all the AFK miners, Blackstone pet farming and excessive expiry items such as the premium dungeons and EXP scrolls that were pretty much required to level to keep up.
As a result of these systems it forced a user count of something stupid like 500. Logging into your Guild Territory, showed there was easily 50 fishers in each one as you couldn't get PK'd in there and people could just make millions daily by not playing. All this was intentionally designed.. this is the important part to remember here.. INTENTIONAL decisions.
Alliance - Intentionally designed fishing INSTANCES, with a player limit or random distribution of players in order to hide the false user counts. This was pointed out to me by a friend who had 5 fishers running on this server. He noticed that all 5 of these were teleported to individual instances which had a limit of 10 people per instance. These instances were non-PK, no @map available and prevented people from grasping a sense of the real user count. That combined with stalls, mining etc.. you have another bloated user count that was INTENTIONALLY designed by the developers.
The list could keep going on stalls, auto-play, crypto mining, auto this.. auto that.. but this all boils down to user count monitoring and how it's shaping the community.
How is this causing the problem?
People in this communtiy generally and primarily move towards the server with the highest user count. I've been a player and now developer and have seen it from both sides. Players require a community, which they cannot decipher what is real or not by looking at MirTracks. This game is now more about jumping between servers for most people, because they feel a server has 'died' when user counts dip or rise on another. They are stuck in a circle of rinse and repeat in hopes of finding a stable Mir2 community, which I feel most are sick of and have moved on already.
We've lost some amazing players in this community already and the ones remaining are on their last straw. Many developers are now focusing their efforts on promoting user count bloating, so they can boast that their server is the most popular in hopes to bring in players and generate more profits.
WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE?
Scrap the user count monitoring on LOMCN MirTracks. Why should a server be promoted to the top for being the highest user count, where as longevity and stability is no longer promoted? Servers like Chrons, Arcadia, Banshee etc who have shown stability and commitment shouldn't be scored based on their user count which we have proved now is fake, bloated and there is no way to PROVE is real.
Someone can simply just write their own user count in the server code, set it to 5000 and there's no way to prove it.. so why are we allowing such a terrible system to be the primary way to promote servers?
When we look at MirTracks, we should be looking at UPTIME and activity from the GMs.
- Last patch/update
- Uptime
These should be more important than a pump and dump server, that has no intention of staying open as long as possible. If they know it's easier to close and re-open another for profits, then this shouldn't be constantly promoted by the LOMCN admins.
The Situation Now!
PUMP AND DUMP features and servers are promoted and no rules or protection is in place by LOMCN. The developers now know it's better to fake it, to make £ as the main source of income for these servers are within the first 2 months. As long as they can pump an insane amount of money into these two months, it'll fund the next server.
Obviously not all the servers have the same problem and are doing this, but some of this is historical and present so the problem for some is already done.
I don't expect everyone to agree with my opinion or idea of removing the user count, but it's the only quick way to stop developers from abusing this mentality and forces people to focus of longevity and commitment.
We need change or this community will dwindle even further and we will lose what's left of this nostalgic game to greed of misdirection of development. Please change this admins.. or the developers will have to do something, who are now sick and tired of this.
