Quote:
Originally Posted by Lanterra
I always had the feeling that part of the low number of players was the relative lack of advertising, plus the fact that 2D is less popular for the other styles of MMORPGs [despite being just as fun, love wyvern.]
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We opted not to advertise much while in the balance/bug fix stage and instead were saving up a lot of plans for one big promotional period after the game became stable and better able to handle larger number of players. However, server stability has been our chief issue [in regard to maintaining a healthy playerbase] since Rhialto stopped working on the server in 2003. Things went from Rhialto getting it to where it could handle 100 simultaneous players, with his eye on the 250 and 500 marks, to only being able to handle 80, then 60, then 40 players, etc.
So anyway, although retro style 2D games obviously will never be as popular as shiny 3D games, if we have a server capable of handling hundreds of players at once (which really should not be so difficult for this type of game - it's a cost/time issue on Rhialto's part) the game does have the potential to be able to fill up those slots. But, in order for Wyvern to do its absolute best we'd also need to put some work into such things as; shoring up the last of the major balance/bug issues, (as already mentioned) increasing our wizard ranks so that there are more people available to work on day-to-day content, and improving accessibility.
The problem is that not only do our server woes require Rhialto's involvement, but so do a lot of other things. For example, although part of the reason we don't have more wizards working for us is that there's less of a pool of people to recruit without a healthy playerbase, the old system of promoting everyone with a little bit of potential so they had the chance to test their work and learn as they did their work on the server, led to a huge turn-over of problem wizards just to get to a handful of good ones. As a result of this being majorly flawed, (and those handful of good ones doing some talented work right off the bat/early on in their wizard careers) our standards have become a lot higher. In order to best help people to reach those standards, what we need is for people to be able to test their work before becoming a wizard so that they can play around and craft their talent prior to submitting a proposal to us. That means either a test server or a new map editor that people can test their maps in.
Again, Rhialto is needed for that and same goes for improving accessibility. To put it simply; We need a new client... as our current one has aged, a lot more people have been unable to use it to play Wyvern. Contrare helped a bit with restoring the Webstart client and maybe if we made it the default client, it would make things even easier for newcomers. However, we really need to be able to keep up with the times and that means mobile and web based clients. Rhialto had put some work into making the latter feasible before restoring the game the last time, but it would require months of work, on
his part, before it could actually become a reality.
In short, Wyvern has a lot of potential. But, its problem has always been that it suffers from a lack of support at the highest level. As a result, the server degraded, our technology has become out of date, and balance/bug issues built up/went unfixed. That last bit was something Teshuvah, Contrare, and myself had put a lot of work into improving and as a result of having to do a lot of it all at once (because it had built up) it turned some people off. But we were past the turbulent early period of that work and we weren't
that far off from being able to move beyond it. It was our hope that, when we accomplished that, we could get Rhialto to get involved again to some degree or another... even if just to fix our server stability issues as, again, that is our chief issue and although the other things are important for Wyvern to reach for its maximum growth potential, I do believe that a balanced Wyvern and a stable server alone can attract a healthy playerbase.