W
Woodsman
Guest
This was what Jeff Skalski said a few months ago:
Method A: Some people on some shards (the larger shards) get to keep their real estate while some people on other shards (smaller shards) lose it all.
Method B: Nobody keeps their real estate and everybody has to start over on getting houses on new shards.
For those who support shard mergers, which would you prefer? If you support Method A, what do you tell people who might lose houses that they've had for over 10 years and why they should lose their houses while people on another shard don't?
Note: I'm not a supporter of shard mergers since I know too many people who would just walk away from UO if they lost their housing. Shard mergers are best in games like Warhammer or Camelot that require a large number of people to come together since the games are PvP/RvR-based, unlike UO where you don't need many people around you to be happy. I'm asking the question, because I see it brought up, but I never see the mechanisms discussed.
Jeff highlighted the only two ways to merge shards:Watchertoo [15:16]: One of the questions came out is there any consideration [given] to combining shards to increase population?
Jeff [15:21]: We talk about it. We’ve talked it out from the one side where having that healthier population is a greater user experience for our players. And then on the other side, of course, we look at the cost too, because we have to maintain the hardware and all that.
Right now I don’t have plans on merging any servers. For UO specifically, compared to any other MMO that I’ve worked on, it’s very complicated just because of the housing component. It’s real “real estate” and it’s one of those things, honestly if I had to write the four pillars of UO that make it stand out and unique, our housing system is definitely one of the strong pillars, and also for what that does for the community. So I’m personally not comfortable with going through and saying okay we’re going to take this shard and this shard, and I’m going to merge these together, because my options would be either I tell one shard, “I’m sorry, you’re going to lose all your real estate, we’ll pack your stuff up and you’ll have to find somewhere else to put it,” which would be a cruel message. The other one would be I merge two and I just wipe everybody’s [house] and all the land and do a fresh reboot and there would be like a land rush for property. I don’t want to do that either. It’s so disruptive. So, I’m not planning on merging the shards right now. I know players are looking at migrating. Maybe we can possibly do something where we incentivize a little bit, because it is a lot to ask our players to do. But right now there are no plans, definitely in the near term, to do a server merge.
Method A: Some people on some shards (the larger shards) get to keep their real estate while some people on other shards (smaller shards) lose it all.
Method B: Nobody keeps their real estate and everybody has to start over on getting houses on new shards.
For those who support shard mergers, which would you prefer? If you support Method A, what do you tell people who might lose houses that they've had for over 10 years and why they should lose their houses while people on another shard don't?
Note: I'm not a supporter of shard mergers since I know too many people who would just walk away from UO if they lost their housing. Shard mergers are best in games like Warhammer or Camelot that require a large number of people to come together since the games are PvP/RvR-based, unlike UO where you don't need many people around you to be happy. I'm asking the question, because I see it brought up, but I never see the mechanisms discussed.