by Oggi » Sun Apr 10, 2016 2:31 pm
The issue with Freaky taking the one-off donation money to upgrade the servers/hosting in 2014 was pretty well documented at the time and while a complete dickmove was unknown to and out of the hands of the other admins, who only discovered it after he'd taken the money and run and left them to pick up the pieces. Anyone who has played on the server since then will know that Muggle has helmed a pretty tight ship since she regained full control of the project and her heart is in the right place in following the vision of a "1x Blizzlike" vanilla server with absolutely no pay-to-win shop or donations.
I believe the 5x questing/exp event is optional and was only put in place after a lot of discussion amongst the remaining playerbase over the past few months because trying to advance the AQ war effort with 100-150 active players seemed like an impossibility and it was felt this short-term boost would bring in some new blood. The active population has quadrupled in the past few days since Nost was shutdown and if it continues to grow I imagine they may end the xp boost early and disable some of the tweaks they made to make the situation more tolerable, like cross faction trade chat.
Apart from the usual caveat of any private server potentially being shutdown at any point, my main concerns with the Rebirth are:
1. Size of the admin team. Whilst they have a capable and well-intentioned GM and Dev team, it's relatively small and may struggle to meet the demands (moderation, patching, etc) of a sudden influx of new players especially if the population continues to grow well above the server's norm;
2. Hosting: the project has been slow to switch or improve it's hosting solution when there have been performance or population increases in the past - I logged in yesterday on an old toon and performance was fine with 500+ online. If that number quadruples again in the coming weeks will it be able to cope? etc
On the plus side, the server's scripting is solid and the attitude of the playerbase in the main is friendly, helpful and welcoming. As with any server there are the resident trolls and bad apples, but throughout it's peaks and troughs the Rebirth has managed to largely keep a decent crowd.
