Server load solutions and some other thoughts.

[Roughrider]

I know many of you are waiting with bated breath for the new PVE realm announcement to be made, myself included. I however don't think that the inclusion of a new PVE realm as a population solution is going to alleviate many of the issues that exist on the current PVP realm. I have a few suggestions regarding load balance and some suggestions directed to the Nostalrius staff itself...

An RP-PVP server is whats needed for balancing AND policing the PVP community that currently exists. Allow ONE character transfer to this new server from the current PVP realm, and lock down character slots to TWO characters per account.

The staff needs to put an IP lock/exemption policy in place. Have a wife or kid that wants to play? Fine - apply for an IP exemption. No more rampant accounts. Make it more difficult for the multi-boxers, hackers and other toxic players to create havok here at Nostalrius.

A clear rule set for conduct needs to be put into place and ENFORCED for all of Nost's realms - and that conduct policy should have the social and community building aspects of game play as its core. A little wild wild west is fine (especially on a PVP realm) yet it has become completely out of hand on Nost.

Developer communication needs to improve with the community - DRASTICALLY. From bug squashing to upcoming features. The reason we HAVE such a toxic community within the game and oftentimes on the forums of course has to do with the massive population and the ability to play for free, but also because the player base does not see public community policing and forward constant communication in-game and on the forums by GMs/Devs. Game masters NEED to be seen in game, doing their thing. Announce in-game when toxic players, botters, hackers, and cheaters have been dealt with.

Nostalrius' bug tracking/reporting system is a mess. I have to create three accounts to play here, be active on the forums, and to report bugs. There is some spectacular forum plugins for bug tracking/reporting/solutions that could really give your community some input and provide developer clarity and ease of use.

Fix the little things scripting wise and then work towards larger targets. Day/Night cycles, LOS hilarity, bad BAF code, piled-up mobs, environment diversity just to name a few. These are little pet-peeves of mine, but I think as Nost ages, its going to be important to maintain and to bring in new players.

Splintering the community further with a BC release server is historically and logistically a bad call. BC was an EVENT on live servers. I would implore the development team to take a hard look at WHY they would want to splinter a new blade. If the reason is that "we might lose some people who only want vanilla content" then the developers here have lost their minds in regards to long-term player retention.

The bottom line is this - the devs have done an awesome job creating a near perfect vanilla WORLD for us to play in, now its time for them to help the player base build a strong COMMUNITY. The Nost team is ALMOST there in terms of being able to really lock down a sizeable portion of the vanilla-loving/blizzard-hating/social-apt crowd and keep them here for many years to come - but they have some work to do BESIDES just getting the server/scripting/event-systems running well.

On that note - I hate to be the devil's advocate, but there absolutely NEEDS to be some incentive for the development team to keep plugging along, and that needs to be donated CASH/BEER/FOOD/NAKEDPICS. I'll leave it up to the rest of you to figure that out, as we don't want any sort of donation system trickling into the world AT ALL. Its obviously a slippery slope - but there has to be someone out there that has some ideas to make people want to donate to the project besides the threat of a shut-down.

[Roughrider]

So a character named "isexchildren" has been active for TWO weeks on the server, and has been reported numerous times for both the name and behavior. This is EXACTLY the type of asshattery/toxicity that I'm seeing constantly on the server. I'm wondering how hard it is to go through the daily character creation logs and weed through this type of thing. I'm available if you Nost folks need another GM.