Time to clean house: archive dead shards
This may be controversial, but I think certain shards should just be closed/archived. Offer free transfers away from these shards. Creation of new chars should be blocked on these shards. For accounts that don't even have a char on them, they shouldn't show in the list anymore.
An example is Drachenfels. It's just deader than dead and it's a shame if even 10 players get on there instead of say, Europa. They'll waste resources and time on a shard that has a population so low you really miss out on a ton of UO experience. I even think they can't get a proper feel of the game on such a shard. Vendors are missing 90% of stuff you will find on an active shard. There are no people to normally group with. (So few, you can hardly call it a proper mmorpg experience), etc.
I've been traveling shards during this first period of EJ and some have plenty of new players and returnees coming in, some are just dead. Some of these people also don't realize that not all shards are like this. I spoke to already two people who almost left because they thought the game was dead. Turns out they just went to a shard that is dead.
It's not good for UO or new players/returnees to keep these shards in list. I vote for archiving roughly in the manner I described in my first paragraph. Free transfers out. No more new char creation. Time to clean house.
An example is Drachenfels. It's just deader than dead and it's a shame if even 10 players get on there instead of say, Europa. They'll waste resources and time on a shard that has a population so low you really miss out on a ton of UO experience. I even think they can't get a proper feel of the game on such a shard. Vendors are missing 90% of stuff you will find on an active shard. There are no people to normally group with. (So few, you can hardly call it a proper mmorpg experience), etc.
I've been traveling shards during this first period of EJ and some have plenty of new players and returnees coming in, some are just dead. Some of these people also don't realize that not all shards are like this. I spoke to already two people who almost left because they thought the game was dead. Turns out they just went to a shard that is dead.
It's not good for UO or new players/returnees to keep these shards in list. I vote for archiving roughly in the manner I described in my first paragraph. Free transfers out. No more new char creation. Time to clean house.
- The lowest population shards should be archived/closed26 votes
- Aye!42.31%
- Nay!50.00%
- Maybe?7.69%
A qua lemmúr wíste, an zen anku vol verde wís.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
What about players houses there? All their stuff that they can't fit in their bank to transfer? What if they already have characters on other shards, which ones do they get to keep?
That's just for starters. It's easy to say, let's close these shards when it isn't one that you play. And no, I don't play Drach.
And for some shards we are really talking about a very small amount of players. Shards can be archived indefinitely even, but just close them for newcomers and incentives moving away by making it free. Perhaps a house copy feature is feasible... where the players from dead shards can move their house to new housing lands on other shards made available especially for them. Earlier I came up with these floating islands in Malas for that. Could be cool.
Drachenfels is deader than dead. Anyone saying otherwise is delusional. Vendor search shows a handful of vendors only.. It's an old shard of mine so I checked there often. On peak hours there are a few people only.. probably can count them on two hands. Zero people at Luna bank on Friday evening. And I saw a new player in Haven and told them to go Europa since Drach is dead. They thanked me for it. It's not fair to new players to have coax them into playing virtually abandoned shards.
And people with chars on many dead servers logging on for some events doesn't really mean the shard is viable and good to keep around for new players to go into and find out there is virtually nothing there.