This is extremely sad to read.
I don't believe in restricting gameplay, especially in *further* restricting.
That will only leads to disappointment, which, in turn, will make people leave MBII.
You can't force anybody to like what you like.
Today's trands for locking and restricting is cancer
.
I think you really need a hard look at why other games have done this. THOUSANDS of game developers wouldn't be following this path, including us, if it wasn't more beneficial to the game. Yes allowing players and servers a degree of freedom is good. TOO MUCH freedom is bad and always has been. Too much freedom has destroyed games in the ways Ben mentioned.
and btw. Mod's poplation isn't even 50 daily. That's what happens if you let Americans lead
Actually throughout the course of MB2's history there have been more EU developers and more EU leaders, but keep going. Also, there are currently 92 people playing MB2. That doesn't include unique players throughout the day as we don't track that.
Really? REALLY?!
I see crystal clear way how duel mode does increase Movie Battles playerbase:
There are also people that left the game over the years because of the "honor duels" type people. I stopped playing as much because of people like that and even getting TK'd for "interfering". This was even when duel mode was already part of the game. Overall, the amount of players lost since the focus on sabering (including duel mode) has been greater than that of players gained because we haven't varied the base gameplay or added anything interesting in forever because we have been focused on it forever. So in a way yes, that focus decreased player base rather than increasing it. Yes a few people joined because of duel mode and I will never deny that, but if you don't look at the full picture that lead up to this you don't have all the information.
The only real reason FA exists though, is because of the movies. It is far too hard to maintain that there isn't a whole lot of point having it anymore regardless of how fun I think the mode is.
Isn't a bit bigger number players online, and a bit happier players enough?
That is not how that works, it isn't how any of this works. This goes back to what Spaghetti said. You are chasing a statistic rather than a game. Don't do that. If you chase statistics, you will always lose.
That's incredible flawed logic o_O
You absolutely, positively cannot compare removing saberists and "removing" timelimit, because removing timelimit isn't removing at all -- it's providing more freedom, which makes server settings more flexible.
Yes you can compare them because once again they are rules defined by the game itself. If you mess with the rules, you change the game. They might be different on their specific levels of impact, but they still affect things. The sum total of all the design rules in the game are what make the game.
As I said before, official servers, configured exactly as dev team want them to be, is here, and they aren't going anywhere.
So what's the problem?
This is one of those ideas that sounds great on paper but doesn't work in reality. Many games have tried this over and over again without much success.
Do you have any proofs, any evidences of that?
I don't have any links because they have been lost in time, but I will again direct you to ForceMod3. The developer made a JKA mod where he had designed his own game rules and was building it how he wanted in his own free time. In a few ways it attracted the RP community to it because of some of its features and they had begun to take over the mod with their RP servers, forum feature requests, etc. It happened for months if not years of the majority of things being RP related when the developer didn't want to focus on RP at all and make what he wanted to make because that is what was fun to him. He was doing it for his enjoyment, not that of RPers. It had everything they wanted though, cool classes and abilities, full 7 forms lightsaber combat, etc. So they kept pressuring him and pressuring him to do more and more RP centric things. Eventually he got fed up, stopped working on FM3 entirely, and left the JKA scene never to be heard from again. He just wanted to make something fun and RP drove a hard working developer away from JKA entirely.
I completely concur with Ben and Viserys posts and hate that they are usually better at wording things than I am.
