There's been a few interesting digressions in this thread.
And most of all, the question as to whether there should be a wipe or not.
Personally, I wouldn't mind a wipe and even wish for it. But that may be because 1. I didn't know the beta days and am curious as to how it feels to have all start off from a clean slate, with everything to be built from scratch, 2. we had a blast in Les Bannis on Aniro because we were all more or less the same levels and had to share quite a bit more than usual, and 3. I think uberness is overrated.
However, a wipe leads to a number of issues, starting with old-timers, overachievers and packrats, who can legitimately cringe at the prospect of "losing" up to three years of grinding, and also a status that they feel they had to work hard for (I imagine losing jewelry masters and starting over might be a tad discouraging, all those clicks...). And, of course, the need for historical consistency and end-game.
Yet, behind the original question of this thread lies an undercurrent issue: when Atys lives again, is it just back to business as usual?
So here's my thinking...
Short of a full-scale wipe (levels back to 1, guilds dissolved, OPs without owners, etc.), there's one thing in particular that I believe would liven up gameplay quite a bit, and change some habits:
move the mats around at random, for example once or twice in an Atys year. The Q50 areas should be left as they are for convenience, but all others would see significant location changes. Seasonal characteristics should not be altered, but the location, radius and resource size could be made to change (by random number generator, so there's no gripe about manual changes putting such and such at a disadvantage). Ease of access of certain, better mats depending on Faction regions should be honored, for consistency.
This would have a few side effects:
- Make the maps obsolete, break the routine (go to favorite spot, dig usual mats, grind, repeat).
- Make tracking a true skill, with medium-to-large expeditions (made up of both miners and protectors) necessary to scout for and extract vital and rare supplies.
- Increase competition between mining teams and put at an advantage the guild(s) that find out the new locations before others.
- Make the prices of notable items skyrocket.
- Keep Homins on their toes, since the change could come at any time, and involve setting up emergency teams when the event occurs, if there's a need for this or that type of mat.
This is borderline off-topic, since this change would require altering server-side data, and is therefore more a feature suggestion than an intra-homin discussion. But I think this is a reasonably tiny change for developers to make (possibly even only a location / amount / radius change) that would have an impact on homin habits, and add scouting to the scope of our activities.
In the same line of thought, changing the paths of critters every 5 years or so might be welcome too, so we don't always hang out at the same spot every season for long periods of time, and have to look for the usual critters every now and then...
Yubo. Atys isn't even back up yet and here I am already, building it my own way...
*hides*
