The Endless Reset

Since I'd recently been making so many comments about A Tale in the Desert, I thought I'd pop over to the wiki to see what's changed.

The answer was... not much... and everything.

In other words, the current Tale was plodding on through its interminable mid-game, heading inexorably towards end-game in 4-5 Teppy months (which tend to be longer than RL months, just like developer release dates extend from 2009 release to...summer 2010!)

Yet, there was a set of intriguing discussion plans left on the front page wiki, about Teppy and his pack of GM's "clever" idea to open new Tale 4 server shards every 3 months.

This, as usual, brought the expected yeas and nays from the populace wanting to get their say in on whether this was a good idea or not. The major key hinges on whether this move will increase and expand the ATITD playerbase with new players who stick around longer (as Teppy is hoping it will) or whether it will split and fragment the existing playerbase to the point that none of the populations become functional enough to survive to mid or endgame (as naysayers and pessimistics predict it will.)

It's an intriguing idea.

Personally, my first impulse reaction was, cool, I might just give ATITD another go because I liked the structure of the starting months. The barriers and bottlenecks are shorter, and easier to break through, with quantifiable short-term goals. I got seriously bored with the midgame because there was nothing to do but chores that marked time once I got into a communal guild which shared all their goods. (x2)

The interminable wait reminded me, in a bad way, of RoD, where nothing ever changes, except at the slow hands of the volunteer imms who do a half-assed job at best.

So why does this slow midgame exist in a paid subscription game like ATITD? Well, because Teppy can't kill his lifeline. The devs meter out the release of Tests slowly so as to drag out the length of time people hang around on a subscription.

Now he's thought of another clever way to maintain a flow of subscriptions from the appeal of the startgame. AND he's free to let the release of Tests now be player-driven, instead of dev-driven, because he's got new server shards springing up every 3 months like mushrooms.

It seems to me like this is a spin on an evolution process here. Some shards are bound to founder and wither away. Some shards might take off, thanks to some conjunction of the stars of Fate and other factors.

The real question is, does he have enough of a playerbase to gamble with?

How many people is he going to piss off with such a changing set of situations and never choose to come back, versus how many people will start coming back given new territory and new opportunities to work with?

How many people will end up 3 month migrants to various server shards (with the potential for an unbalanced, competitive, griefing behavior to develop because of lack of accountability) and how many end up staying to settle a particular shard?

Will there be enough people hanging around one shard to build a diverse-enough community not to stagnate into an insular small-town full of inbreeding, or worse, not enough players around to finish Tests that require huge numbers cooperating... leading to mass quitting or mass migration in droves to the next Promised Land... coming in 3 months?

Will all the vets stick together on one shard, leading to only one server having all the skilled experts to consult? And is that a good or bad thing, if the newbies have room for new blood to become new experts, or will they crash and burn without any vet support?

Who knows... These things are impossible to predict without first trying them out. The backup plan if all goes to hell is to say screw it and merge the populace again for Tale 6. I suppose Teppy figures if more people try ATITD, the more might stick around for Tale 6.

I'm tempted to keep an eye out and give it a try on a new server shard. The key to how long I stick around is how fast I can find a support group, honestly. I think the communal guild thing is the way to go as you don't have to reinvent the wheel, plane the wood, grow and weave the cloth from scratch just to have a cart to hitch the horse to, all by your lonesome.

The other playstyle that I'm highly open to considering is doing it in a duo. A lot of duos have the advantage of both being a small compact partnership to build a tribe around, as well as a privacy/hermit/protection factor that you can't get in a communal group.

*hint hint*

Just putting out feelers. I should be level 45-50 in a month or two in Aion, which hopefully means that I can continue on a more relaxed pace and have some hardcore time to devote somewhere else.