Once again GoA, what are the plans for Dyvet?

[Corran]

Somone needs to light a fire under GOA's ass. Feasability studies or not they have a degrading set of servers and need to act quickly. Its been a while since the original post and still no information.

Actually if you think about it, it could be a huge distraction tactic. Say as little as possible while maintaining hope of a solution so the die hards continue to pay their subs until they get WHO running and drop daoc like a hot rock.

Always a possibility but in the long run it would prove a bad play and they would lose thousands of subscribers to any future game. And as proven by their current ongoing projects that would be financial suicide. Also the fact they problem is only with the "English" servers then they wont drop DAoC as the rest of the servers bring in a good level of income still. If they were waiting to do something that they think could affect future income poorly then my guess is they would wait till WHO then change the server language and cluster that way, thus alienating the player base that wants their english based server, but keeping at least a portion of the server population that want bigger rvr scene for their toons. Could be suicidal again though if they get poor publicity in the MMORPG front (just look at Dark and Light to see what poor publicity does to a game - and people thought daoc was bad)

Yes something needs to be said soon, but I cant see a break in the silience giving new information, be merely another "We are working on it still and are closer to solution, however no ETA yet on a final solution". Sucha comment wont help the situation though so doubt you get that.

As a player then I wish they would hurry up with an answer, but as someone that understands a business viewpoint then I can understand them taking time to get a feasible answer to the problem. Only thing is I know some studies take a lot of time, and unfortunately their time is tight because there 'appears' to be constant movement away from the server currently and no certainty that it will increase when they implement their plan. (n.b. 'Appears' is used as this is based on peoples comments, without seeing official figures from GoA then cant be sure how the server doing)

Anyways. Rambling on here just wasting some time, guess i better get on with work and catch some 'bad guys'.

 

[Imgormiel]

Always a possibility but in the long run it would prove a bad play and they would lose thousands of subscribers to any future game. And as proven by their current ongoing projects that would be financial suicide. Also the fact they problem is only with the "English" servers then they wont drop DAoC as the rest of the servers bring in a good level of income still. .

Actually you are wrong, despite a good amount of players of the past few years - regardless of language. DAoC has been losing money for GOA and been in the red for a very long time. And on that note Requiel and the GOA staff will vouch for what I have said in this post as it is completely true.

 

[Ogrelin Blodig]

I just figured it out! GOA will place Bots in the game that you can group with and that u can fight....just like BF2142!

 

[Cromcruaich]

Where the fuck do these stories come from? The last couple of times I did a /who I got more then that just in my realm.

Doom saying is fine but at least stick to the facts.

/who in hib gives between 100 and 120 primetime recently. Take out the buff bots and the invisibles.

'"I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm lookin' at one right now.".

But thanks to Req for the replies. Problem finally acknowledged after several posts say everything is ok, but at least thats progress.


Oh, hib/pryd community was excellent by the way. What really really killed it for us Pribs was the database loss, that really did a lot of damage, and lost goa a hell of a lot of good will, it irreperably soured the relationship us customers had with goa.

The idea that fh had a significant negative effect is inaccurate. People need to get arguments straight, you cant say on one hand that FH represents a tiny minority of the community, and then on the other say its had a significant detrimental effect.


Something odd seemed to go on about 2 years ago as well - PC Zone started pushing DAOC, it reviewed some expansions favourable, gave a demo disk on its cover, and also the game got into its top 5 rpgs - then it suddenly went off the radar - like GoA werent giving PC Zone staff enough free lunches and kick backs!

 

[Cromcruaich]

Actually you are wrong, despite a good amount of players of the past few years - regardless of language. DAoC has been losing money for GOA and been in the red for a very long time. And on that note Requiel and the GOA staff will vouch for what I have said in this post as it is completely true.

hiya, i really really dont believe this, they wouldnt run it if it did, it would simply of been shelved. I think youve accidentilly misunterpreted something youve been told. What I think could be more accurate is that the UK cluster has been losing money as a proportion of players when set against the sum of the per server cost (including paying for support and the whole daoc team).

So, youve got 10 servers, break even is say 100k per month when adding up all the related costs - personnel, building letting, electricity etc etc, meaning each server must make 10k a month to be said to be making money.

I could be wrong, and wouldnt mind a correction and clarification from Req.

 

[Arkian]

While it would be nice to migrate the servers to a US cluster, there's on very major thing, apart from the moving, re-patching and such, that would need to be considered... payments. At the moment, the only way to pay for a USA account is to pay Mythic by credit card. GOA however, will take payments by european debit card, aswell as credit card. Migrating to Mythic's systems would mean no more debit card support..

Not sure about this, I manage to pay fine with a UK Visa Debit (delta) card and so do other people I know.

 

[Raven]

if you had 3 shops and 2 of them were booming and 1 wasn't you would close the failing one, pretty simple. there is nothing goa can do now and even if they could there would be no point bothering, a few months back the population was sustainable but various reasons (That have done to death) caused it to go into melt down, just enjoy whatever is left of it and wait for WAR to come out in the US. Or play WoW and ride a Chocobo

 

[Castus]

if you had 3 shops and 2 of them were booming and 1 wasn't you would close the failing one, pretty simple. there is nothing goa can do now and even if they could there would be no point bothering, a few months back the population was sustainable but various reasons (That have done to death) caused it to go into melt down, just enjoy whatever is left of it and wait for WAR to come out in the US. Or play WoW and ride a Chocobo

Not neccessarily true.Tesco for example will keep open poor trading stores just to miantain their presence in that area.Maybe they need to keep Daoc going for similar reasons.

 

[Esselinithia]

Lets see their chances for technical fixes:

Switch language and cluster => Bad
Account transfers => Possible problems
Cluster between EU and US servers => Some questions must be answered, and it would be hard to implement (technical limits)
Cluster between different languages => Would be hard to implement, and the language of "common channels" is questionable.
Trying to get and keep new players => Hard (Maybe the game can be bundled with some stuff, etc)
Trying to get old players back => Hard

 

[Alekine]

goa think u all are idiots uke:

 

[Tesla Monkor]

o_o

Requiel sez: To scotch some rumours though I will tell you that we aren't looking at a character transfer system nor are we looking at moving the English servers to Mythic's platform.

 

[rampant]

Requiel sez: To scotch some rumours though I will tell you that we aren't looking at a character transfer system nor are we looking at moving the English servers to Mythic's platform.

when?

 

[wittor]

Requiel sez: To scotch some rumours though I will tell you that we aren't looking at a character transfer system nor are we looking at moving the English servers to Mythic's platform.

in other words RIP Dyvet !

 

[Punishment]

in other words RIP Dyvet !

I think unfortunately that was already a foregone conclusion

The funeral was just in doubt momentarily as the hearse got stuck in a ditch

 

[Imgormiel]

hiya, i really really dont believe this, they wouldnt run it if it did, it would simply of been shelved. I think youve accidentilly misunterpreted something youve been told. What I think could be more accurate is that the UK cluster has been losing money as a proportion of players when set against the sum of the per server cost (including paying for support and the whole daoc team).

So, youve got 10 servers, break even is say 100k per month when adding up all the related costs - personnel, building letting, electricity etc etc, meaning each server must make 10k a month to be said to be making money.

I could be wrong, and wouldnt mind a correction and clarification from Req.

Arite Crom - been spamming ur nfd forums from time to time with another name ;p But no dood, no misinterpretation, no misinformation and yes it does look rather gloomy until the discussions with EA mythic come up with something more viable.

Atm they have a 1-5 year plan for DAoC, which means basically they could pull the plug on it at any moment, despite what EA Mythic do. As I was told, GOA's customer's are GOA's customer base, they are losing money for years on this game now and they don't care too much about what EA want with regard to that (well there were some swear words said during that sentence but there's no need to repeat exactly what I was told with that regard) so basically EA need to pull their finger out much more if DAoC is to survive in Euro. Else the plug will be pulled and then they will focus on WAR. But with that said, I infer that some sort of exit strategy will be made for those still playing or wish to play - There's still 10,000 peeps playing - which I guess is what GOA is doing for the long term plan for the whole game and not just for Dyvet.

 

[Yurka]

if that rumour is correct, then maybe a "voucher" system will come in...

allowing people to have a voucher for x amount of lvl 50s on the other EU servers, to reroll with artis/mls/instant rr5 or 6 and some starting money to buy the rest of SC kit. kinda like the start of NF test server.

 

[Bluesky]

Requiel sez: To scotch some rumours though I will tell you that we aren't looking at a character transfer system nor are we looking at moving the English servers to Mythic's platform.

Well the fact they are working on "something" therefore most likely means a cluster with another cluster I guess. ANYTHING at all like that can only be good for rvr on Dyvet imo and i really hope it happens SOON

 

[hemorragie]

Requiel sez: To scotch some rumours though I will tell you that we aren't looking at a character transfer system nor are we looking at moving the English servers to Mythic's platform.

we are doomed......

 

[Kami]

if that rumour is correct, then maybe a "voucher" system will come in...

allowing people to have a voucher for x amount of lvl 50s on the other EU servers, to reroll with artis/mls/instant rr5 or 6 and some starting money to buy the rest of SC kit. kinda like the start of NF test server.

I'd like that, it'd boost population and give more people to fight against or play alongside with. I'd be a little annoyed if it wasn't open to existing customers though, having said that I'm not even that sure that some people would have space for more chars!

 

[Imgormiel]

Well the fact they are working on "something" therefore most likely means a cluster with another cluster I guess. ANYTHING at all like that can only be good for rvr on Dyvet imo and i really hope it happens SOON

The problem with that is a question of balance. GOA are more likely imo to favour a cluster with a foreign server with the language being of European Nature as opposed to English, which would be complete suicide as that would waste any point in doing the cluster.

GOA need to get their heads around the fact that English is still the most spoken language with regards to language and business worldwide - that is till Chinese replaces it in the years to come. Only two countries on the planet actually speak French, which would seem to favour one reason at least as to why GOA WAR is relocating Ireland later this year.

Personally, I think the answer in nature of compromise. Some of you are going to get what you want with regards to this issue but will be offset by some other things that you don't want - which inevitably will bring QQ/whine etc to this forum. And then the other half of those that didn't want the predominant arguement but were appeased will just stay silent and get on with it. What ever happens in the short term is only likely to either bring failure or success. And they know alot hinges on it with regards to marketing strategy, financial income ie turning an increasingly looking white elephant into one that starts to make a profit and then becomes more viable to keep running for a 5 year plan as opposed to a 1 year one.

You will just have to wait and see what Requiel, Xalin and the rest of GOA come up with as regards to a feasible solution to the current problem.

 

[Imgormiel]

if that rumour is correct, then maybe a "voucher" system will come in...

allowing people to have a voucher for x amount of lvl 50s on the other EU servers, to reroll with artis/mls/instant rr5 or 6 and some starting money to buy the rest of SC kit. kinda like the start of NF test server.

The problem is they need to spam alot of old players with some sort of reward system and your idea goes a little along the way to doing that. Then they need to get some marketing strategy behind it and seriously, LOTM was way under marketed. Obviously if people think they are getting value for their money and are given reason enough to spend it here they will Req and co are going to do something, generally because they know they have to and if nothing is done then enter FH soothsayers of DOOM for a few months till there's nothing left to talk about save Lotro and which chars/pictars/avatars/names people are using and playing till WAR is released :S

 

[Flimgoblin]

From his previous post:

Keeping a viable English language regular ruleset server is one of our top priorities. Any solution that removes that choice will not be one we would be happy to implement. I've said it before and at the risk of sounding like a broken record I'll say it again, we are actively working towards a long term, sustainable solution for Dyvet. There are short term plans in the works which you'll hear about soon aimed at getting former players to resubscribe and a strong marketing push off the back of LotM. Once we've finished our current round of discussions and feasibility studies we'll be much closer to implementing a proper solution to help the English playerbase. Unfortunately I can't give you any kind of ETA for that part as there are multiple parties involved.

I don't think just dropping the english cluster is an option...

 

[Imgormiel]

From his previous post:


I don't think just dropping the english cluster is an option...

Flim modded my other replies? bah xD

 

[Flimgoblin]

Flim modded my other replies? bah xD

nuked them till I could check if Tesla had permission to repost that quote undeleted now

 

[Tesla Monkor]

nuked them till I could check if Tesla had permission to repost that quote undeleted now

I do have enough tact to check for persmission first.

Anyway, we don't know anymore than that so now you know just as much as the E&Es.

 

[Shike]

Vouchersystem would be nice and I'd use it if we got one. Cluster would be a nice alternative aswell.

 

[Bluesky]

The problem with that is a question of balance. GOA are more likely imo to favour a cluster with a foreign server with the language being of European Nature as opposed to English, which would be complete suicide as that would waste any point in doing the cluster.

...unless ofc they only use a non-english language in the frontiers (as in they only actually cluster NF so when you port out of Vindsaul/Drum Cain/Snowdonia etc you join a diff cluster) then (imo) everyone's a winner

 

[Kami]

Well I'm enjoying Dyvet at the moment, yes there aren't quite enough people but the atmosphere is actually rather nice. Had a few people chatting to me out of the blue last night as we stood at trainers etc and shockingly they weren't after money!

Although I gave them some anyway

I'd like clustering and really like the idea of the voucher system although I'm not sure how GOA will be able to do it technically, perhaps that's what they're looking into at the moment !

 

[Imgormiel]

nuked them till I could check if Tesla had permission to repost that quote undeleted now

I'd rep you but it seems pointless

 

[Imgormiel]

...unless ofc they only use a non-english language in the frontiers (as in they only actually cluster NF so when you port out of Vindsaul/Drum Cain/Snowdonia etc you join a diff cluster) then (imo) everyone's a winner

Well, it seems we won't need to worry for the time being with keeping an English server is a priority. But sadly, when I was in France I had little time to discuss anything with Req regarding DAoC other than him showing me what he does in game and game mechanics etc :E