Come together

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Duck One
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Come together

Post by Duck One »

I am sure you’re all aware of how it looks to have empty servers; that people wanting to game log in, find nobody on, and leave in frustration; and over time this frustration drives people away to seek fun elsewhere. With that in mind, I propose the following:

Only 1 ALFA server be online until such time that participation demands that more than 1 server be up to handle the volume.

Yes, I appreciate the gravity of what I am suggesting. A lot of people have put a lot of work into building and maintaining their respective servers, and don’t want to see all the effort tossed aside. Players have a favorite server and don’t want to lose access to it. People want variety. All very good reasons for keeping all the servers. So let me propose a compromise: rotate which server is online on a monthly basis. Here’s how it might work:
  • • Each server will take turns being the featured server of the month.
    • While offline for a period of 3 months, the HDM and his builders work together to build and plan for their month long event. They dream up a plot which will have something for lower and higher level characters which should take about a month to unfold and conclude.
    • As their time to come online comes closer, they make announcements about the event, giving PC’s an in-character reason to be drawn to move to that part of Faerun.
    • For a few days there is an overlap period where two servers are up to let players travel.
    • Some players convert to DM’s and vice-versa, but for a period of 30 days, the entire community games on that one server, making the server much fuller and offering a broader range of times, levels, and opportunities for all.
    • The event progresses throughout the month, perhaps changing as the players shape the events.
    • Towards the end of the month, a culmination events brings the plot to a conclusion.
    • After the players leave for the next server, the server is taken offline. The DM’s consider lasting effects from the event and incorporate them into the module. The planning for the next event begins anew.
The advantages of this change are obvious:
  • • All the players and DMs are concentrating in one area, making gaming and adventure more likely, and increasing the drawing and staying power of ALFA.
    • The servers have built in down time, allowing for building and testing, and of course planning for the next big event.
    • Players with 2 P.C.’s never need to feel torn between which to use at any one point.
    • Players that DM don’t have to pick which to do.
    • The built in breaks help reduce the stress on builders to build, and give DM’s time to plan, reducing burn out.
    • Less traveling needed means less time walking through blank space to get to the adventure
    • People could take breaks without missing action on their favorite server, reduce burnout and frustration.
    • People could even plan their vacation time to include a couple of heavy ALFA weeks when their favorite server is up in the rotation. Imagine a DM and a group of players all scheduling a week long ALFA week of fun.
If this works, more players find more adventure, and therefore more players are attracted and retained, and eventually the need to have 2 servers up at once is needed, an a new rotation devised. It could really revitalize the community.
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Arianna
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Re: Come together

Post by Arianna »

major drawbacks to this is :

that you can't play where you DM , I would not want to play where the DM also plays , I am sure a number of players also share this sentiment.

Not very many DMs want to ONLY DM and those that do burn out rather quickly.

Alot of DMs don't care to mix levels too much so you still only end up with 2-5 PCs in level range of each other that a DM will run something for . . .. the rest get bored and log off.

If you get more then one DM trying to run stuff at the same time the game pauses can get confusing and could be detrimental during battles

Not everyone is going to fit into ICly or be able to participate time wise in monthly plot lines, and so get bored and log off


Those who lose their servers may no longer Want to bother to build or deal with adding content

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Re: Come together

Post by Zelknolf »

We've had this chat a number of times from many different angles. Every one of them amounts to ALFA losing most of the contributors associated with the downed servers; even with the promise of it coming back at some point, taking away the portion of our game that a player is actually attached to for three months is enough time for them to move on and never look back (or, probably worse, become an inactive disgruntled de-facto ex-member who only occupies chat and forums to troll the rest of the community).

Most servers even rail against the idea that we should promote population density by means of content distribution or incentives. Trying to promote this through outages will surely prompt a more-severe response.
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Re: Come together

Post by Ithildur »

Overall it's not something that I think will benefit ALFA presently.

I no longer view player density as the main issue that impacts whether people log in or not, at least for myself. Setting aside RL/busy-ness/current priorities, it's what happens, what I experience when I do log in, that matters, and that actually isn't always positively influenced by the number of players logged onto a particular server. Oftentimes I have a much more enjoyable experience with a small number of folks logged on than say, 10 or 20. Add a DM to the mix, and that's doubly true; I'll log in for a DM plus a half dozen folks I enjoy interacting with hands down over chatting with 20 people about the weather.

I'll assert that the best way to consistently find good game in ALFA is through being at least somewhat ORGANIZED; whether it's done formally or informally/understood, even semi-planning/scheduling regular times when folks are logged on is a good thing; perhaps discuss/plan some activities, etc ahead of time via forums. Additional bonus, I know for myself from the DM client side, when I saw a group doing this (Knights Draconis) it made it much more enjoyable and easier to DM them; I personally would hands down choose to DM such a group over 20 people that randomly log in to talk about the weather.
Last edited by Ithildur on Tue Jul 21, 2015 9:13 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Come together

Post by kid »

Yup. I wish we could be more PW-y, but don't think most of us can really.

I do admit I like the idea of focusing more people into one server, but even certain playing days... (Like trying to have our DMs trying to schedule events on different days to max out number of participants) would be nice.

But it seems hard enough to schedule as it is... So don't know if that's doable.
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Re: Come together

Post by HEEGZ »

I agree with you completely Duck. This has been needed for a few years now. We are in the interesting status of having contributing builders to all four servers at the moment. So it is an even harder sell now than it was back when only one server was being regularly updated. It looks like the main arguments against the idea have been neatly summarized already.
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Re: Come together

Post by vergin_sacrifice »

First let me state - I don't know how this all works. Yet.

But I'm curious. We have 4 servers, if Amn is still in the works? a 5th coming. Is it possible to consolidate them to 1 or 2 machines, with the domains still clearly separated so that DMs can still play, builders can still build, and hdm of a particular region still be HDM of that region? With the DMA over the rest? Do they have to be in different boxes to accomplish that? Maybe have two copies of the same server, so if one goes down the other can be started up with a few keystrokes and be brought back up from a different location? The latter I talk about because I know I lose internet, if the host does too, it sucks, having a second host of a mirror would be great IMHO.

I have to agree with both sides of the discussion. Logging in and not seeing anyone, or logging in and the one person I see is 15-20 minutes from me in game, I'm not terribly eager. Example, I logged out in BG and Persephone was the only one left, all the way down in Ruqel. The night before I 'walked' back from Beregost because the same thing happened, for 10 min or so of Rp with Duck in BG. And that's on the same server. So I understand how it feels when there is no one any server, or on another server from where you are.
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Re: Come together

Post by Xanthea »

Yup. ALFA has always needed to concentrate the playerbase ever since... well, ever since BG was added. A rotating server list is the more interesting take I've seen on the idea yet and would be pretty cool.

I doubt it'll ever happen, though. ALFA doesn't like change.
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Re: Come together

Post by kid »

Well. I wouldn't mind. If we won't to do a rotation i'm for it, consolidation also cool.
Just make sure we adjust our rules accordingly.
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Re: Come together

Post by Duck One »

Here’s the rub: my life is chaotic. I’ve got a wife, kids, job, chores, obligations, etc. Gaming is my stress release, but I don’t have large chunks of uninterrupted time at predictable windows. Gaming has to come last in the priority list to all those other things. So when I am able to carve out a window of time, I want to log in and find adventure quickly before I get called away to help with my daughter’s homework or to clean up dog barf on the carpet.

And when I get one of those opportunities, and log in to find a bunch of mostly empty servers, with what couple of players who are on usually with one of the following attributes: too far away, logging off soon, too high of level, or really no logical reason why we’d meet up. If/when I do find another player, it is often 30-45 minutes of travel and role play to do the requisite setup to form a party and get the quest going, and by then we’re rushed because one or both of us is up against a time limitation. On the best day, it’s an awkward and tedious task, and on the worst (and sadly more common) it is impossible to do any adventure at all.

In my pen and paper days, the DM would bend reality to bring us together quickly. Too far? A few lines of narrative from the DM and a couple of tick marks of rations off of my inventory sheet, and I’m there. Wrong level? The DM would adjust the lower character to make it reach and work, complete with a narrative back story to account for the change. No logical reason for them to meet? A handy NPC would contrive a reason that brings them together. And voila, in mere minutes two players with no realistic way to play together are suddenly in a party on an adventure.

Intentional or not, ALFA has created a world which divides its players and makes it tedious and often impractical for them to play together. Time zones differences and real life obligations are wedge enough. I am content to play with just about anyone on any server. I’ll make it work so long as there is a chance to squeeze some adventure into my windows of opportunity to play.

Putting everyone into one place will help create opportunities for adventure, which in turn will attract and retain more players. A server rotation is a compromise which brings this about.
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Re: Come together

Post by Zelknolf »

This response doesn't seem to do anything to address the concerns.


Though looking at the rest of the situation described, it sounds like there's some pretty unrealistic expectations of ALFA there. The handwaving of levels things works fine when you've only got six people sitting around a table; you can just ask the other five people "Hey, anyone mind if Tharovol here gains two levels?" and then everyone's happy. This is a little bit more difficult in an environment with many players and many DMs. The small groups are out there, to be sure, but you have to schedule those and treat them as commitments (on account that they are; the whole idea is that you're making promises to other people in the hopes that the result will be fun).

If you're keen on unpredictable schedules and persistent environments, then a stable platform and the absence of DMs with real ultimate power over the entire world is part of the buyin. There's a lot more people at the table, and you can't typically get all of them to say "Yeah OK this specific case sounds cool."


That said, there's some stuff you can do to mitigate the expressed problems.

I might suggest relaxing your acceptable level range; there's a number of benefits to this-- obvious one is that it expands the people who you can play with, and unless you're really just interested in ALFA as an action game (I'm curious as to why, but I'd want to ask that in a somehow not-judgey-sounding way? Actually curious; it seems odd; NWN2 is really bad at being an action game) -- less obvious is that people who do a lot of work here also tend to have been here longer and tend to thus have higher-level characters. Cloistering yourself among lowbies usually means isolating yourself from the work that's done on ALFA and making it harder to get any improvements made to the game, harder to find ALFA's features, and harder to find new content.

Issues of time and travel can of course be mitigated; if you're regularly playing with some people, agreeing on a hub goes a long way to help there, and being aware of the travel systems, like the boats and wagons that move between settlements (and are faster than walking) can expand your playable windows.

And, of course, players routinely contrive their own reasons to bump into each other. Most of the community is understanding here; there's a few grumpy people who spew horrible things about the practice (it's technically metagaming), but people largely don't care about those grumps. Walking 200 miles because there might be work there and oh hey here's a PC in this tavern is normal.
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Re: Come together

Post by Ithildur »

Summer's also a slower season generally; things will most likely pick up towards the end of summer.
The small groups are out there, to be sure, but you have to schedule those and treat them as commitments (on account that they are; the whole idea is that you're making promises to other people in the hopes that the result will be fun).

Issues of time and travel can of course be mitigated; if you're regularly playing with some people, agreeing on a hub goes a long way to help there...
Again, I'd reiterate that if someone's dissatisfied with the amount of interaction they're getting, some organizing helps tremendously. Especially if someone's RL is busy, it makes sense to organize so when you log in, you've got a thing ready to go, and quite possibly a DM that's waiting to pounce on your group having seen your scheduling threads. :)
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Re: Come together

Post by Duck One »

This response doesn't seem to do anything to address the concerns.
The primary concern largely boils down to be that people are resigned to the way things are and largely resistant to change. It was very much the same when the concept of more than 1 PC was offered, or when DM’s could be players, or a server without a password be used. The dire predictions never came true, and playing conditions actually improved through these changes. How many people were turned away before these policies were begrudgingly changed, and where would ALFA be today had they not waited years to change them?

At ALFA’s birth, the game was wildly popular, and the community could thrive while being a niche because so many players were to be found. With the release of NWN2, there was more influx. However ALFA didn’t achieve critical mass during that time, and the policies that separated prospective players from adventure kept driving them away. Each of the concessions I listed above was an attempt to forestall the erosion.

Which is ALFA? – a 24/7/365 persistent world where you can log in at any time and find adventure, or a PnP analog where you need to coordinate your calendars and play episodically? Serious analysis probably says it is truly neither. It doesn’t offer enough content and is too lethal for a player to play alone on his own schedule to be a persistent world, and it is too restrictive to offer concessions to DM’s to run a campaign that can mesh players together for alignment, race, level, class, etc. It straddles the middle having perhaps all the problems of both with not enough benefits of either.

ALFA has changed since it was launched. At peak hours around 9:00 EST on a Friday we’d have 50 players logged in across 8 ALFA servers. We had a weekend long event on TSM when we tried to offer round-the-clock coverage, and we hit the server cap (24 I think) for several hours during that weekend. At one point we had 4 different DM’s running 4 parties of different levels. The record I think was logged across ALFA at 96 players at once. Waterdeep would hit the cap often. In those days, the policies seemed reasonable and not stopping ALFA from thriving.

You’re lucky if you get 20 distinct players logged in the course of a week now. The most I’ve seen at once is 13, which included DM’s, across 4 servers. You can’t expect the policies written for those times to be relevant now, and you can’t be change resistant when ALFA is not thriving.

If what you’re saying is that my expectation of logging in when I have free time and be able to have fun is an unreasonable expectation, then I respectfully submit to you that ALFA is not a persistent world. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, but the expectations and the policies should reflect that reality.
I might suggest relaxing your acceptable level range
I will play with anyone, anytime. I will bend the limits of in-character motives to make it work. I just want to play. I teamed up with your uber PC to watch her mow down countless mobs of critters that Shadow put in front of her while feeling much like a chew toy caught between two dogs, but it was fun. I will bend the limits of alignment and race too. But not all are as open-minded as I am, and sometimes people don’t feel like “babysitting a noob”.
and unless you're really just interested in ALFA as an action game (I'm curious as to why, but I'd want to ask that in a somehow not-judgey-sounding way? Actually curious; it seems odd; NWN2 is really bad at being an action game)
Maybe, but it’s D&D, which isn’t daffodils and daisies. All those stats, all that metal gear, all those spells….pretty much for action. Wynna does a good job turning the game into a political intrigue / mystery / drama game, but I have yet to meet the player who turns down a good dungeon crawl. It’s an adventure game. Adventure involves danger. Danger begets action. The plot, the details, the drama are all sauce for the goose, but the real meat is the action. Otherwise drop all the stats and let’s go play SIMS.

Bottom line: I put this idea on the table 10 years ago when we still had over 300 active members. We had 9 live servers, 4 in beta, and a waiting list for applications for new ones. I said we needed to remain at levels where we thrived, and that if we got too sparse, people would go find a place where they could get into a game more easily. I knew as the game and expansions went away, our ability to get new members would fade, and our only edge would be to have the thriving player base that would be attractive to hard core gamers.
But the opponents of consolidation held fast to the ideal of building all of Faerun; that we owed it to the people who had spent all those hours building to see those servers go and stay live, and that by having a variety we would be attractive. But that hasn’t been the case.

Like the DM/Player rule, the 1 PC rule, and the server password, anything that brings players together more quickly and frequently is a good thing. How about this: Try it. Go through one server rotation. See what it does. You can always go back.
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Re: Come together

Post by Zelknolf »

Duck One wrote:
This response doesn't seem to do anything to address the concerns.
The primary concern largely boils down to be that people are resigned to the way things are and largely resistant to change.
This sort of line can quickly turn things into another "you've given up and want to inflict that on everyone!" vs. "you're a extremist who can't compromise!" sort of argument-- I'm going to do my best to not fall into that line; I'm sure we've all seen that I'm somewhat vulnerable to the sort. I don't see myself as resigned or incapable of change (and, indeed, I might argue that I'm the most successful person at changing things in and about ALFA), and I'm sure you don't see yourself as an extremist or incapable of compromise. There's a great deal of complexity to this problem and dismissing the greater context and the results that others want is a quick path to not getting anything done.

This is why a list of more-specific problems came with a list of plausible alternate solutions which are more likely to be done without anyone trying to stop you. It may not be your idea exactly, but they're things I know can happen and that I think will make things better for you.

But, to be more clear on this point--
How about this: Try it. Go through one server rotation. See what it does. You can always go back.
--the concern is that we won't be able to go back. The people that we'd lose from three-month server outages will be gone, and the only people who will remain will be those who were OK with the change anyway. You'd acquire the consensus in the process, yes, but that's not the most palatable way to go about it. I guess the end state of as much is about the same as the other piece I wanted to respond to, which we're prepared for, so I'll go there.
If what you’re saying is that my expectation of logging in when I have free time and be able to have fun is an unreasonable expectation, then I respectfully submit to you that ALFA is not a persistent world. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, but the expectations and the policies should reflect that reality.
This may well be the case, and tech has long been prepared for that change when it comes. All of ALFA is pointedly open source; one of the benefits of this is that when we must become a campaign world, individual campaigns can simply host their campaigns, free of the overhead of ALFA's structure and governance, and allowing the waved-off allowances necessary to run a NWN2 game like a pen and paper game. There will actually only be those six people at these tables, and consensus and respecting assumptions is easily achieved. Indeed, some people already do this (and always have -- ALFA has always had people who just take its modules and ruleset to run their own campaigns, and it seems to make people happy).

I'm of course sad to see fewer players on our persistent servers, but I'm more concerned that the people using my years of work be having fun with it, and so I wish them well and make sure that my work is available for general use. It also means that the option remains available for the people who need it, and it's much of why I push for our persistent servers respect the assumptions of persistency for as long as we can squeeze life out of them-- and then I hope that my ruleset serves independent DMs after that.
I have yet to meet the player who turns down a good dungeon crawl.
"Good" is something of a sticky word in there; of course, no player will turn down a good dungeon crawl so long as it's good in their eyes, but it is certainly worth recognizing that I'm likely to turn down a dungeon crawl that you would enjoy and vice versa (though as just a labeling thing, if someone were to invite me to a "dungeon crawl" with no other context, I'm likely to decline, because it implies a certain absence of narrative, and a lot of bashing of random things which don't themselves contribute to the setting or the characters involved). We do try to make a world that supports who we're able to, but obviously that previous point wouldn't exist if our world was perfectly pluralistic.

I suppose cut out of that quote was a weird sort of dichotomy. There's obviously kinds of game in between constant murder and the Sims. That space between seems to be what ALFA's designed for, with a spectrum of play styles represented among our membership (with varying success; see previous point and the previouser point it references).
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Re: Come together

Post by Duck One »

There's a great deal of complexity to this problem and dismissing the greater context and the results that others want is a quick path to not getting anything done.
Complexities relates primarily to the fact that many people have many hundreds of hours of work invested in the way ALFA is, and the idea that any portion of that be dismissed in any way dishonors all that work. I get that, believe me. I was there. I helped write the charter after the quake; helped rebuild the framework; built an entire module; worked through a lot of problems along the way. Years of work doing just about every job title you could name. I know from where you speak.

But the flip side of that is that all those hours of invested work leads to a sense of entitlement. (I’ve been there too). How can anyone in that position realistically be objective? In the investing world, it is called throwing good money after bad. All those hours of work can’t be recaptured, and clinging onto the way things are simply for preserving that investment is not the correct way to approach the decision. The question before us is not what it took to get here, but now that we are here, what is the best for the future? That question ignores the previous investment of hours to correctly answer, and gives weight to the best choices for positive outcomes in the future.

You have done a ton of work…good work. That is to be applauded. Sincerely I do. But put yourself in the position of someone new….someone coming in off the street…someone just playing ALFA for the first time. If there is to be growth, a revitalization, it will come from them, not you or me. Look to meeting their needs in weighing your position. That may be hard for you, or me, to easily do, but it is the correct perspective to have.
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