Re: Should HC get a reset in Swamp? Time to vote!
I'd like to provide a little context for people who aren't playing hardcore very much to help explain why things have come to this point.
For a certain amount of time (how long I'm not sure) one clan owned all 20 forts in the game. This of course gave them a huge boost to their exp rate while sitting in forts, which they used (not to say abused) to the point that there are now quite a few characters running around at level 1000, or 2000, or 3000. When version 3.6B came out, Aprone reset the rate at which exp is generated for people with multiple forts, and soon after another group of players were able to steal most of the forts back. I wasn't there for the fighting but I am a member of the clan that currently owns 14 of the forts, so I feel I have some perspective to add that most players don't have.
First, just because we own so many does not mean we fortify them. Most have less than a hundred food. Several have none at all. In fact, we have b een battling electroshack and others back and forth for weeks in order to keep them. They'll take a fort so we'll take it back, they go after a fort and we take another of theirs. And so on. This is fine, it's how the game was intended to work. So I really don't see how we're breaking anything by having a lot of forts. Were there more factions at play, we probably would have let most of them go to newer clans by now, but as another poster said earlier there are rarely more than 30 people online at a time anymore.
So reset the forts/food if you want, I don't think its necessary but I'm not too fussed about it because I'm confident we can rebuild. That leaves levels and inventory.
We currently have some people running around at level 50 or 60, and others at level 3198. This is pretty much a worst case scenario for anyone new trying to overturn the apple cart, and makes fort battles totally ridiculous. There's no way for me, a &q uot;lowly" level 180, or even me and two others of similar level, to defend a fort from even 1 of these characters. Put a thousand points into health and another thousand into the flamethrower and I can one-shot kill anyone while they empty clip after clip of minigun into me to little effect. That's not exactly a challenge, for either player; it's swatting a bug from one perspective and climbing Mt. Olympus from the other. Even if you do manage to kill one of them, what of it? They'll just come back in 5 minutes and kill you back. There's simply no defense against someone with 20 times your points, apart from making friends with someone else with a lot of points from a different clan. Considering there are also language barriers at play, I don't think that's a fair solution.
So I think levels should probably be reset, but I have no idea how to do so fairly because some folks earned those levels through hard "work" missioning and so on whereas certain folks simply took advantage of a time when the reward for doing nothing was higher. Thus, resetting everybody is a huge slap to the people who did put in the months of effort to "earn" what they have. Which brings us to inventory, and my final point.
Most people probably know by now that a lot of experienced players will have an extra "storage" character for most of their gear because dying--in hardcore especially--is so brutal. Even the non hardcore characters have gear you can't buy that is valuable and would take considerable time to relocate. I don't do this myself, and I could see how this might irritate people because it is technically cheating, in that it exploits one system in an unintended way to get around the negative consequences of another. Here's the thing, though: it keeps people IN THE GAME! If you reset everyone to level 1 with a blank inventory, including storage characters, well, you're gonna have a lot of angry players who did nothing wrong. I have less than 2 months left on my gamer account at the moment, so what this basically says to me is, thank you for all your hard work, now as a reward, pay me actual money for the privilege of doing it all over again. I can tell you right now: I won't do it. And I don't think many others will either.
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