Post by SongRune on 2022-09-04 21:39:52
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I feel like deleting everyone's characters, which they may have invested thousands of hours in, without them having any say in the matter (the other 49 percent of players in your vote) is a very good way to permanently lose players, and some terrible PR for the game as a whole.
This may be less painful in the first week or two, rather than later, but that's also a worse time, because you're telling people who only have a week or two investment that if they continue to play, and invest more, they could lose it all at random. That's a really persuasive reason to stop getting invested in a game.
Losing large amounts of items has the same effect, and honestly doesn't even buy you that much. Let your players keep any investment you can possibly allow them to. You're already giving them a huge jolt. Don't add any more "we don't respect your investment and might take it away at any time" than you absolutely have to. The new server has more stuff and more people, but the actual amount of stuff per person didn't change.
The real challenge is nodes. You CAN'T let them both keep that. I don't know if there's a good system here, so I don't have much to say, but the core principle is the same. Don't erase your players investment and connection to the game and world if you don't absolutely have to.
I figure you could maybe just upgrade all the nodes from both servers and have a few months of competition where the players can siege nodes or support them, and the defeated or less supported ones fall until things fit the normal rules. It'd give a little agency back to players in a situation where you're forced to take a lot of it away from them. At THAT point, it's at least a lot closer to a major "world event" than a pure "you lose everything you worked for".