Do players no longer care about quality?

[Benfi]

So I've been server hopping a lot these days and what I noticed is that there are a lot of poor quality servers with LOTS of players and many great and unique servers with only a small playerbase. This makes me wonder...do players these days no longer care about quality, professionalism and uniqueness?

What I saw on the bigger servers were broken NPCs, bugs, poor spelling, poor NPC coding and a huge mess in towns. Most of their features were just standard releases on the eAthena website. Yet these servers are the ones with most players. Then I visit some servers that have great and self-made unique features, a professional staff, everything working like a charm but... 90% of them have only a small player base. I'm really wondering what players these days care about, seeing that most of them join such badly maintained servers instead of the professional and unique ones.

And when I look on the eAthena website and I see the head administrators of certain big Mid/High Rate Servers (I won't mention any names) ask the most simple questions (like how to read out a variable or how to set certain mapflags), that just makes me sad.

Is it really true these days that if you have no clue on how to run a server, grab all the custom eAthena forum script releases and throw them on your server, you have a bigger chance of getting a big community than when you have lots of knowledge about how to run a server and you build many great and unique features?

[LemonCrosswalk]

No.

[Tande]

It's rather sad, though true.

[Majinken Souga]

That's why I tend to stay away from huge servers. I think the reason they have a lot of players is because most people want to be on a server with a lot of players. How they got those players in the first place, I have no idea. However, you are right that many of the huge servers have a lot of problems, though I've been on smaller servers with problems also. I've seen my share of corruption on high-population servers and unbalanced donates that force you to obtain them if you want to be any good in PvP. I join smaller servers not only because I get nervous with a large population, but also because of what you've said. It's likely because of the whole "omg, people are here!" factor. I have noticed this not just in RO, but in general where games are concerned. Everybody seems to be moving towards a "quantity, not quality" approach to things.

[Peter]

Sadly, players no longer care about quality. Heck, Gravity doesn't even care about quality!

On my server, we fix every bug we can find. That includes bugs in Aegis. We have a development repository and track tickets and such, and make sure that bugs are fixed. It's amazing how many bugs that there are in the actual Aegis server (official.)

We average around 100~150 players, and I find a lot of people connect, stay for 10 minutes and then leave due to the population size. Not bothering to stick around to see how the community is, or anything.

[vekk]

My two cents,

I think that, most high and super high rate server doesn't have professional team.
Alot of "kid" just go and try to make their server (not only kid but well) and have no idea of what to do "next".
So they hire GM to make the dev for them.

Either that, or they doesn't take in consideration the time they have to put in the server to fix everything.

As in general, I think you're kinda true, but not that much.
Alot of admin have succes with their server and have alot of poeple on in. I know some really competent admin, that their server have alot of problem.
You know why ? They are overwhelmed. They don't have time to do every single thing.

When you have ALOT of poeple, you have MORE thing to fix and to deal with. (Especially lag and stability, cheat etc.) So the devlopment or else tend to lay back a bit more.
If also true that some poeple just have no idea how it work.

The part I think you forgot is that there also alot of bad admin on low population server. It's just that they don't last long, since there's no one on it and poeple just go and find a new server. It's alot more difficult to "quit" a high populated server" than a low one, since you make more friend and you make alot more attach to it.

And, there's also player that is searching for quality, and population and just find nothing.. I wonder why "competant admin and gm team" have hard time to bring poeple on their server..
Since they don't find any, they just stay where they are, or go search a server again... and again.

[Randfeon]

People never really cared about quality - it's always been which server lets them "pwn noobs" more easily, be it because of donation items or not.

And there's also the 3rd class factor, added recently.

[DeadOwnz]

Sound like your talking about a majority because not ALL don't care. I do at least.

[Final]

LOL QUALITY!!!!!!  Whats that? 



(point made?)

[DeadOwnz]

Not at all just saying >_>
Dont hate me bro.

[orix1357]

I do, but it's no longer a concern to me 'coz I'm getting bored at the least.
I'm just making some custom stuff at my personal offline server.

[Anti-Static Foam Cleaner]

Fact: 90% of MMO players don't like MMOs

[GorthexTiger]

Fact: The existence of SHRs answers your question. No they do not care.

[DarkDevine]

eAthena just made it too easy, for 'I HAZ GM LOLZ!!one1'-Admins to have an own server.

People like it, if they get everything they want easily, they get bored fast after that as well and will complain then, but for first they are happy to have everything.
Normally you just can't have everything you want, because most servers have been low rates,
that saved the fun with the game, but soon people started wanting more and wanted to pwn (Because it was hard to farm stuff to pwn)

Then people started wanting more, they set up high rates and super high rates and super super high rates and imba custom items and donation items, now people can finally pwn easily with their 0815-build consisting of 2000 berries, 2000 poison bottles and a hotkey bar containing EDP, those berries and cloaking.
No skill needed, no farming needed, just pwn.
That satifies those lazy players, the low rates became emptier and finally went down, the high rates raised and now they have the highest population mostly with communities full of retards.

People that make quality-servers mostly do low-rates or low-mid-rates, because they really know what RO is about (Not wtfpwning noobs while being a noob yourself, really).
Players worked hard on low rates before to reach something, DANG, server wiped or admin ran away with the whole donation money,
that happened so many times.
Nowadays players just join those high rates because they already know, that it will be wiped soon.
They don't want to put further work in their stuff that will get lost soon,
they want to play and not farming everything over and over again.

And since the good low rates finally went to the HoS (RebirthRO) or are just about drama anyways (AnthemRO) because the GMs became retarded or needed MOAR $$$, there is no good server with a good population anymore.

For me, I love low rates, I love playing real RO and not some customized s***, I would love to play a 1/1/1 server, just a completely blank eAthena with just some professional fixes at the engine and possibly a few NPCs with useful trade-quests or something,

even though I play midrates and highrates, because I already know that if I play a good low rate, my work will be lost one day because of incompetent admins.

TL;DR:
All servers that exist should be hacked, killed, eAthena should remove all SVNs uploaded somewhere and only 3-4 servers with good admins in the rate-range of 1/1/1 to 100/100/100 should be made then.

[Peter]

Players worked hard on low rates before to reach something, DANG, server wiped or admin ran away with the whole donation money,
that happened so many times.
Nowadays players just join those high rates because they already know, that it will be wiped soon.
They don't want to put further work in their stuff that will get lost soon,
they want to play and not farming everything over and over again.

To be fair, I've been running a low rate for 6 years without a single wipe (As I am, undisputedly  running the oldest private RO server.) Way to give me recognition