EssenceRO review.

[Tira]

I definitely agree with the staffing issues. I unfortunately had a vast array of things to deal with throughout December/January (complete hard drive failure on my laptop containing about £10,000 worth of work that was unfortunately backed up on another partition of the same drive), resulting in a lot of cost and effort on my part to recover the aforementioned, that didn't exactly leave me much time for anything else. I'm also starting a new job at a design agency half way across the country, which means I'm simultaneously trying to find a new apartment, so things are pretty frantic at the moment. Ultimately though, Essence has never had many staff - this is mostly due to my reservations about new staff, since I am incredibly selective in whom I'm willing to take on. If I'm not 100% satisfied that GMs can conduct themselves in an adult, professional and knowledgable manner, I'm not going to accept them - and I also generally won't even look at an application from anyone under the age of 21. This obviously limits the pool of potential candidates considerably (and also means that all existing staff have careers which generally take precedence), but I'd rather this than a half-assed selection of incompetent kids typing in atrocious English and playing havoc on my staff team, which seems to be the case more often than not elsewhere.

The above said, I'd like things like this:

I've sat by and watched my friend be b**** out by a GM for asking a question.

To be reported/drawn to my attention (and the Abuse Reports forum is there for staff as well as other players). Admittedly I haven't been around for the last three weeks or so, but I read every PM that I receive via forums, as well as every email, and that is the sort of behaviour that I have absolutely zero tolerance for (to be honest, I'm somewhat surprised that any of my GMs would be stupid enough to do it).

As for stability, all these issues should now be resolved. Turns out we had a faulty stick of RAM, which has now been replaced, so everything is running smoothly as normal again. I think there was also the odd crash due to the implementation of 3-1 classes, and as much as we try to bug test these thoroughly prior to implementation (since we're months ahead of eA in this regard), it's difficult for a small developer team to iron out every single potential bug, since we really can't emulate a 600-player population in a sandbox environment, and sometimes issues are hard to predict.

The player count has been rising rapidly recently following a few months of plateau, so evidently things are on the up again (and now that I'm back to b**** at people to get things done, stuff generally does run smoother). I don't necessarily agree with all aspects of your review, but many I can definitely sympathise with - and I appreciate you taking the time to write regardless.