Important: The Future of Pangaea

[Dante]

Dear Players,

Firstly, I’d like to thank you all for your continuing support of Pangaea and our community. However, the time has come were we need a serious debate upon the future of our beloved game. Both player and staff activity has been dwindling for years now and we need to be realistic upon the future of Pangaea.

This has been discussed for a while now, but with the retirement of Ares as our main scripter, the process has had to be put into action sooner rather than later. We have had some major game breaking bugs recently including town sieging and the town stones themselves. If this is the future of Pangaea, that bugs cannot be fixed quickly and effectively, then we must question the survivability of our shard. Moreover, without an active scripter you can appreciate that it is very challenging to incorporate new additional content and areas to explore.

That being said, Pangaea is technologically ancient, but there are options out there if we can provide the man power and financial backing. Realistically, we have funds for about the next 6 months and therefore a decision has to be made soon.
We have discussed the following options whilst making the final decision:

1) Shut Pangaea Down: If we were to do this, all recent donators would get some form of rebate or a process would be made to help deal with it. After all, it’s the player’s money. This would be accepting that Pangaea’s time has finally come.

2) Continue on our current POL and find a new scripter: This is probably the least attractive option as we are constantly facing obstacles relating to out dated technology and we are working on old ideas that we find are no longer relevant – we cannot develop Pangaea and attract new players in its current format.

3) Finally, we could rebuild Pangaea on the latest RUN UO platform and update the game and start a fresh, with new concepts based on what we already have. This would also involve porting over a substantial amount of the class system for instance. This is probably the most attractive option, IF we can sustain the financial side of it and hire a new active scripter. We would also keep in mind the failures of Pangaea 2 and avoid these completely.

We would like to thank the players for their continued support and commitment and for being part of a community like no other. It has been a pleasure working for and with you guys.

The Staff

[James Blackburn]

I agree that pangaea might need changes, playerbase was simply dieing out, but honestly I have no idea what does that changing to RUN UO platform actualy mean, and how big the diffrence is... so if somebody could explain I would appreciate

[Ivan]

Pang currently seems to be realy heavy burden for our scripters, it seems like its too large job to manage pangaea or our scripters are just realy busy otherwise aswell. So continuing with POL shard doesnt seem like an option.

Recreation of pangaea would be an valid option, but its a large process and staff has to realy acknowledge how big of a job it'd actualy be to recreate it. Its not all about copying the class systems and w/e, its also the stories and RP content and balancing pvm and pvp again.

What comes to shutting down, ultima online as a game has lived its days already. Ofcourse the player count has been going down because of summer season starting, but you should think of it as temporary drop still. Imo if you are going to shut down pangaea let it live until the money runs out, thus leaving a chance to have fun for the last time on pang.

[Maximilian Lhoth]

Pangaea 2 plan has been seen already, no thanks :/

Except the Pangaea 2 team of Seraph, Kontrol etc. were a%%holes, compared to the current staff who seem to be capable of higher levels of empathy.

I would play there anyway, if you decided to make a RunUO Pangaea. The community matters much, even if I'm not very liked person these days and kind of the hermit of Pangaea (to get me to do something requires passion, and when I do something, I do it with a passion indeed...)

RunUO shards I've seen are pretty OSIstyle always. So we'd end up with another osistyle shard but with a class system and skillcap... oh, one good thing, I like elves. I can imagine the elves would be there as a playable race ;)

IF you do close "Pangaea 1", at least make its code downloadable public domain and the rest of players will figure out something. Alteran had Pangaea's code somewhere hidden and without Alteran there would be no Pangaea now.

We have many players, who are adept with various programming languages and maybe we could become player-scripters? Personally I know Turbo Pascal, and I've studied C# and JavaScript in uni of applied sciences. And we have plenty of similar people here.

How about a bugfixing player-scripter-brainstorm-team? I'd be happy to join the team. I have nothing but time and a lack of purpose of life and semi-altruistic movies.

My personal plan, by the way, is, when I get old, become a pensioneer and get my inheritance, I'll run a shard for other old guys like me! I'd even hire staff and pay them if need be. When my father was young, he liked to play pinball, and today I installed him pinball games and he loves them! It's the nostalgy.

[Maximilian Lhoth]

What comes to shutting down, ultima online as a game has lived its days already. Ofcourse the player count has been going down because of summer season starting, but you should think of it as temporary drop still. Imo if you are going to shut down pangaea let it live until the money runs out, thus leaving a chance to have fun for the last time on pang.

Older peeps like 320x200 with 256 colors and 3d makes their eyes hurt. Believe me. A good ascii-based roguelike game with great game depth beats a game with 3d graphics, cool sounds and so on, if the game lacks depth. Ultima Online, customized to Pangaea, doesn't definitely lack depth. The playerbase is old, because we're used to the 320x200 with 256 colors stuff, but some rare individuals, extremely cool youngsters also find roguelikes and retro games amusing and prefer them over newfagness (no homophobia intended, I support the awesome Tom of Finland stamps 100%).

[Bella Pious]

Seriously ..... if the staff cannot handle all the new changes, why throw them out in a rush and leave them broken and then said they have no time to fix it so we are forced to choose to stay on the multiple broken system or get it restart or nothing at all? Geez ... why did Boris leave in the first place to leave room and a new direction to the Staff?

Can't we just undo the new changes that are broken and leave it be with less new problems? I do see a lot of players returning, many of them pretty good roleplayers, or at least ppl who enjoys roleplaying.

I ponder on the statement about keeping Pangaea as it is and hire a new scripter being the least attractive idea -- to the current staff team maybe. Do you think most of us old players who have stayed on Pangaea for 10+ years regardless of all the changes that we have gone through, stay because we had hope in future staff to miraculously fix problems? No, it is because we love it and we would stick with it with the past known problems. Even though I don't say it out loud too often, but the feeling that current staff team are turning Pangaea into a white-mouse lab for what they want to achieve, never ceased but we put up with it with a hope for a better future.

[Glarundis]

hmm
why is it harder, for our scripters, to have POL instead of RunUO?i'll go with whatever is best and gives more options (from what everyone seems to be saying the past years, RunUO is much better in terms of different possibilities)

also, max said something which i think is a must.
many players don't want to stop being players.
but many of those players could help with scripting and stuff. it is, in my opinion, a must to let them help, since we need many of those guys (scripters)

and what do you mean by Ares retiring? :S

oh btw, i'll go ahead and say something for the "new pangaea", if it comes to be

1-don't be afraid of having to shut down for few weeks/months and let players help with recreating. ppl can wait/help during that time
2-fix class system properly, don't be afraid to change things that should've been changed (like priests with 100 res spells and stuff like that)
2-balance religions properly, we can't permanently have the differences that we've had since forever, it's not gonna cut it anymore, and just like with the class system, we need to drop the "out of respect for the former admins". either we change and make it fair, or pangaea will die (if, out of respect for the "true pangaea", you guys do decide it's better to shut down pangaea rather than give it too much of a change, i understand completely)
3-change the piety system and the way religions work. TOTAL CONTROL given to GM's, as they'll roleplay the gods.
no more players dominating due to OOC reasons. gm's decided who to indoctrinate and who to excommunicate. gm's decide who to have more piety and who to have less piety. "don't like that guy joining your religion because you don't like him OOC?though luck. he's doing a good job at roleplaying a char for this religion, so be prepared to have him in your religion as well". seriously, unless we have gm's controling religions in this sense, it will be too much left to the players, and, ultimately, the players who rule become the gods themselves. this is pure shit. let players control the religion, but always under the guidance of the god (the gm)

[Ondoher]

From where are you going to hire a new scripter ?'

Also youre going to need a whole team of people to develop pang from scratch. All the things happened with Pang 2, this option doesnt really get my hopes up.

[Dante]

Ares quit, we do not have a scripter, does that clear things up?

And Bella, for christ sake this isn't a laboratory and Boris quit because he wanted to and felt he didn't work well with some staff.

So don't start harking back to the Boris era, for that time has passed and we have to deal with what we have got.

These bugs occurred in implemented, thought to be working new additions, it was only till recently that these "Bugs" appeared and then the current scripters realised they could not devote the required time to the shard anymore. They are human after all and do a voluntary service.

[Maximilian Lhoth]

Can't we just undo the new changes that are broken and leave it be with less new problems? I do see a lot of players returning, many of them pretty good roleplayers, or at least ppl who enjoys roleplaying.

Yeah, just completely nuke out broken stuff rather than close the shard.