Whether you put so much of your time into something should be something you personally value regardless of whether people use it or not, if you do it to be ranked 20th or 100th, the question is not about others, is what you are making something you wish you could play.
My posts are about resurrecting a thread which serves no purpose, whose sole effect is to give those who might want to return to NWN, or to join this game for the first time, on seeing it listed in GOG a reason not to join our community. ( yet even posting prolongs this thread). Your words are not harsh, they are exaggerations which just don't jibe with the facts, the sky is not falling, the game is no more dead now than it was before, but losing gamespy was a heavy blow, which we are still recovering from, but that was not as bad as how we lost the original forums, or what might happen if we lose the vault.
I think your petition, and your focus, is intended on getting bioware, EA, Atari, Hasbro, etc to step up and fix the game, or fix gamespy. The problem is that the people who worked on NWN1 are gone, I don't think they could patch the game without a major investment of time and energy, and bringing in new people who already have other programs they are working on. ( if they needed to, they would actually probably have to hire members of the community like Virusman to actually fix it, or just include NWNCX by default ). Bioware is now part of EA which frankly only keeps the game around in these forums because it makes them look good - threads about games being dead actually makes them look bad. Atari is basically dead, and Hasbro is focused on NWO, and probably prefers us to keep getting the newest version, especially with 4th edition rules. You are trying to shame companies into doing something that they just cannot easily do even if they wanted to.
This is not going to happen. If something happens, it is going to be done by the fans despite what the official companies do, or by GOG themselves. If the official companies had their way, we'd be moving on to their latest game, and putting in monthly fees to keep their latest MMO running.
However, if someone from IGN reads our forums, won't it make them wonder why they still spend all the money on keeping the vault up if we are asking if the game is dead. Won't it make someone who saw the game on GOG think twice about that impulse buy. Won't it make someone coming back after a long hiatus, wonder if the game is even still worth reinstalling again. Won't it make EA question why we are on these servers, long after we should have moved on to Dragon Age. It's a prediction that can easily create it's own future.
I personally am appreciative of everything EA, IGN, and bioware have done for NWN, they deserve kudos for maintaining forums for this very old game, maintaining the vault, and supporting it as much as they have. Losing gamespy to me is an opportunity to create something better - the fact people are moving to NWNCX means that we now have the option of NWNx in Single player - this means fully modded combat, multiple fixes to bugs, and completely new features.
If your PW, or any PW, or a lot of PW's have low numbers, it's because they need to come up with some new original ideas which make people want to play, which make the players think jumping thru hoops like typing in a direct connect address is worth it. If you listen to the podcast it describes a new PW which is getting lots of players, so this is still possible even with everything going wrong ( and i think that was for NWN2 which is even less popular ).
The popularity also rises and falls depending on the season, on other games that are out there, the thing that makes this game survive is that people keep returning to it after they leave, after that other game starts to bore them. But the only determining factor in whether this game stays around, is if we continue to invest time into it.
I am not blind to the state of the game, far from it, but I also have seen a decades worth of the sky is falling threads predicting the end of the game, and if I posted in that first thread where this game is today, they would have said i was crazy to think it would still have so much going for it.
Modifié par painofdungeoneternal, 20 mars 2013 - 07:23 .
