We may agree to disagree on this point, but I am going to be blunt; can you name a single Crystal server that came out that had an effect anywhere close to Chronicles did?
You'll be very, very hard pressed to do so. Because nothing can compare to what Chronicles did for this community. In fact, Chronicles further proves my point in this regard - it moved AWAY from LOMCN and chose to avoid the negativity that seems to just infest this forum, and it thrived and still is alive and kicking in the face of everything that's happened to it.
Sure, Crystal may have kept us going inbetween great servers. But imagine a GENUINE new player to Mir - many of who'm I encountered on Chronicles, Marble. Can you honestly tell me they'd have stuck around had the first server they played been your run of the mill C# server?
That's the issue i'm getting at. Mir can stave off death for as long as possible and C# has done a ****ing great job at that - but for every Mir player it kept playing it also probably drove off as many fresh new players. This is just my opinion, but it's far more important to bring new players into Mir and get the word spread through their circle of friends that Mir is a game worth playing, than to keep our old but dedicated players "just chugging along".
I won't get into the Marble discussion as it's something I saw as an inevitable failure and learning curve, that happens with everyone. But I agree it still has a future, not in its present state, but perhaps someway down the road in the future for Mir2 veterans who perhaps aren't interested in Mir3.
Thank you for joining the discussion though, you know I appreciate your input, even if in the past we had our run ins :joyous:
I think that's a fair point, I'm just not sure I'd entirely blame the Crystal files for that. Seems more like no one managed to pull off a very large server using them. Bon with 5heroes got pretty close. Every server having to deal with crashes for the first couple of months for a long time didn't help either. I'd actually be very curious to know how many new players become attracted to Mir nowadays, I can't imagine it's very many except when something like Chronicles launched and the majority of that was down to marketing
Toxicity is by far the worst thing about the community, it's a small minority but still it's the main reason we moved away from LOMCN and the main reason I quit interacting with the community for a long long time. Even now I tend to stay out of most discussions and leave the interaction with the Chronicles community for the others on the team. It's also not something I ever see changing as it's a general internet thing. We'd spend more time some months putting out community fires (some self caused for sure) than actually updating the game, it became an incredible draining exercise that we were almost relived when other servers began taking the heat off us, still we always aim to be the top server :P
Even with that toxicity I think Mir still has room to grow, servers need to change and become more modern. Take notes from other current successful MMO's while still attempting to blend in the PvP action that keeps a lot of the hardcore players playing. It's a balance that I don't believe anyone can get 100% right. But someone will pull off a Chronicles 2.0 and Mir will keep going for another few years somehow