Reviresco wrote:Not going to vote because I joined in mid-2015, but I have an obliquely related question: how did Salem retain players when raiding was so much more common? It seems like in present day that a significant portion of people who lose their main holdings/characters quit.
There were several differences between this Salem and the older version.
First, Salem of 4-5 years ago had much less to do, so if you lost your character or your base, you hadn't lost nearly as much time and investment as you do today. If you managed to save one of the two, you could get the other back with a few weeks of work, for the most part. And with it being easier to get back to 'full strength' it was also easier to get revenge, so a lot more players on losing their bases tended to do like The Claw and run away yelling "I'll get you next time, Gadget, next time!" Back then, a main character max had like 80 to each humor which increased to around 250 for big raiders after a raiding change, and it wasn't common to raise a proficiency above about 100, maybe 250 for Stocks & Cults, so you can see how different it is now.
Second, there was the Tribe, Candy Gang, and some other larger factions that tended to form alliances and protect smaller players while fighting more among themselves so it was easier for a lot of people to be neutralish or protected or otherwise avoid being raided through other means than just a lot of big defenses.
So, we added a lot of new content and entire new mechanics, made it possible to easily get higher humors and proficiencies, created reasons to do so, more than doubled the animals for hunting, doubled the skills you can get, and pretty much made it so that your base and your character are much, much more valuable than they used to be, even the raiders. Of course, this created a problem that we needed to make it easier to survive and keep these massively more valuable characters and bases, which made it necessary to redo raiding and make it much more defensive until we can balance it back down to a fair level, and why we added such things as the TBC and the mortars and the stocks. But that's really a different thread.
Personally, I'd vote for current Salem over the other available options. Not just because I helped make it the way it is, but because in order to get back the older, more care-free system we'd have to lose so much of the other new stuff we all love or we'd end up driving off everyone who doesn't raid and end up with a situations similar to what happened just before MM bought Salem. Raiding might not be as fun as you want it to be right now, but it's so much better than just reinstating the old system. What we aspire to do is make raiding fun while keeping it difficult, to prevent those who get raided from falling to despair and quitting.