the IMM's just have to stop throwing in areas. New areas are neat, but in all honesty - if the player numbers drop what is the point?

We've been shifting to a quality-improvement focus over the last couple years. More than half of recent large area projects replace older areas. In addition to that, there's considerable effort towards splashing in new color or functionality to older areas- look at the shops in Tir'Talath for one example. When we do add a brand-new area, we generally merge or nix older areas to keep the total area count the same. This gives us a mix that should satisfy the concerns you're talking about, while still providing new material for exploration-oriented players.

In more recent news on that front, I've gotten a green light from Implementors to start pushing heroimms towards area-oriented projects that don't necessarily involve writing a whole new area. (One of my hats is to supervise these sorts of projects, and make sure they get done well, work in our game, and arrive in a reasonable amount of time.) For example, a new staff member might be assigned to write/revise a smaller area, and spend the extra time generating objects for shops, redoing descriptions in older areas like Galadon, etc. It's still area work (which we consider crucial to our 'cross-training' approach to new staff), but it's less focused on expansion than our older approach.

More people will keep traversing Galadon and the 'important-eq' areas rather then the new areas with interesting crud.

This isn't true from experience. Plenty of the newer areas see a lot of traffic. To cite one example, Azuremain is consistently in the top few as far as XP awarded per day. It's also completely false that no one uses gear from the new areas- as a matter of fact, the newer areas tend to be more equipment-heavy than old ones. If you're only using gear that was in the game in 2000.... you're doing something wrong.

Implement more twists in the game.. more skills, more races, different cabals, different IMM's, more religions (THAT ACTUALLY STAY!#!) and things that will constantly change the game.

Apples and oranges with respect to areas. See below.

I personally would rather see changes, CHANGES (bad or good!).. rather then careful deliberation and a change once in a while. The last announcement on the board was what, 10 days ago? That's not enough.. more more more!

You might notice that Sebeok and Zulghinlour recently posted to explain they can't be around a lot right now- Seb because of moving, Zulgh because of work. I just finished moving myself, and only got back to a normal CF schedule a few days ago, as I mentioned on these forums. Also, all coding basically went on hiatus (except for Jullias, who did the really hard stuff involved with managing a transition like this.... stuff that isn't really visible to the playerbase, but is crucial to normal MUD function) for a little bit while we changed over to the faster servers.

Coding is done by a small cadre of people, with help from the staff as a whole. Thus, a few instances like the above can have a MUD-wide impact for a little bit. If Seb/me/Zulgh aren't around much temporarily, and J is occupied doing nuts-n-bolts stuff, that's a sizable chunk of our available resources for the type of projects you're looking for.

Area writing and immteraction are done by the whole staff, which is typically 30-40 members, and tend to more or less chug along steadily, regardless of the presence or absence of a few people.

Also, different types of work are more or less visible to the playerbase. You might want more races/classes/etc., but all of that has to be built on stuff like game stability, game speed, human resources work (training, managing, and evaluating the staff), etc. As another example, I spend a significant fraction of my online detecting and busting cheaters. If you're an honest player and I'm doing my job right, you barely know I exist in that capacity, aside from the occasional global echo or forum post. Yet I'm doing work that benefits you as an honest player, whether or not you realize it.

In short, we're busy, and we care about the game. That's all you're going to be able to ask from us. Jumping up and down and demanding faster implementation of things only serves to irritate the staff, and generally produces results contrary to what you're asking for.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com