Hi,
• It seems that any message that does not sing glory about the new realm is immediately considered hostile, and the responses are not only unfriendly but totally besides the point.
• Neither I nor Sheeper have said anything indicating that we are *not* willing to contribute. We raised valid questions about the survivability of the community and are worried about the fragmentation of our not-so-big community, but in return we get a respin of old records. I've read Brian's beer and hamburger comparison on several other threads already, it didn't add anything new to the issues I brought forward. Allen's responses were downright spiteful and totally uncalled for. I do feel personally offended by his messages. If you have no intention to discuss a message constructively, then please restrain yourself from answering. Thanks.
• Not everyone is attracted to D2/CE for the same reasons.
Personally, I am a slow player. I like to collect items. I compare sets/uniques that I already have and keep the best of these, minor upgrades, but I like that. I also like to store a few extra items to hand down to new players or friends. I don't care about my ranking on a ladder. I play this game for my own entertainment and not for competition. I like to chat a lot. I like to help newbies or people with lesser knowledge about the game, as I was helped before. I like to learn from the people who have higher level characters and/or equipment. My highest level char is 86 and still in act1 cgs. I like to have many different characters and builds.
For most people 1 account may suffice. Considering the above, I have a big problem with the limited amount of space, especially since I've started my 6th character today.
• I think I do understand the original intentions of disabling level and player limitations, showing all games, no passworded games: prevent people from isolating themselves, stimulate community interaction. (Hans-Jürgen: correct me if I am wrong). I think I'm a perfect example of someone who interacts a lot with people *in game*. I care less about posting on a forum, since playing (organizing, comparing, chatting, learning, educating and helping) consumes nearly all my time already as is :-)
• The 8kb bug got me again yesterday, I was given a lot of items by a friend who changed realm (and whom I will miss dearly). Unfortunately I lost many great items, since my character was already holding a lot of items that you would consider low level crap :-(
I would gladly pay my membership fee to get rid of the current EULA limitations.
But starting from scratch, without newbies, without half of my friends, with only one account and continued risk to loose items due to 8kb bug, doesn't appeal to me at all.
• @Hans-Jürgen: as we are relatively new players, we have not seen the bot messages for 6-9 months, but only as long as we are playing (and evaluating this mod). To you it may be dragging on for a long time, for us newbs it's not been all that obvious.
Many times I felt that julia wasn't sending the proper message. The messages are usually set in a negative tone, complaining, nagging. I think you could yield better results with a friendly, challenging message, that clearly says what you want/expect from people. Julia likes to talk in riddles. I you want I'd gladly volunteer to proofread julia's messages to fix embarrasing mistakes like "to expensive, to laggy" (should be "too" in both cases).
For example, this particular message was just like a nagging old hag, spinning the same record over and over again, with an open ending like "servers are to expensive,..." (or something like that)
It may have been more fruitful if Julia had said something like "Hi, we urgently need funds to keep the servers running. please visit http*insert correct url* for detailed information.".
PS. english is not my native language. I am dutch, and we seem to be less political correct than is common in other countries. I apologize if I offended anyone unintentionally :-)
on a more positive note:
• I would like to know the system requirements for a server.
• Is there a ready made package to run a CE server, or how and where can I obtain the necessary software and settings?
I would gladly dedicate some hardware and my bandwidth to add an extra server to the public realm.
Having been a helpdesk/testlab engineer for more than seven years, I think I should be able to handle the setup easily :-)
Thanks in advance.