To open this discussion, I think the most pertinent phrase should be repeated over and over again. "I choose a high-rate server because I didn't want a blizzlike experience."
Since the gold and rate changes were announced, I looked over and over again over the forums to see how both the community and staff reacted, and I'm dumbfounded about how the community feels simply faulty. First of all, it feels like the only community that had proper pools and was direct asked about recent decisions was the Lordareon community. Am I wrong? Can someone link to to staff-created threads where they asked, maybe, Icecrown players about what suggestions they had and what they felt was best to improve the server? I want to see what kind of ungodly and unholy things the community said to make the staff simply disregard it.
Which is quite ironic when I see the little server message that pops from time to time. Yes, that one that says Warmane is kept online and the staff's salary is paid through donations. Focus on "donations". Donations imply that your players, clients, are willingly giving part of their money because they enjoy and want to support the service. Considering the situation that a "private server" is naturally in, that implies mainly one thing: Trust. It means the donors trust Warmane with their money, they feel that such money will be used in meaningful ways, and they receive the power to execute some non-blizzlike services through it, such as realm/faction transfers, etc.
So why it feels like the clarity and communication between staff and community is so bad right now? Is it difficult to open a staff post and say "Hello, we thought about these changes for the realm(s) because of [insert detailed reasons and motives]. What do you guys think? Any suggestion? Is it good? Is it bad? Because we have a problem here, and we need to find a good solution for the majority of players.", then go through the replies and respond or consider the best ones? Keep in mind this post's title. I'm a new member of the community and might not know past events that happened.
And to stop this from being a pure rant, my suggestions are a middleground between the actual Warmane's decision and the community answers.
First suggestion:
Floating rates. Exactly. Updating the rates at regular intervals to match whatever economic situation we have at the moment.
Second suggestion:
From what I heard, once upon a time Warmane had a lottery system. Why not put it in again? It would suck out most of the money out of the server, as people bet in there for the simply fact people have nothing else to do with the money. Maybe a 100g per ticket, with chances to get cosmetic stuff such as rare mounts? Maybe outfits or pets/companions? And at lower gold costs, make useful things for noob appear, like stacks of potions or food or equipment.
Give people reason to value their gold again.
Third suggestion:
Middle ground between actual rates and x1 rates. Make the profession and rep rates something around x3, maybe?
I repeat the phrase that I used to open this thread: I came here because I wanted quality without blizzlike rates. I don't have time nor patience anymore to spend a good month or two leveling professions. I came here to have fun with WOTLK content, and so did everyone else. Is the objective to make people want to spend money on leveling those things through donate coins? Why not better stimulus for people to donate? Like monthly lotteries between donaters of that month, with the prize something really good or exclusive?
There's tons of paths to take to increase the server's longevity, but making it a painful grind isn't one of these. I can't imagine the "happiness" of the new player who got to lvl 80 in like a week or two, just to discover that to get anywhere on the game he/she will have to spend more time than they spent leveling just to get the basic rep gear to start doing rdf hcs, to them start being able to gear up for the end game content.
That's not considering the complete desync of money gain and level gain that the rate changes will cause, that will force the player to stop and enter in despair through an endless grind as he tries to make just enough money to keep leveling.
"Low-level material economy"? What about I getting into my level 80 character and use my extra movespeed and faster mining/gathering speed to clean all nodes in the low-level map before any of the new players can get to them? Considering such new players will have to fight through monsters close to their levels to get to the nodes, not counting the lack of a same-speed money.
Basically, this is my request to the warmane staff; Be smarter about this decision, no one will lose trust in you if you take a step back and re-analyse the issue with your community, the community of Icecrown and other no-blizzlike servers.
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