The exact date will be announced at least 6 weeks in advance. Season 2 will launch with certain game aspects and zones being time gated, the unlocks will happen on a fixed time schedule and this schedule will be made public before the launch.Īside from the scheduled changes outlined in the timeline, only bug fixes, events and realm task experiments will happen within a season. The alternative would have been to just do a normal relaunch and hope for some miracle to not end up languishing with a small population after at most a year with the option to shut down or to relaunch again, effectively doing seasons without telling anyone you're doing seasons. Seasons are the only realistic option for freeshards to not only deal with but to actually embrace the freeshard lifecycle. To quickly summarize: The launch hype brings the initial population, from then on the player loss without "something new", advertisement or external events is inevitable, "something new" is always dangerous in case of freeshards for old games. However, once all preparations were done, other servers were on the horizon and as the grass is always greener on the other side, the sentiment at the time made a relaunch - especially a controversial one with seasons - untenable and hence we decided to shut down instead.Īs for the reasons on why we should do seasons, shortly after the final affirmation we publicly talked about the freeshard lifecycle with subtle and not so subtle hints towards seasons. Tests were underway, like the invader/defender RR reset event, and only a handful of changes, namely the PvE scaling (quick aside, pve scaling has since been dropped) and the style changes, were supposed to be tested before the announcement. Then again in early summer 2021 we started to creep up on the critical point, once again internal discussions happened and we again affirmed the decision to do seasons if we relaunch. The first Covid lock downs changed everything. Once early 2020 rolled around we were rather close to following through with that, however, We would either shut down or try a relaunch with seasons. Internally we had decided at some point in 2019 what we would do in case the population dips below a critical point:
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