State of Avlis Address Commentary

[Pyracantha]

First, thank you Orleron for the update and for all the vision and work that has gone into creating this wonderful Avlis world that consumes so much of our time, thought, energy, sleep, etc.

I had a couple reactions when reading about the future expansion plans, and humbly offer a couple tidbits for thought.

The size of the real estate in Avlis seems more than adequate at this point for the size of the user community. Fleshing out the existing areas seems like the spot-on right thing to do before adding additional servers.

It seems to me that the most interesting expansion option for Avlis is to expand the player base. New players bring the truly interesting dimensions to the Avlis experience for everyone.

Perhaps the Avlis community could concentrate some efforts on devising ways to expand the number of players. Some ideas that come to mind include:

1) Build some hostile areas where newbies can survive hunting alone. MANY players prefer to learn their way around a bit before introducing all the complications of social interaction. This is particularly true of players who come not from other online RPGs or PnP, but from the single player NWN itself (like I did). It takes a while to learn what RP means, and it's a hard transition from single-player hack-n-slash to fedex quests in one step.

2) Survey players who came, saw, and didn't return - especially those with good applications. Find out why they left.

3) Find some place, on Bioware website or Gamespy or something, where Avlis players can post their experiences. There are great stories, but I think they're mostly seen only on the Avlis forums.

I'm sure there are much better ideas than these out there.

Thanks again, to Orleron and the Team.