The epic ststem?

[Deider]

In the words of Fire Marshall Bill...


This is the Avlis server list from around ten minutes ago.


That's due to a DM event (yay!). Normally around this time of day (at least for the past week) I usually see between 0 and 6 people on, across all the servers.

Now this is the first page of the EE server list from around the same time.


Ravenloft has 60+ players. That's not a fluke - I've been checking daily and 67 is actually on the low side. And that's just the first page of the list - it goes on for several pages.

When's the last time you've seen 60+ players on Avlis? Not even on one server, across all nine. I think for me the last time was... around 2006, when TheG got banished. And that was a DM event, not casual logins.

I'm not saying we need to have dozens of players to be successful. "Success" depends on what your metric is. If the goal is to cater to whoever's left and ensure they are having fun then we are succeeding and there is nothing to worry about.

But the decline in players here... it's not COVID, it's not summer and it's not that people aren't playing NWN anymore. Hundreds of people are playing NWN - they're just not playing it here.

[krackq]

Any idea what the draw is to those places? Is it just that they are running EE which is much newer version of the game out there? When a game is released, its released to the world and say thousands of people purchase the game worldwide. Out of those, a fraction decide to look into persistent worlds.... which could end up being hundreds or thousands of people. What makes them go to where they go or what gets them there? One thing obviously would be other players. When I play fps games, I go to the fuller servers to play instead of the empty ones. I imagine its the same case for this. What else though? I've never played anywhere else so I don't know but am curious what draws them there.

[Nighthawk4]

I can't speak for others but vault wiping would be a great way to chase me away.

#Me too


I quit my last PW due to a vault wipe. That is what brought me to Avlis, back in 2003.
At my age I am not sure how much longer I have. Not sure I could go through starting again, either here or somewhere else

[ScottG]

Word.

And you can't compare EE to regular NWN. There's so many hoops you have to jump through to get standard NWN working vs EE, which just has a larger player base.

It's just not easy to get on to Avlis on NWN vs jumping on any of those servers on EE, I just log in and it auto-downloads any haks and files... It's just superior tech. So I think the bigger question is what changes would you want to see when moving over to EE, assuming that is happening.?

[Sarmanos]

NWN EE is on Steam which is easily the bigger platform than GoG, so your average EE buyer just won't have NWN Diamond available since they don't bundle it in on Steam.

That aside for Avlis-specific reasons why people aren't playing or even leaving? I'm not poking that hive with a stick anymore. I've done it enough in my time and all I ever got was stung.

[pallizard]

I’d say it is definately summer here.

As for the vault wipe, it is a dead horse. Should it happen, it would become even more a dead game, for my part at least.

Most of the time i log in, i’m alone but i blame the time zone. Most event are in my night, which leave me to some crafting and gathering for now, until fall and wi ter be back.

[Calzier]

Vault wipe would kill this place. Don't know why it's even dragged up again.

Low player numbers are a consequence of (1) ageing player base - we all have other things to do, drop in, drop out - plus natural wastage as people move on, and (2) EE. EE ~is~ the game now.

We could talk about other things, systems stuff, compare different PWs, but none of that is going to make a difference if people who download NWN get EE by default, and look over EE-compatible PWs to pick somewhere to play. Avlis isn't even on their radar/server listing.

[Nighthawk4]

I think this is the major problem.

Previously, if someone picked up a copy of the Diamond Edition from GoG or wherever, Avlis might be one of the PWs they considered. However, now it is more likely that they will see the EE version on Steam or the like and just go with that. Then they look for a PW to try and don't even see us.

<Personal Opinion, not Team Stance>

We need to get onto EE, even if only to draw people's attention to Avlis here. Easy to say I know. Not as easy to achieve.

[rk57957]

So where is everybody? Have people gotten bored and moved on to other things? Or is it something else?

I was at the beach getting horribly sunburned.

[PlasmaJohn]

Basic organizational dynamics. Attrition is normal and if you aren't constantly attracting new people you're going to shrink. At certain critical mass thresholds you'll see bigger population shifts.

Getting folks set up on Legacy NWN is going to be a huge ask unfortunately.

As for why Aerilith and Ravenloft are so populated... The former had EE first mover advantage AND what some consider excessive promotion by BD. My guess the latter became the "not-Aerilith" RP option. Turns out that both had excessive promotion by BD (see below). The right question isn't why those two are so populated it's why are those the only ones with a significant population.

I wish I could recommend going to EE but I'm still not seeing any support from BD for being able to self manage authentication. Trust them at your own peril.

Is the struggle to do the conversion a lack of interest in working with NWN or just a lack of skilled developers in general? In other words is EE the only option?

edit: Found more information on the state of EE PW's.
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/7 ... on-arelith
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/7 ... n-consoles
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/8 ... -community

[Nighthawk4]

This might not be the thread in which to ask this, but if the difficulty is with private authentication, could we switch to EE using their Authenticator and then convert to one of our own later as we did originally?

[PlasmaJohn]

This might not be the thread in which to ask this, but if the difficulty is with private authentication, could we switch to EE using their Authenticator and then convert to one of our own later as we did originally?

Keep in mind that complaint is my gripe with the state of EE. The Avlis Team may consider it an acceptable risk.

IMO you need to consider how much moving to EE would extend Avlis' life. If you think it'll buy 2 years even I'd say that's reasonable. Five is a bit more sketchy. Ten or more and I'd definitely be looking for ways to insulate against Master Server outages.

If you're super lucky they didn't change anything except the address of their master server but I'd consider that highly unlikely. You'll need somebody well versed in reverse engineering communications protocols and authentication layers. When I wrote Alpha somebody had documented a good chunk of Bioware's comms. I just needed to fill in some of the missing pieces and connect some dots.

[Nighthawk4]

So it’s not easy to redirect Players to our Authenticator instead of BD’s?

[PlasmaJohn]

So it’s not easy to redirect Players to our Authenticator instead of BD’s?

Redirection is the easy part. The question to be answered is: Do they both speak the same protocol? If not then somebody needs to figure out the new one.

I was actually rather surprised that Bioware came up with something reasonably secure.

[PlasmaJohn]

There's hope. See this: https://www.avlis.org/viewtopic.php?p=1461827#p1461827

[Urizen]

I'll play with you!

I do like some multiplayer in my multiplayer game

[bolo]

I'll say this. NWNEE runs pretty easily on a new pc. I just had to buy a new computer and I am having a helluva time getting the classic NWN to run right, let alone connect to Avlis. I tried using a saved NWN folder I had stored on an external hard drive, and it wouldn't run at first, not even in safe mode. The classic game doesn't seem to play well with new technology ( I'm running a Ryzen 3700x and a Radeon 6700XT graphics card). EE runs without having to jump through any hoops. I was finally able to connect, but it didn't run right. I had no UI and when I tried clicking on something the game crashed. I may try again later. But, as much as I love Avlis, I dunno if it's worth spending hours fiddling with a program to get it to work. This game is almost 20 years old and it's had a good run, but I may end up giving up on it, at least classic NWN.

[downsystem]

It seems the move to EE looks possible now and we hopefully will see what becomes of Avlis with easier installs on bigger platforms like Steam, GOG and BD this year if everything falls just right. Thanks to everyone who is working on this conversion and hopefully Dieder smiles on us in this time of conversion to see more traffic to this world called Avlis so it can live just a bit longer.