The amount of time and effort required for even basic changes to be implemented is astronomical. That being said, I've been working on a comprehensive vision of Darke's gods, races, and guilds in order to do a complete overhaul for nearly a year now and am no closer to making any changes than when I began. What's more is every change made (combat in particular) requires testing that is nearly impossible to do without the help of players. I've had a change to combat experience gain due to haste effects available for testing and can't find -any- players willing to login to the test site and so much as make sure it doesn't error out. (To be fair, Kim usually doesn't have a problem with doing testing.) I've spent about 3 hours testing it and haven't found anything, so should I just put it in? (sidenote: I'll probably just put this in and let it ride until I get feedback)
I believe that Darke should be an easy game to get in to and a difficult one to succeed in. It sounds to me like most people would agree that this should be the case but differ on what level 'get in to' means.
Darke was created as an open-ended persistent game. It was in fact designed to be able to handle the inevitability of 300%+ wield characters. In fact, in the combat code are comments from Drizzt and Diewarzau referencing 500% wield as the upper limit of what was thought to be feasible for normal player limits regardless of time. We've largely removed the skills, spells, and abilities that were designed to make this possible on old Darke and replaced it with levels, but that's another story entirely.
The reason we solicit advice/ideas/feedback/input from players is that the player base is larger than the administrative base. So while those of us who do work on Darke have a clear idea of what we'd like to see, we're aware that our ideas are not the only ones and they may in fact not even be the best in terms of enjoyability (anyone remember the fatigue movement on the world map? Wasn't fun, but it was an admin idea that we all thought was doable). Posting ideas is therefore an excellent way to keep Darke alive and vibrant.
