No need for introductions, but that doesn't mean everyone who formally worked at OOO is now here at Grey Havens. So to clarify, how many GMs are left?

Thanks for letting us know the current state of things! Wishing you guys the best of luck on restructuring, because from what Clockwork Traveller pointed out it's understandably a difficult process.

So, although development for ingame features is halted for now, I'm glad the meta-game stuff is being looked over so the entire thing doesn't crash.

As for introductions, I think that you're right in the sense that we don't necessarily need formal ones. However, the general hope is that we'll see our moderators more often. Not necessarily, you know, all the time. We'd just like to know you're alive occasionally.

Anyway, best of luck with the restructuring! I have no doubt you guys can pull it off.

Will the servers remain as they are ? As we all know they are (putting it nicely) "not very good" , will the servers change? could it become peer 2 peer ? or is it too soon to tell? :T

The client is written in Java. Anyone who's knowledgeable and curious enough will be able to reverse engineer it.

An open source server means that people can fix security holes and analyze the codebase to make it more secure. I'm not going into details, but there have been a few instances of huge security holes that lasted for ages or were never even fixed. These are issues that have been found and researched by players. Malicious users have exploited them and will continue exploiting them. Helpful players, on the other hand, are limited in what they can do.

i'll come back to the game if they let us craft and upgrade our weapons as it was years ago... finding recipes was kinda exciting, but you could actually craft and evolve your equips, now it's just the equivalent of those tablet mobile games, that uses free2play to grab your attention but then you'll risk spending more money than you'd like to, it's not a nice way to do things IMO

@Cronus

The better question would be what direction is intended by this transition; i.e is the idea to continue development of the game, to continue development of the prize boxes, or just to host the game in general?

The other big question should really be more of a how many as well as a who exactly. Yes, it's former Three Rings employees, but who exactly and how many exactly-? It's likely to be small but exactly how small?

@Open sourcing

If they release the game as open source, I'll very likely be running my own no-forge balanced-armor server for all to enjoy, provided no one else makes one, and to kickstart it I'd grant everyone who asks their very own whatever they have on the current server. I'll even throw in some beta armors as reskins, add costumes as rewards for various things and make a 5* winmillion. What would this cost me? Time and money, but less time and money than grinding out dreams and nightmares + paying for celestial stuff and other prize boxes, so essentially free.

This is probably why no open sourcing will be occurring. Naturally, they'd be competing against players like me and anyone else that wants to run a server, and that sort of thing mandates better and more constant content updates from them (forcing other server operators to constantly update and feel the frustration) and why on earth would you want to put that kind of pressure on yourself?

And said security holes could be both found and patched sooner.

Your last point is true but it remains valid only so long as there's an official server and its problematic for mostly different reasons. Namely, someone else could run their own server with cheaper prices or more rewarding gameplay and thus, GH would have to sacrifice their own game balance and devalue their players in-game assets to stay competitive against other instances of the game they're the primary developers of.

After the official servers are taken down, the game would either disappear or go open source, in which case it's a free market where the bad servers will lose their playerbase to other servers with better moderation and/or features.

Gotta say I love the lighthearted "anyone could set up a server" vibe that just came out of nowhere; no offence there but you're really out of your depth here. It's an extremely long and painful research process and passion alone won't cut it, even it everything was to be made open source. Cronus himself explained how moving the servers was and still is difficult (and on-going to a certain degree) and that's for former members of the team. I'll let you figure what it would be like starting practically from scratch.
Point is, the Grey Haven team went well out of its way to maintain Puzzle Pirates, SK and other legacy games, this is a long term move. I can't imagine these efforts being wasted by letting the average Joe run his very average SK server for a very very average portion of the community; this is grasping at straws. For the first time in a couple years there's a sense of hope bringing parts of the community back; where Grey Haven goes is where the community should follow, it genuinely seems like a time to wait and see.
P.S. tons of packet capture and replay tools available out there, making the client side code available un-obfuscated would rather allow reverse engineering the server, which is in most cases how games like PSO2 got brought back on private servers.

It's only weird that it wasn't prepared in advance. Seeing how the news came about exactly 1 month after the march layoffs, I doubt it was spontaneous. The team needs to find/replace all sega/three rings text with Grey Havens asap so the temporary interest the community has doesn't die down again.

Not anyone could up and run a server, but I can guarantee you that between me, Zeddy, Petater, Dogrock, Skepticraven, Spiral-Spy and all the other people like that, something could be figured out.

> tfw I'm not explicitly on Fehzor's list of nerds

---

When discussing open source and what it'd result in for the community I realise that there's two entirely different ideas of what's good for the game. Spiral Spy's recent blog post brings up the following three points:

1. Players would be biased in case they were put in GM roles.
2. Players aren't that great level designers and would have a limited amount of resources to work with.
3. Players are bad at fixing bugs

And as it turns out, these are things I have hardly considered, because I'm looking at further development of SK in terms of gameplay and balance, not community. I'd be fine with having a small private server that averages on 30 players online if it means we'd have old RSS and dailies gave 150 radiants. To others, it'd be the absolute death of the game.

I don't know how much it costs to do the game's move from OOO to GH, but I can presume it's pricey. Such a move had to cost plenty, yes?

Honestly, that move, while better than shutting the game down, was worth every penny they had.

More speculation that I'm waiting for an employee to clear up. Seeing how they "creepily watch" the forums, they can see I'm querying an answer to that here. I'm under the impression SEGA gave away Spiral Knights because it was hemorrhaging cash.

Fight The Dragon (a game on Steam) has an Adventure Creation Kit (ACK) that is very user friendly but also allows for some very detailed complex level creations. I'd like to see something like that implemented in SK. They have systems in place to prevent farming and make sure there's an appropriate amount of monsters to treasure to health/potions ratio. Anyone else here played Fight The Dragon and used the ACK? Man, that tool on this game would be awesome!

Also, Star Trek Online is a great example IMO of both regularly released official content plus user created content via their Foundry. Their Foundry isn't nearly as user friendly as the above mentioned ACK, but I think STO has a great system in place for allowing user created content to coexist with official developer created content.

Thoughts?

OMG, if this game went open-source I would die and come back to life three times!!

I'm not a fan of players falsely hyping each other for 2 years and then have the parent company trade away the game.

Just waiting on the team to validate the unsubstantiated hyping.

The arcade redux that like 3 people on these forums care about/remember

at this point, "arcade redux" is just a vague term for everything we agree would be a good addition to the game. i.e. new technical gameplay concepts, expanded usage of certain things, improved usage of others, more environments, and enemies that don't follow standard AI.

I'm sure there will be a thorough explanation on the past year that will allow us to rebuild trust in the team.

@umbra maybe to you, but I stick to OOO's statement that it is a way to make the arcade more enjoyable by readding a "sandbox" aspect

@cronos
no one mentioned a bomber update but players
We only know that theyre called the morai wars, the morai could be an enemy knight group, enemy species, morai as a location, or just an arbitrary name, its not a substantial part of the current story and probably wont be expanded on

(On that story if you needed clarification: the knights were in the morai wars, which had pushed them to the brink of extinction, they sent the skylark to get an energy source to go and save isora (the planet they were on, specifically how they would use the energy was not mentioned) the skylark found cradle, got shot down, and the game starts)(thats it, thats all we are told)

Balancing shouldn't take the form of yet more power creep.

Shouldn't we move these updates into announcements? That or since we're 3 pages into this thread, it might be better to make a sticky thread created by a GM, that users can post within, and just have cronus/other update the first comment in the sticky. That is, unless we're turning this into a Q/A.

Lol Potato there are like 20 people reading the forums this is one of about 5 mildly active threads right now and it's by far the most interesting it's fine.

Thanks for the update, mate!

Ok, but how will the Secret GM forum be affected by this?