Alright. I'm sorry i couldn't post this earlier but I was literally around 100 miles from my computer and posted that update on my phone, which is not conducive to typing out long news posts.

That being said, lets start with your major concerns from the top:

Yes, this is the end of beta. There should be no more major rollbacks barring something unforseen. Everything is as it should be, or at least in a state where it doesn't break the shard and the balance. Some areas are in need of some adjustments, but those will come with time as we iron things out.

House Packing - I've added a new command, .packhouse, for players.
Please please PLEASE only use this with the new client. It has NOT been tested extremely, but it seemed to work flawlessly for the 20 sample houses we used, all of which were very item heavy. This will allow you to pack all the items in a house into one easy to carry item, which you can then unpack into your new house, preserving all your decorations the way they were, and in the same relative spots. This should make moving/replacing houses near painless for everyone.

Gold/Bottle Wipe - I was able to successfully convert 99% of the old potions into the new system, however their delays are still a little fubar. IF you want consistent potions, use newly made ones. However your old ones should still be there.

Now for the part that most people are pissed off about.
All gold, and all empty bottles, have been wiped.
This was discussed amongst 4 of the most active players, and the active staff, for several days over the course of this month. What we could do, how it would work, what are our alternatives.

This is the decision that was reached, as well as it's logic:
As of the wipe, there were over 100 million empty bottles in obsidian.
I should not have to point out at 10 gp per bottle, that's 1 billion gold.

Also as of this wipe,t here was over 1.8 billion gold. That is to say, if obsidian had 200 active players and that's it, each would have 10 million gold. Obsidian has far FAR less than that.
UPDATE: I forgot to include the monies hidden away on vendors in the tally. Thanks to echo and certain players for reminding me. This brings the total up to 2.1 billion gold.

Now, most of you will say that this is from inactive accounts and old players. So we ran a few tests, to see exactly how much of the gold was from old players.

The amount of gold on active players(with more than 5 hours of log time in a given month) is over 900 million. Most of this is due to bugs, either directly or indirectly whether intentional or accidental, or from people decimating the accounts of older players, usually without their knowledge.

This much gold in the system, especially given the way certain players have been abusing it and who have abused it in the past, has made the game economy completely unstable in 3 fashions.

1. Prices for almost all items are inflated to an extreme that is not maintainable through any legal and bugfree method of obtaining new gold(not already in the hands of other players). (Yes drakes were bugged, and still are to a degree, among numerous other situations)

2. The major loot imbalances, once fixed, will widen this gap to such a point that newer players will be hard pressed to advance and compete economically, especially if certain overstocked players continue to throw their economic weight around and force a broken economy.

3. Given current methods for removing gold from the economy, it would take roughly 3 years without any new gold being brought into the economy, for it to return to its base state.

If everything I said above here went over your head, then let me give you an example.

We currently have 5 players active within the last 3 months who contain enough gold to singlehandedly drive the price of one resource of their choosing, up to around 5x or 10x its natural value. The last four times this has happened, the prices have never returned to their original values, but instead settle on 2x or 3x their original worth, creating an artificial cartel.
This drives gold to the point of near worthlessness once you achieve a certain point, and is not what we are aiming for. Again, this example ignores the dozens of accounts that have been used recently that have less economic power but combined could do more damage.

While we respect the older players on our shard, the staff of obsidian are under an obligation to balance the shard to ALL PLAYERS, including the new ones. Every player carries equal weight, so we can not in good conscience leave a system imbalanced, or rebalance it to a broken level, just to benefit old players.

If you feel this is enough to leave, then It's been fun having you, sorry that you feel that way. We cannot sacrifice the future of the shard, or the balance of it, because of the whims of older players who feel it must always be the way it was, and always balanced in their favor.

We are not doing this to "put everyone on equal footing", nor are we doing this to "punish the old players" or "give new players a chance". We are doing this because between 9 different people, talking for days, it was decided as the absolute best method for returning the broken and imbalanced system to a state of balance that all players can appreciate.

Nicley done on the new command. But has it been tested for bugs as in another player can go into someoens house use the command and doesnt have to be the owner?

So once again you are punishing the players who stayed here through it all to make it fair for the new ones. Well I hope your new players stick around through all the bullshit because i am not sticking around for anymore.

Ok i know gold is easy to get. At least for me on my pvm mage.And im sure not all the people earned all their gold the old fashion way. But for the most part most of us have. So now if we go out and earn another say 5 mill over the next 2-3 years. Is that going to be taken from us because we took the time to go hunt fish or w/e to earn the gold. I have spent count less hours fishing and cuting fish steaks to earn my gold. And takeing orders for str fish and mixing and mineing and i could go on. But my point is why take all of our gold. Could have at least left us unough to buy our houses or w/e. And i know it was done to be fair. But how fair is that to those of us who have worked hard for what we have. (or should i say had)And speaking of fair. How fair is to us that have lost countless things and not replaced. Just seams to me that if you work hard for things on this shard it will be taken from you one way or another. Might as well just get all the stuff you can and go get pked. Cause youll lose it one way or another. And i agree with belgarion once again. we have stuck through it all. And i think it has been more than most players would have. And the number of players show that. And one last thing i think it wrong to just to tell the older players if you want leave cya around. Im not saying to kiss their asses to get theam to stay. But i think this was a bad move as far as tottal wipe on the gold. But i guess the 9 people that had been talking for days had their say so. So piss on what the rest of us have to say. witch i have been on for the last few day and have had herd nothing about it. Anyway this is my feeling about it all. Hope not to piss anyone off. But just dont know if its a waste of time to play here anymore or not.

Sounds good to me. I've always thought the gold and economy was a bit out of wack here, but that seems to happen in a lot of mmorpgs where bunk money is somehow introduced. Phantasy Star Universe for example comes to mind. "Duped" money had been produced by some kiddies with the Playstation 2 version and a gameshark-type disc. The economy got so incredibly bloated that I never really had any money for things in player shops... until I open my own and sell basic items people would use for crafting. I made insane money because to most of the veteran players who were doing basically the same thing I was for longer, money had become no object.

Thanks for the update and I look forward to playing soon!

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Ultima avatar: The Famed JIZABOZ,GWAR Guildmeister

I used the house command yesterday and it worked fine, I would suggest moving everything out of your secure chests before using it though. for some reason I can't open My old secure chests in my new house. I'm sure its cause they are under a new item type or some such.

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Ankhesenamun
Dedo Serenity
Fisherwmn
Ruby Estella
Enchantress

OK.
So for the sake of there not being staff on.
For the sake of not having staff do their jobs.
For the sake of a dormant admin.

.....

For the sake of sheer stupidity....

You take this drastic action.

If staff were allowed to do their job to the fullest...as I know some wanted to and had information enough to do so, maybe the excess gold would have been taken care of at its creation...same as bottles. As well, if some staff would actually take time to log in and check things out, maybe this would not be an issue. If prehaps the bug was fixed, it would not be an issue. We all know there are cheaters if they are allowed to cheat.

So basically it is like a woman watching her husband cheat for years and the woman goes out and kills all her friends husbands all over town to 'even the score'.

And to further it....when Bobby finds out that players got gold from vendors he does a rollback to 'fix that too'. So the people who sold items 100% to get the gold lose the gold again. Bobby didn't like seeing new houses going up so fast. He would rather see players struggle even more. THANK YOU FOR YOUR HARD WORK BUT YOU ARE AN A-HOLE.

Regards.

What if the money on the vendors was off duped bottles, just stored on vendors?
Guys best thing to do is get on with it and make more gold.
How often can you find anything to spend 2-3million or even more on?

If this DIDNT need to be done staff wouldnt of done it. Just respect what has been done and stop the b.itching on the forums.
Whats this gonna look like once we do get new players and they read all this?

Kinda like the truth.

Can not demolish house until server goes live?
Will it turn in to a deed for a new house or if i open the box will it make a new house?
Or do i have to now buy a new house to unpack my stuff?
Does the new house have to be in the same spot as the old house?

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WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!

Ok so after reading this i no longer really care that i've lost my gp's...it does make sense. I lost a lot, one or two (or three or four as it would seem) lost a hell of a lot more - but now i'm guessing with the shard minus its bugs those lovers of pvp and stuff will find out who truely are the better players, not too mention the fact that the development of some players will now be significantly slowed down due to not having endless non-legitmately gained pots of cash to chuck about

& quoting mr. jiz from another thread:
...ok after 3 - 1..2..3...it is after all, a game lol

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Miner/Smith/Lumberjack/Carpenter/Cartographer
Alchemist/Fisherman/Tamer/Warrior/Daemon

Have to admit, how the housing was handled was an excellent job.

And yes you do get a deed as far as I know when you demolish a house. You can then use that deed anywhere you wish. After you place that house you use the unpack command inside the house and everything is returned to the exact way it was when you packed it.

all in all, very nice.

A wonderful point....in imagination land.

As far as housing we're tweaking a few more things and expect it to go live Sunday. Thanks for the patience.

Wow, I'm definately done playing now. Some of us, like myself, never abused a bug or cheated to get millions of gold. Instead, I wasted hundreds of hours hunting, mining, smithing, etc. to get those millions. Now with the new class system, two of my near-perfect characters would be completely f***** up anyways. I'm not wasting hundreds of more hours when all the cool staff (Echo, Sonne) are basically done playing.

The only cool people left on the shard are SinfullDead and Tax Man, and the game stopped being fun when Affliction died. Unlike all you posers that talk about Will in your signature, he and I founded two guilds together, hunted/mined/fished/tamed together, etc. Now all people wanna do is PvP and find bugs to abuse so all the rest of us have to deal with a rollback once a month or so.

Perhaps when Obsidian gets >50 people online 24/7, like when I started, I will start playing here again. Playing in a server with one person online and getting all your houses/gold/characters completely f***** up isn't what I consider to be "fun".

But THANK YOU!!!!!! to Broadband, Cybervic and all the other players and staff for all the great times I've had playing here the past 4 years. I really hope that with the new client Obsidian establishes a thriving community like we used to have here.

I want to point out that all the people who are complaining that you earned your money legitly, look at the big picture.

Player x abuses a bug. Player x then uses his newfound millions to drive the price of a resource, say for example STR fish, to 3x it's original level.

Player Y fishes and sells his fish to player x for the newly inflated price.
Player y now has tons more money than he should, because player X abused.

Yes, a lot of people got money through "legitimate" means, however that doesnt' mean the economy wasn't f*****. And as i said before, not all of it was bottle duping + other active bugs, some were just passive bugs with monster loot getting glitched, like the 1-2k drakes that have been the farming target for the past 2 years+.

If we had another option to fix the economy, we would have used it. Unfortunately it's so foobar that there is no real way to fix it without making all gold less than 1 million completely and utterly worthless.
This way we have a lot less 0s.

The fact that 5+ and 10+ million on chars less than 1-2 years old is the normal is an example of how screwed up the system became. All prices are heavily inflated.

And yeah, vendors were wiped. That's not why the rollback happened. I wiped vendors before the rollback + again after it happened, broadband did the rollback for house related reasons. Vendors were wiped because they were used as a method of attempting to hide gold from staff, and we are never sure we got them all, PLUS a goldwipe is useless if someone still has 5+ mil on his vendor, because they will still just attempt to inflate the economy back up to where it was instead of actually adjusting to the way the economy should be. And some people did, and had more than that.