Games Campus announced what they are planning for the server settings and I'm thinking it's a bit of a mixed bag. It's not all good news, but it's not all bad either. For starters it will be a PvE style server with player versus player action limited to Bloody Plains. That suits me just fine. Hopefully we'll get war events often enough to attract players there regularly.

The experience rate for the server will be 2x the base rate, which is not particularly good. They know that the G1 rate is higher than that. Games Campus has also said that experience rate events won't be all that common, not even weekly, although they are planning for some special events like Christmas. I expect a lot of new players will quit after it takes longer than a day to level up. The no-lifers won't care.

The skill experience rate will not be quite as high as it was for the beta test, but at 3x the base skill rate it will still be fairly easy to get skills up to the C6 level, using cheap clan map manuals. After that things will get slow of course, and I think we can expect to see more than a few people using skill trainers or lego robots. The Games Campus people haven't said one way or another if they'll allow their use. Of course the insane skills are still going to be insane to level up.

The drop rate will be returned to normal low rates, and I'm not sure this is so good either. There will be fewer players here than in any other version of the game. That means fewer drops collected, sold, traded, and used. It could take quite a long time to get Wan Daye's Blue Jade Seal for instance. Manuals, Tomes and skill books will probably be fairly rare too, until players are high enough to run the higher dungeons.

Otherwise the Games Campus people are promising more updates to the game, with new material, clothes, maps, weapons and more. They seem to think that some of this will help to make up for the lower experience rates. We'll see. I hope Games Campus understands that they are the last chance for this game. They are the 4th publisher of this game for the western markets, and every one before them failed, some in a more spectacular fashion than others.

We players have another choice in playing 9Dragons. We can start new characters here, or put up with the absolute bullshit coming from GamersFirst. I'll be starting a new character on the German server and see how it goes.