Questions about the state of the game?

[Pendar]

Hello there, I have a few questions that the forums have not yielded much information on. The idea behind asking is to help me formulate a few proposals and satisfy my curiousity.
As it stands now is Illarion expierenceing an increase or decrease of players daily/weekly?
I can find mention of the character wipe dating back to 2002 but no facts at all is this a mid-term or long term planned event.
I gather from what I have read that most preciouse development time is going into the new client at the moment. As such we shouldnt expect to see many if any changes to the current client?.
If this is true would be it be practical to hope that some items attributes could be changed? "for example the great axe".

Please only reply if you have facts, this post is not so much a discussion as an attempt to inform myself before wasting board space. I dont want to read this game sucks so no one is playing it because XYZ. There should be a special forum for that kind of thing anyway.

Thanks for your time
Pendar

[Gro'bul]

As it stands now is Illarion expierenceing an increase or decrease of players daily/weekly?

Fluxuating rather interestingly. From what I've seen it is more, but look at the statistics on the main page. Go to the homepage, click statistics, which is under the player number. You can find statistics on player activity in game and in the forum for 2 hours ago, 1 day ago, 1 week ago, 1 month ago, and 1 year ago.

[Nikago Fyrstyn]

Well they are working on the new client, so it would be rather sensless to put work into a script, that makes programming much harder, like we have now, and better put this time into the new client, were programming should be much easier and maybe we get weather effects .
So don't think we get new Items or so on now. The charwipe, well they always said that a huge software change must take a whipe afterwards, no way around, maybe the chars aren't compatible with the new client dunno so maybe wait for news from the staff.

[Estralis Seborian]

It takes 10 seconds to change the stats of a weapon.

Charwipes are not really planned, they are sometimes necessary and unavoidable.

Illarion had more players in the past. But with the new features, Illarion will so cool that we could need a new, faster server for the mass of new players...

[Shi'voc]

there is development on multiple branches, not just the client.
for example there is a web based account system, a lot of changes on the server (which together with the new account system require the char wipe before introducing the new versions) and of course there is work on the new client.
the individual parts are worked on by different persons and there are many things on the server which can be changed without the help of the persons programming it... (like item stats)

there won't be any changes in the current client because it's hard to maintain (which is the main reason we build a new one which will be far easier to extend and will run on linux as well, and propably on macos x if i get one of those nice mini macs to test it on )