@Rare Wands/No Wands.
I don't speak for Ryan in anyway but he decide to make this change of making the wands a rare drop. Not the general staff (GMs and such)
What I would like to think is that he is trying to slowly phase out the wands perhaps so that all the people with millions of gold worth of wands have a chance to use them before we decide (Or if we decide) to remove them completely. If we just removed those wands completely then those people would obviously throw a piss fit (and I would too if I owned a lot of them.)
Honestly I think wands do have a part in the game, but currently there are areas where they can macroed/scripted to a point that people will think its unfair, which does needs to be fixed. A starting point of course would be to restrict the client to prevent autoheal macros/script Gh wands or perfectly sync lightning wands.
Now what exactly would be the perfect balance after that sort of fix is hard to say. I have seen/heard many discussions of the "perfect" scenario for wands would be but nothing really came to a solid agreement. Everyone has different directions on this matter.
But as for wand drop being slow again, it is something Ryan decided for the time being. We can easily reverse this and make wands very cheap if we wanted to later or we can continue on the slow removal of wands from the sever until they become a rarity of some sort.
Again Ryan makes those decisions, not GMs like me or the others.
Honest we do have active staff floating around currently. They are excited to try new things and do events here and there. Making changes to the map, making new arenas ect. They really do want to make a change.
The main issue is that being a GM we are limited to what exactly we can implement. We can not make active changes to PvP. Like I can't just go out there and tweak the wands right now, I can't change the spawn rate. hell we can't even change the MoTM by ourselves. We all need a proper admin to does those sort of actions. Mark, Suzy, and Sage were amazing at that function, but during their tenure (with exception of Mark he did just about everything) here focused more on the PvM side.
The general GM staff is limited in our overall ability to make big changes to certain areas. Honestly we are more in a advisory role than anything else when it comes to PvP changes or anything else really. We just lack that actual ability to make those changes happen ourselves.
The only things we can really do is events like CTFs, 1v1 duels, and all those standard things. We can do big events like poker tourneys, Graveyard invasions (Town invasions again is tied to admin function so we can do that), RP events, or even some field events. Make new buildings/arenas but after that we are sort of powerless to make the changes that need to happen.
Again, saying that we need an active staff is a slap in the face of some of the current GMs. Montana is out there building new arenas, and with Frank redone the poker hall in Brit and make the Poker hall in Vesper. They do an event every night if not two to three. They are working on side projects that we hope we can convince Ryan or whoever to allow us to implement into the game. Duncan is working on the RP events for Blackfyre or the Orc forts, the savage forts, he has been really working hard on trying to bring back RP to the sever. Slowking is worked on the Poker tourney tries to host them every chance he can get and I believe he trying to get this scavenger hunt setup properly. And all the while we go around checking for afk house timers, afk monster farmers, or afk miners, or answering questions from the page system, then they throw events in between that time, then graveyard invasions, random spawns, then just regular interaction with players to get a frame of mind of what needs to be done or what they would like to see.
Staff is active, it is just that we are limited to what we can exactly do to make the big changes. And remember that GM staff are all players as well and we do want to see changes to the sever and do care about making thing happen.
As players you guys should be telling us what you would like to see changed and what type of things we could do to help out the sever. We generally pass those messages along whenever we get the chance if enough people are saying the same thing.
Change is slow and I know its frustrating to wait for change that has not been happening for awhile. As a staff member and a player I feel both sides of the frustration, from not getting many of my own ideas put into the game or as a player not seeing any real change occurring.
But the one thing I would say to everyone knowing our limitation as current GM staff is that you should tell us what you would like to see us put on. Like what sort of events or things can we do that would spice up PvP or PvM, that doesn't involve handing out rares or gold left and right to make people want to play more? I am pretty sure that Frank, Montana, Ducan or me would love to try make your ideas happen or work something close to it. (If they seem reasonable)
As staff we are here to try to make the game experience better and to smooth out any problems that may occur. Do talk to the staff, suggest your ideas, tell us your concerns, we do listen and care about the game and what changes need to happen.