Retirement and Starmourn

Those of you who are already players of one of our MUDs probably know what the retirement system is, but briefly, it’s a system whereby you can permanently retire a character and receive credits for some percentage of the value of the character and its stuff as calculated by us. You can then take those credits and put them into a new character on the same game or one of our other games.

People have been asking about retirement and Starmourn since we first revealed the project to the world, and we’re finally ready to reveal how it’s going to work. (It’s not complicated.)

We’re going to allow retirement into Starmourn but only 3 months after we put the game in full release (meaning anyone can access the game and the world will not be reset/wiped going forward). After that three months is over, people with existing characters will have 30 days to spend any retirement credits on them after which they aren’t eligible for retirement credits any more. New characters will, as per our other games, have 30 days before they’re unable to receive retirement credits.

The reason we’re instituting a delay is because what we really don’t want to see is people retiring their characters in our other games on day 1, playing Starmourn, and then really regretting their decision. It’s not that we think Starmourn won’t be awesome, but it’ll be the new shiny, and we think it’s highly likely that people will dig themselves a hole and regret it. We also can’t allow people to back out of retirement because then what we’ll see is a flood of people leaving the other games in order to try out the new game, many with no intention of doing anything but playing around and then returning to their previous game. That’s disruptive to both the existing games and Starmourn.

Now you know!