There seem to be a lot of people shocked at the news that Shadowbane has decided to press the reset button with their next patch, resetting all characters, items and player-built cities. They are almost equally shocked that the player-base is almost uniformly supportive of the move.

Shocker number three: when I was working at Wolfpack some years ago, I was strongly advocating doing the same behind the scenes. Even more so, I advocated making a ‘reset button’ a core part of the game mechanics. The truth of the matter is that clean shard launches were typically Shadowbane’s most successful times, in terms of player interest, surpassing even launches of the expansion packs.

People who are aghast at the prospect of a reset are typically coming from a mentality around MMOs that is based on their experience with more traditional grindathons, like EQ and WoW. If you imagine all games playing that way, then it would seem a horrible idea. But Shadowbane is a very different sort of game. Characters take minimal time investment to max out, items are relatively interchangeable, and the real meat of the gameplay is the politics and the city-building. And here, a very different problem sets in.

I’m sure most readers have encountered one of those epic games of ‘Risk’ that went on for twelve hours that they still talk about as being epic to this day. What they often leave out is that, of the seven players who played, three of them got knocked out by hour four, and two more lasted until hour six. All five of them ended up spending the next few hours playing on the XBox while the last two guys standing spend the next 6 hours squabbling over the Ukraine.

When a Shadowbane server lives too long, it’s a lot like that. And what we found is that Shadowbane players loved a clean Risk board. The losers liked being able to get back into the fight again on an even standing. The winners like to be able to declare themselves winners, and then actually have worthy opponents. The land rush is more exhilerating than the trench warfare that follows. Reset buttons are not inherently flawed.

Why didn’t we do it then? Mostly reasons of public perception, if I recall correctly. We were concerned that EQ players and WoW players would look at it with shock and horror, because they didn’t understand the differences of paradigms. It’s very interesting that they are choosing to do it now.

Original comments thread is here.