Pserver Announcements: Astral Project Temporal Shutdown
>Announcement extracted from Project Astral discord.
"Hey Everyone, As many of you have probably noticed and felt yourselves, our player count has been steadily declining since the release of the WoW Forever Beta. A lot of servers are currently dealing with the exact same problem, and unfortunately, we are no exception. We started out with around 400–500 players, but that number has continued to drop over time. The beta alone is not the only reason for this.
>A lack of new content and existing bugs have also played a major part. Right now, our player count has stabilized somewhere between 100–150 players, which makes raiding and especially finding groups through the Dungeon Browser significantly more difficult. And with the upcoming release of WoW Forever, as well as GTA 6 on November 19th, the outlook for the next few weeks is not exactly promising.
>On top of that, while working on our most recent balance patch and the currently planned Gem balancing update, I discovered some major flaws and gaps within our systems. One of the biggest problems is that there are some fundamental design problems within the Astral Tree itself.
>With every new gear content update, and especially with future expansions, we would eventually find ourselves in a situation where we have to keep nerfing classes further and further while simultaneously increasing boss damage and health more and more. First we hit Shamans and Paladins. Then Dks and Paladins. And now again Paladins.
>Eventually, we would reach a point where balancing would basically come down to choosing between: Players barely taking any damage or Players getting one-shotted. That is very clearly not the philosophy behind this server. To properly solve these problems, the Astral Tree in particular would need to be rebuilt from the ground up. This is not something that could be done within 1 or 2 weeks. It would take several week/months of development and testing and during that time I would not realistically be able to provide any new content. With the current player trend, that would most likely cause the population to continue declining due to missing content until we eventually fall below the critical minimum needed to reliably find raids and dungeon groups.
>Because of that i decided to shut the Server down on Saturday, October 10th. After the shutdown, I will create a full backup of the entire database and immediately begin working on the server to build the best possible experience we can provide. We will use this time not only to completely rework the Astral Tree and fix the Proc Engine, but also to work on all of the content that was originally planned for Season 1. The goal is that once Project Astral returns, we can relaunch directly into Season 1 with a clean, polished, and properly finished experience and something completely new for everyone.
I personally want to apologize to everyone who is disappointed by this decision. I completely understand that this is not what anyone wanted to hear, but it is something we have to do. We need to pull the ripcord now, before it is too late, and use this to properly rebuild and improve everything that needs it.
>Donations: I have removed the donation announcement as well as the donation link so that no further donations can be made for the time being. I want to sincerely thank every single person who has donated to support Project Astral. I am incredibly grateful and proud of the amount of support this project has received from the community. However, now that we have made the decision to shut the server down temporarily and work toward a future relaunch, I completely understand if anyone would prefer to have their donation refunded, and I want to give everyone that option. If you would like to request a refund, please open a ticket and provide your Name and invoice number. We will then use PayPal's refund function to return your donation. In the name of the whole Project Astral Team i want to thank everyone supporting our Project and Vision."