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Personally, I always felt it's better to either avoid wipes or to completely wipe everything. I played a H&S years ago that constantly nerfed NPC gold and equipment in the name of "balancing the game" yet didn't wipe veterans' gold and equipment. So, a player who played five years before could get uber weapons and an average of thousands in gold per NPC, but new players could get weaker weapons/armor and an average of 10-20 gold per NPC. That's not balancing the game, that's imbalancing it in favor of older players (not surprisingly, at least one of the staff who advocated such nerfing was a veteran player himself who benefited greatly from such changes). This was one of the reasons I quit since it was obvious that such policies were aimed at limiting newer players like myself who through long hours of playing had achieved what veteran players had had come into quite easily before and were beginning to challenge veteran players.
Of course, I only play RPIs now and such wipes don't really make sense in primarily role-play environments. With my own project, we're probably not going to wipe beta characters, or at least give players the option of keeping their beta characters if they made significant progress in developing them.
Take care,
Jason
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