Disclaimer: Please hold your "we should reset the map" comments in your arse along with the rest of your useless shit, please discuss some of the points in the post instead

Map resets quick overview

Civ servers often have discussion of map resets as a way to revitalize the server or to move away from fundamentally broken mechanics on the current map, though usually not primarily because of improper map generation.

Map resets themselves come at a heavy cost as it currently stands: it resets all in-game actions and consequences to the direct detriment of long term in-game campaigns. Aesthetic builds, conservation projects, acts of justice, in-game literature, and often valuable longtime players are all lost simultaneously.

Is losing all of those needed when the intention of a reset should be to remove bots/alts, redo factorymod, rebalance vaults, or destroy resource (possibly duped) stockpiles? And when we reset the map to revitalize the server, are established communities benefiting from it, or those looking for a reset button to their in-game actions? After all, a major draw to civ servers are their relative permanence of in-game effort.

Map resets are not necessary to do major rebalancing outside of map generation, and cost more to the community than the development effort saved from building migrations.

Soft resets as an alternative to launching a new map

A soft reset is an alternative to a map reset by applying breaking changes to balance through migration scripts and a period of item decay. This spares the art builders, librarians, and pearled deviants an effort wipe, while giving the rest a fresh start. Active cities can survive bastions changing shape, vaults can't, And That's A Good Thing.

Pylons, physical namelayer, contraptions, nu-scarcity, alt removal, and more can all happen with properly planned migrations on the current map. Mana migration is a great example of a non-trivial rebalance that didn't reset the map.

The most major question becomes "what do we keep, and what do we throw away?" though, and it would be impossible to strike a consensus every stakeholder thinks is fair to them. This is especially tricky when it comes to in-game resources. We have the option of either wiping all in-game effort of mining, XP generation, etc or adding a sort of radioactive decay mechanic to pre-existing resources for a period of time to allow some effort to be carried over.

For example, if 2.5% of enchanted tools, 5% of diamonds, 10% of obsidian exist by the end of the decay period, then everyone and their dad will want higher values on whatever they put more effort into acquiring or placing.

Soft reset drawbacks and other considerations

I mentioned the loss of long-term players previously regarding the map reset - we'd likely lose long-term players who'd be demotivated from their current stockpiles, farms, or vaults disappearing. This number would be less than the hard reset though, and I think it'd be significant enough number to make soft resets worth whatever pain that comes with it.

This said, the dev effort for migrations is needed on top of effort needed for just plugin or config changes. Map generation itself is effort we'd save, but is likely less than the effort needed for migration code and balance.

Map resets often come with a coordinated effort of public advertising and private shilling that helps bring a strong initial crowd. Often you see only the positive faces that got onboard with the reset participating and it really helps the image of a server unanimously being hyped for something new. We'd want to clearly outline benefits of the soft reset, making sure players could communicate that this would create new frontiers to conquer, and try to reach out to older players about what's new in classics land. The angle of a "server reset" is still fundamentally appealing to most players even if they find that people already dug rail lines.

The fundamental blocker to any type of reset is dev effort, and that would bar a soft reset longer than a hard reset. Of course the more expensive thing is higher quality, affordability is often a more valuable question. We should likely ring together a larger development group before we even talk of monumental efforts like these, and you can contribute by going to https://github.com/Civclassics.

Do we not currently have enough devs in our current community? Then we still need to think about recruitment in the current situation, and what low-hanging dev effort fruit might excite more player activity in the short term.

tl;dr we don't have to do a map reset to rebalance everything, here are the practical considerations for forcing breaking changes over a period of time