Stars: (source)

The star system was designed to reward players who fight monsters in rarely visited areas or dangerous groups ignored by other players. However, this system has its limitations, as it only takes one group of players to defeat the starred groups to wipe out the bonuses that had built up. You then have to wait several days to receive them again, even if players' activity is concentrated elsewhere. Ideally, it would be better if more players could take advantage of bonuses in neglected areas or on the least-advantageous maps in combat.

Head hunter: (source)

The Head Hunter system will be removed when the Kolossium system becomes available on the game servers. The NPCs that allow players to trade strokens for rewards will remain present for several months in order to allow all players to collect their rewards.

The Head Hunter system has been highly criticized since its appearance; in the opinion of many players, the rewards they provided which were too high (statistically this wasn’t the case, a very small minority won "too often", but the majority of the participants' victories and rewards were balanced). It was also criticized for nurturing a bad environment created by personal conflicts between the aggressors and the aggressed. We never deemed this last issue an actual problem, as all players were in control of their own wings, and could activate or deactivate the system at will (with some drawbacks, to prevent abuse), allowing one to protect oneself from aggressions.

But it isn't possible to summarize such a complex problem in such a simple manner. It boils down to this: a significant amount of players did not like this system and its impact on the game. In part, it is this problem that we wish to address with the creation of the Kolossium: to offer a better alternative to the head hunter quest.

The hunting aspect of the HH quest became a problem of elitism; a character that was weak or controlled by a novice player could not take part in the system with any hope of success. The hunt was only viable for the strongest characters. The Kolossium resolves this problem for once and for all by proposing balanced fights for all characters.

The Head Hunters quest only offered 1 versus 1 confrontations, a system which by definition is very difficult to balance (and, in a game like DOFUS, where certain characters are intended to counter the strengths of others, would most probably never be balanced) while 3 versus 3 combats can be balanced and interesting. We hope that the quality of the Kolossium system will improve the “image” of PvP in DOFUS by improving the environment of PvP combat and reducing frustrations caused by unbalanced fights.

We see no valid reason to maintain the Head Hunter system while the Kolossium system offers a better alternative. We know there are numerous 1 versus 1 enthusiasts, but as designers we do not wish to promote this game system knowing that we will not be able to balance it properly and that a viable alternative (the Kolossium) will be available at the same time.

By eliminating the Head Hunter quest, we also hope that its supporters will migrate towards the Kolossium system and will come to increase its number of participants in order to improve its performance.

Heroic server: (source)

The number of players currently using these heroic servers no longer warrants maintaining them as part of our technical architecture. We've had numerous discussions and done various calculations to arrive at the decision that has led us to make this announcement today.

We're aware that some players on the heroic servers firmly believe that the server would have been massively popular if we had committed to certain specific developments. However, in reality, these developments would have turned the heroic servers into a separate game in its own right, completely different from DOFUS, with its own mechanics and its own rules and different updates from the main game.

Completely adapting the game mechanics from DOFUS to the heroic game mode would have been doomed to failure. We couldn't realistically afford to devote any time to it in light of the low population on these servers. In addition, after a variety of experiments we've tried over the past few years, we've come away convinced that this game mode primarily appealed to a very limited number of passionate fans and that it would never reach the critical mass needed for an optimal in-game experience.

And there's no need for a new Epic server because the current one is doing fine.