3/21/16 Update Discussion Thread

[BadSkeelz]

Hey these new Guild pages are pretty sweet

[MeTekillot]

I am also immensely disappointed that there is no available Nilazi anything.

[seidhr]

It should be way, way easier for magickers to remain rogue now that magick isn't the source of their power and usefulness, but rather an augmentation to it. I like that that's the case, but I worry that it'll dwarf regular mundanes if magick ones become common. The "wizard" model had far less overlap. I'm more than a little apprehensive about making magickers objectively superior to mundanes in literally every conceivable way. They're just simply better characters at everything, making me feel so much less enthusiastic about my non-magickal character.

People keep talking about this from a 'coded power' perspective.  There are certainly some codedly powerful options available with these changes, but combining some of the mundane guilds with extended subguilds is also really powerful.  These types also have the advantage of not being pariahs and walking capital offenses, if undeclared.

Magickers have always been codedly very powerful and able to murder your PC if they want to - this update doesn't really change that fact, but it does change how they have to go about doing it.  In fact, they'll have to earn some of their prowess the hard way now.

[Dresan]

From a coded perspective Stealth is still OP as it should be. Thus I will always have a hard time giving that up along with the ability to ride out and survive anywhere in the known.

That said, this change makes magickers both more interesting RP wise and still powerful in their own right.

[Kryos]

I am glad the staff made these changes.

The reasons people want the old sorcerer's are the same reason I DON'T want to see the old sorcerers back. There is too much coded power and not enough RP opportunities with regular mundane (and gemmers) that don't feel like one side should be shivering in their boots the entire time.

With these changes you can RP a magicker who is a person FIRST, a person who is just a hunter, warrior, someone normal who just happens to have magickal abilities. While from a coded point of view thats still incredibly power (though warrior/stealth is still OP) but more importantly it opens up an incredibly amount of RP opportunity.

And now with these changes staff is taking a look at those RP opportunities more closely, maybe now water magickers might have some more interesting RP opportunities. These are the things players have been asking for YEARS.

The days of CAM and super powered beings are gone. Good riddance. I look forward to the more whole-some RP opportunities with this new version of magickers.

I'd point you to the log submission area.  Where a Sorcerer by reference has entertained 7 high powered roles, and by the nature of that engagement, absolutely everyone under them to some degree.  Sorcerer drove one of the most sweeping plots in recent history.  And that's before we add in all the non referenced interactions.  

This CAM malarky is a bit often pulled out, never modernly referenced.  Only references I know of are 2, both of which are in the logs posted about awesome RP and world changing politics and events.

Lastly, this thread isn't about discussing the changes themselves, but the manner in which they were executed and the perceived lack of impact players have on changes.  They happen, we offer our response in futility, and that is bad.

This snuck into the wrong thread, but I believe has some merit in discussion material here.  So I'm transplanting it.  Not the part at the end where I begin with Lastly though, that should stay where it belongs.

[Warsong]

Fuck my life for looking one more time before I went to bed...

I think you have to realize that this change isn't solely for pk purposes.

All a good majority are worried about is, (paraphrasing) The magick warrior can use magick to kill me!

Not everyone who plays the game is trying to murder you.  I personally will, if capable play a flying ranger because that will be fun as shit.  Not because I wanna drop stones on your regular mundane head.

Do we need to be prepared for overblown twinkdom, yup, but have some faith that everyone isn't sceming to kidder you everytime they come across you.

I feel like every post of yours is a holier-than-thou soapbox preach that ignores every point anybody makes in order to talk down at people in extreme strawman fashion.

It's just an incredibly condescending and insulting manner of debate. It's like you go out of your way to assume people are stupid or have the worst possible motivations.

[MeTekillot]

I saw nothing wrong with magickers being able to attain immense power with little effort if you can get your foot in the door, or in an Elementalist's case, having the door thrown open whether you like it or not. I think that's what magick should be. A totally unfair trump card that you are unable to compensate against. I think it's as themely to be wiped out by some asshole throwing a fireball at you as it is a Templar to throw you in the arena. People talk at length about how magick should be rare, and I don't think it should be prolific, but insisting that it be some four-leaf clover shrouded in mystique that you can only hope to experience once in five characters' lifetimes seems ridiculous to me.

I do not understand the motivation for removing magicker guilds that could not have been served by NOT removing them but still keeping these additional subguilds.

[Warsong]

It should be way, way easier for magickers to remain rogue now that magick isn't the source of their power and usefulness, but rather an augmentation to it. I like that that's the case, but I worry that it'll dwarf regular mundanes if magick ones become common. The "wizard" model had far less overlap. I'm more than a little apprehensive about making magickers objectively superior to mundanes in literally every conceivable way. They're just simply better characters at everything, making me feel so much less enthusiastic about my non-magickal character.

People keep talking about this from a 'coded power' perspective.  There are certainly some codedly powerful options available with these changes, but combining some of the mundane guilds with extended subguilds is also really powerful.  These types also have the advantage of not being pariahs and walking capital offenses, if undeclared.

Magickers have always been codedly very powerful and able to murder your PC if they want to - this update doesn't really change that fact, but it does change how they have to go about doing it.  In fact, they'll have to earn some of their prowess the hard way now.

If there was such a thing as a record of who's best at each general thing (archery, fighting, poisons, travel, etc.), magickers would now hold every single record across the board, without exception. It just feels... I know people go insane at the mention of the word "balance" in this game, but that's frankly it, and I think it's relevant and necessary in this context. It doesn't sit well with me and I'd like to hear staff's perspective on why this part of the change is beneficial to the game. It rather seems to me that it has now been manifested that the only way to be the best at X is to be a magicker, where X is literally anything. They were the most powerful before, in a general sense, which was totally fine; but they weren't the best at everything. It feels boring and unnecessary.

The mundane subguilds don't match up to magick. I doubt they're meant to. That was fine when magickers didn't compete universally with mundanes at everything. Even though the game isn't one big competition, it still matters and affects gameplay in a very major way, and therefore roleplay as well. Magickers were more powerful because magick could generally defeat the proverbial sword. But they could also be vulnerable and couldn't just do everything, so they'd sometimes have to rely on non-magick people for things they could do better. Now, magickers are just objectively superior individuals. The nuance seems gone, and I feel like magickers have lost quite a lot of what was special about them. They also don't sound very interesting anymore, but that's another matter.

Magickers being more powerful than mundanes felt okay when they were more powerful because they were different, and therefore also vulnerable in certain ways. Now they're just as good at all the things mundanes do, and therefore neither terribly different nor at all vulnerable in any mechanical way (aside from things everybody is vulnerable to), and have spells on top to let them do things that blow any extended subguild out of the water, let alone the basic ones.

I don't know. It just feels unnecessary.

[Fathi]

Little bummed to lose the Elkrosian/Drovian/Nilazi guilds, but overall I love this change and it makes playing magickers a much more attractive option to me now. I always wanted to play a mage that didn't manifest powers for years and years, but worried I'd be terribly bored given my character would be awful at everything but magick.

Really eager to give this a try.

[Large Hero]

[valeria]

The only guild I'm bummed to lose is nilazi.  My personal reason is that Elkrosian/Drovian never seemed very thematic to me (electricity isn't an element as much as it is part of the storm, and darkness is really just a subset of light).  Nilazi is the only one of those that felt unique to me in a cool way and was universally something I was terrified of.

I enjoyed having things to be terrified as fuck about on an OOC level.  I can confidently say that with sorcerers gone I've lost a good chunk of that.  I haven't seen a single sorcerer thing or plot since they went, which to me has felt like losing one of the game's big bads.  Losing nilazi is like losing the other to me.

[Xalle]

We are looking to cycle in the spells from the drovian/elkrosian/nilazi trees into the game in compelling and thematically interesting ways.

[Incognito]

We are looking to cycle in the spells from the drovian/elkrosian/nilazi trees into the game in compelling and thematically interesting ways.

At the risk of asking "are we there yet" - can we have some rough timeline on when we can expect these three guilds' spells to be cycled-in please?

[little chicken woman]

Mana doesn't regenerate yet, so if your concept depended on magick first, everything else second, you might want to keep your old character for a while.

[manonfire]

I'm really disappointed nobody felt like flexing a creative muscle and tying this change to something rad happening in-game.

It's either straight up laziness or apathy.

[Rathustra]

We are looking to cycle in the spells from the drovian/elkrosian/nilazi trees into the game in compelling and thematically interesting ways.

At the risk of asking "are we there yet" - can we have some rough timeline on when we can expect these three guilds' spells to be cycled-in please?

There is currently no timeline for this, but it is possible it will occur parallel to other changes to the guilds.

[Rathustra]

I'm really disappointed nobody felt like flexing a creative muscle and tying this change to something rad happening in-game.

It's either straight up laziness or apathy.

That's just like, your opinion, man.

Also, the updates on the GDB only cover OOC elements of the change. If anything is happening IC, given the sensitivity of the subject, it will not be announced here.

[Desertman]

[Large Hero]

8 karma roles, dude.

[Pale Horse]

In regards to the recent release notes:

Nope.  Still seeing magicker options as main guilds and no sub-guild options during character creation on my account.  Doesn't matter how many times I login and out.

[Molten Heart]

I still have elementalist main guilds as options too. I was considering creating an elementalist for one last hoorah! According to the announcement, these won't get changed until a character enters the game. Time to make a concept with  shelf life and hopefully live a long time I think.

[Pale Horse]

I still have elementalist main guilds as options too. I was considering creating an elementalist for one last hoorah! According to the announcement, these won't get changed until a character enters the game. Time to make a concept with  shelf life and hopefully live a long time I think.

I was/am considering, myself.

Not the "last hoorah!" with the options I have open as they're now gone (Fare-thee-well, Nilazi!), but I'm tempted by the new sub-guilds.

[manonfire]

I'm really disappointed nobody felt like flexing a creative muscle and tying this change to something rad happening in-game.

It's either straight up laziness or apathy.

That's just like, your opinion, man.

Also, the updates on the GDB only cover OOC elements of the change. If anything is happening IC, given the sensitivity of the subject, it will not be announced here.

Obviously, I don't expect anyone to post double secret details on the GDB about how code changes are introduced IC'ly - but you stated pretty clearly that this change is OOC only, so that isn't something I even remotely expect.

What is the IC explanation for these changes?
These changes are only being marked OOCly. Nothing monumental has changed in the game world - there will be no spectacular shift or RPT to mark this change.

Much like the sorcerer change - my question remains basically the same - why didn't you guys do something fun with it? Why not a phased change based on player reactions in a plotline? You don't have to involve players with changes in code - it is, after all, your playground, but why wouldn't you want the playerbase be a witness to the change IC'ly?

I can only come up with two answers.

[Thunkkin]

Obviously, I don't expect anyone to post double secret details on the GDB about how code changes are introduced IC'ly - but you stated pretty clearly that this change is OOC only, so that isn't something I even remotely expect.

Really? They never stated that. Multiple times staff has mentioned the possibility that certain characters may notice things or come to learn things ICly. I guess we're reading between the lines differently?

I can only come up with two answers.

As a sometimes jaded player, it's helpful to see why staff get jaded, too.

[Rathustra]

I'm really disappointed nobody felt like flexing a creative muscle and tying this change to something rad happening in-game.

It's either straight up laziness or apathy.

That's just like, your opinion, man.

Also, the updates on the GDB only cover OOC elements of the change. If anything is happening IC, given the sensitivity of the subject, it will not be announced here.

Obviously, I don't expect anyone to post double secret details on the GDB about how code changes are introduced IC'ly - but you stated pretty clearly that this change is OOC only, so that isn't something I even remotely expect.

What is the IC explanation for these changes?
These changes are only being marked OOCly. Nothing monumental has changed in the game world - there will be no spectacular shift or RPT to mark this change.

Much like the sorcerer change - my question remains basically the same - why didn't you guys do something fun with it? Why not a phased change based on player reactions in a plotline? You don't have to involve players with changes in code - it is, after all, your playground, but why wouldn't you want the playerbase be a witness to the change IC'ly?

I can only come up with two answers.

The changes are only being marked/remarked upon/highlighted OOCly. There is no spectacular in-game change. This is not incompatible with my second statement.

Your only coming up with two answers though - that's your problem. I can't really say anything to satisfy it.