I hate magickers, official thread.

[manonfire]

Ah, the "cry more" last resort again. Not the first time you play that card, eh? Always handy when you can't accept people disagreeing with your stoic opinions, yet can't really argue why they're wrong. Such respect it garners.

I'm wondering now, by the look of this thread, which option will satisfy the most people: changing magick back to a point where it actually is rare, and isn't just the easy and fast way to insane power - or simply keeping it that way for the obviously numerous players who enjoy that style of play and seem incapable of accepting how anyone can speak against it.

Obviously if someone disagrees with you, the best riposte is to ignore those of their arguments that make sense, and twist the rest of their words around to make your version look more favorable. Luckily the posters who often do that tend to be disliked and disregarded.

Magick is like house rules. It doesn't match what's written on the game box, but we can always ignore the laws laid out by the game's creators and take matterrs into our own hands, doing things like we prefer it instead. After all, it doesn't affect anyone negatively, right?

Sarcasm is a pretty solid way to go, too.

[Rindan]

The problem I think is that the creators of the game keep telling us that there's no problem and it's all in our head, yet the players, except for a few, keep wondering why there's so many non-mundane characters allowed in the game.. So as long as the creators tell us that it's all in our head, posting over and over that there's a problem won't do much..

I don't see this at all.  In fact, wasn't there an appeal a little while ago for people to STOP making magikers over and over again?  Unless I have missed it, I have not see anywhere in this thread a staff member saying "you are all wrong, there are not as many magikers as you think".

I think the biggest issue with the world being stuffed with magikers is that it makes it really hard to keep the same mindset.  Seeing one magiker for the first time in your characters life is scary.  Seeing three of the little fuckers in one god damn around Tuluk is silly.  

I say this as a completely NOT rhetorical question, but what is a person to think when half of the people they run into in the wastes are magikers?  This happened to me very recently, and it wasn't like I was sulking around dark dens of 3vil.  I kept running into magikers either literally on the North road, or just off it in sight of the North road.  After a while the awe and mystery wears off and your character can't go into shock because of the horrors he has seen.  Instead, your character grumbles under his breath and tells his kank to hurry up and go faster.

This is the point where I am with my character.  He has seen so many magikers in such a short time that it is stupid to play according to the documentation.  It is more logical for him to suspect anyone who looks even a little out of place in the wastes of be a magiker because half of the time he will be right.  Further, it is logical to avoid magikers like the plague, but to not get too terribly upset about it.  You might as well treat magikers like a pack of Carru.  They are something to be flee from, but after they are out of sight you go back to doing whatever it is you do and think nothing of it.

My concern really is not with 1.Arm.  I'll chalk piles of magikers wandering the wastes along well used paths with obvious magikal effects to the end of the world.  My real worry is that this same ridiculousnesses will be present in 2.Arm.  Maybe the staff won't have karma in 2.Arm, but I REALLY hope that they start rejecting magiker applications on the grounds that there are too many active magikers.

[Hymwen]

The question of documentation and rarity aside, is it really healthy for the game to have so many magickers? This may be a misconception, but a bit over a year ago when I started playing, there weren't quite as many magickers. Not as few as I get the impression that there were way back in the days of olden glory, but I still remember it as being much less. And much more hunters, travelling merchants, tribal people who weren't the Tan Muark or renegade tribals who just lived in Allanak/Tuluk... much more diversity in roles as I saw it, where I suspect that now many of the players who liked to play the outdoorsy types have given up on making them mundane characters and instead opt to play magickers because it's so difficult to do it without being someone's bitch every few days if you can't cast spells yourself.

My current character interacts regularly with about 10 PCs. They all live in an area that isn't lawful, but definitely isn't what I would consider a safe haven for magickers (or anyone). 3 of those 10 are magickers, openly, casting in plain sight and making no attempt at hiding the fact, and I bet at least one or two more are secret non-mundanes in some form. And I'm not even surprised by that statistic because it isn't a first for me. It forces everyone in that area to adapt fully to these powers and leaves no chance for anyone to play anything that deviates from what the players of those non-mundanes have decided for them. That's a whole area of the game where you let yourself be ruled completely by imposing "exceptional characters", or don't play there.

[Lizzie]

What if it isn't an issue? I mean, ok so there are more magicker PCs in the game than previously. It's the end of the world stuff. Everyone knows the game will be ending soon, so everyone who has magicker karma but hasn't tried it out before, is trying it now. So what, really? I mean, the game's going to end in 6 months, we already know this in advance, and maybe having more magickers than before will make a *perfect* explanation for why the world ends, as a kick-off for the history of Arm.2

Personally I'm loving all these magickers coming out of the woodworks. My first PC didn't know a magicker from a mekillot. My second character sees them all over the place, or at least she thinks she's seeing them (even without any proof at all - flame-haired? Gotta be a krathi. Doesn't wear a waterskin? Must be a vivaduan. Frizzy hair? Ha! Elkros, no doubt! - that's her perception, even if it isn't true.)

What's fun, for me, is when my PC assumes half a dozen people are magickers, and they turn out to be just average joes. Gives me a reason to RP being WRONG, or start rumors based on assumptions, or tell the boss that this or that guy needs to get shived when in fact he's just a humble law-abiding no-body. Or even more fun - when I assume that guy without a waterskin is a viv, and it turns out he's a mindbender assassin spy of House Jimbob.

I'm having SO much fun with the "idea" of "everyone's a magicker oh noez!" that I can't bring myself to be worried AT ALL about the notion that it might be true.

It's the end of the world as we know it - and I feel fine.

L. Stanson

[flurry]

I think some of the concern is overblown.  With only half a dozen months to go with the current version of Armageddon, people naturally are going to want to try some things they haven't before.

I don't think there's a "solution" other than imposing tighter restrictions on what people can play and I don't think that would go over very well.

edit to add:  I still think a better approach would be to find a way to make people want to play mundane roles.   With more incentive to pick non-karma roles, there would be fewer magickers around without anyone feeling like their options are taken away.

[spawnloser]

Rindan, Halaster actually, not long ago when people were bitching about the number of magickers, said that there aren't as many magickers as the-people-saying-that-there-were-too-many think.  They said that if they notice someone making magicker after magicker and that that is a problem, they will ask the person to make something else.

Continuing to address the rest of your post, Rindan, as I said before, this is mostly a problem of perception.  Your character has met a bunch of magickers in the waste.  It took you two weeks to notice all these magickers, but in your character's life, that's 1/3 of the year or ,to put it in familiar Earth terms, 4 months the way you and I would tell it.  It doesn't feel like that's much time to you...but it will feel like much more to someone that lives at seven times the speed that you do.

Of course, we can always go back to the 'end of the world' issue.  All the players know that the world will irrevocably change and thus are trying to play something they haven't just to see what it's like.  I doubt we'll see quite as much of this in the new game, though.  We'll all know that we have plenty of time to play things, and for the first chunk of time, there will be no restrictions on who plays what.  People will have plenty of options and we'll very likely see plenty of people wanting to set up their merchant dynasties and the like right off the bat too.  Those sorts of roles are in low demand, seeing as how there's only a few months left, so how could you get as big as Kadius in that amount of time?  You can't, so noone's trying any more.  That will be available in our next version of the game.

Mr. B, Halaster also said that magickers are designed to be they way they are to MINIMIZE spam-casting by allowing the magickers to branch a few spells quickly to have some survivability, thus encouraging interaction.  It's not being a 'cheesefuck,' as you so elegantly put it, to branch as designed.  It is being a 'cheesefuck' to spam-cast without roleplay.  Not all roleplay is emoting.  Just because some people have played a magicker before and know what branches to what doesn't make them cheesefucks either, nor does trying to branch to a particular spell.  People try to practice mundane skills if they think that it will branch to something useful too, and if they can realistically roleplay that desire to practice as well as the actual practice itself, there is nothing wrong with it, and the same goes for magickal or psionic skills.

I guess what I'm saying is that not all people that enjoy playing magickers are 'cheesefuck magicker lovers' all of whom have 'figured out exactly how to twink them out' and the rest.

[Malken]

Another problem is that if you actually manage to kill a magicker, unless it was one of the few special-app'ed (And often, people get to keep their special-app'ed race option) then that person who played a magicker and just died will just go ahead and make another magicker and often will play it in exactly the same spot because they got used to that place and they now know better how to play that mage..

And yes, Rindan, like Spawnloser wrote, I was referring to Halaster's post and another admin that I can't recall who are telling us that out of X number of characters currently online, there's maybe only 10% of them that are non-mundane. I don't want to say that they are lying at all, but this weekend only, it certainly doesn't seem that way to me at all. Or the past week... Or pretty much since I've started playing my current character. And no, I don't play him or her often in Allanak at all. Or a magicker-friendly tribe.

[Hymwen]

Lizzie, I would feel better if I knew that the next version of the game will bring things back to what many of us consider an acceptable balance, but I don't know. Apparently the staff considers the power that magickers hold intended and I don't disagree with that in itself, but coupled with the ease of progress and the high numbers, it creates a game environment that obviously doesn't reflect the documentation or what many players want. Will people be less inclined to play those powerful magickers in a new game where they don't know everything about the wilderness, where that oasis is located, what types of food they can get and where? Unless mundanes become somehow less disadvantaged in almost every power- and survival-related aspect, why would the players who value personal power over the state of the game play them? It's clear to me that this is the issue we currently deal with.

[Malken]

And Lizzie, please also remember that we've been saying that for months, now, but until the announcement of the new game was announced, people were just telling us that it was all in our head, but now that it is quite obvious that there's a huge number of magickers around all the time, the new catchphrase to shut us up is to say that people are just trying new classes and are playing more magickers before the game will end..

Well, the problem is that the announcement was nearly three months ago, and that the game won't end for at LEAST six months.. So does that mean that we will have been playing for nearly a whole year in a high fantasy, high magick mud? That for a whole year it's 'okay' if we have tons of magickers and non-mundane classes running around because the game will be ending 'eventually'?

[Lizzie]

Considering the game's been around in its current "version" for around 10 years as I understand it (post hack-n-slash version before Sanvean took over), then yeah I think it really is reasonable to expect an influx of magickers for around a year before Arm.2 is released. That's 1/10'the the history of the game in its current incarnation.

I've read the docs, and the forums, extensively before I started playing. I've read the concerns about magickers, and many of the concerns were dramatic and over-exaggerated intentionally to prove points.

I agree there are more magickers than previously, like most people have stated. That means, to me, that previously, there weren't more magickers than there are now. And that means, to me, that the "problem" wasn't nearly the problem people perceived it was, previously, and the current "problem" can easily be chalked up to the fact that people simply want to try out things they haven't tried out for, but have karma for, before the game ends.

I also think that the staff is probably allowing such an influx, because it will make a really awesome "ending" to the world. Maybe they -want- magicks to be the fad of the day specifically because they want a rip-roaring earth-shattering krathi/drov/nilaz/elkros/vivadu/rukkian blowup of the world, in portions apocalyptic, so that no one can claim they were descended of Lord Jimbob or Jojo the Akei or whoever.

I don't know, and I don't want to speculate, because I don't want to be disappinted or let down if I put all my hopes in such a big huge deal only to find out the world ends because some guy who found the motherload of flash-powder chose the wrong moment to light up his spice pipe.

[Marauder Moe]

Well truly, only the staff know for sure if the percentage of magickers has increased over the years.  I myself am not sure.  From what I've seen in Allanak, it comes and goes in phases just as normal.  Sometimes there's a dozen active gemmed players, sometimes just two or three.  I can't really speak for other parts of the world because I never played them for long periods.

It's possible that the playerbase has a higher proportion of seasoned veteran (karma) players now than it did a few years ago, which might account for any increase.

As I've said, though, I prefer IG solutions to any artificial magicker-quota or the like.  I'd rather there be IC difficulties that discourage people from playing magickers in the new game, rather than simply not being allowed.

[Jherlen]

Worth noting that we weren't in the "game is ending" phase when those statistics about the number of magickers were gathered.

I'd bet they're higher now than before, but still probably not above 40%.

[Rindan]

I make this one appeal to people.  If you are playing a magiker, PLEASE make an effort to hide yourself.  Running down the middle of the North road with obvious magikal effects is flagrantly stupid.  Yes, you might not see a PC, but VNPCs also move down that road.  If you are a magiker with even an ounce of brains, you will stay the hell away from major routs of travel.  Further, casting a few rooms away from any city is also extremely dumb.  Soldiers patrol around these cities and people are always moving in and out of them.

Just use an ounce of common sense.  True, the PC population is far too small to conjure up a mob, and the risk of ranger/assassins from the cities coming after you in the wilderness is small because these units don't exist as PCs and the staff is reluctant to have imm controlled NPCs hunt people down, but you SHOULD be worried about these things.  This goes double and triple around Tuluk where you have half a million people who got into a frenzied mob when they hear about magikers.

It would just be nice if my character could make it from the span to Tuluk without running into multiple magikers.

[Dresan]

I make this one appeal to people.  ....

It would just be nice if my character could make it from the span to Tuluk without running into multiple magikers.

So true....

However i honestly can't blame people for wanting to play character where they don't have to spend RL months of repetitive training only to risk instant death the moment they try to do anything interesting concerning their profession. Is it any wonder it is so insanely hard to find a -skilled- assassin? (of any guild).Anyways this is getting to close to derailment but would make an excellent new thread.

I think flurry is right though making mundanes more appealing to play is a solution or at least putting Magicker classes on par (training wise) with mundanes. I've seen two magickers attack someone in the Sanctuary in  Tuluk, however i've never seen an attempt at an assassination anywhere in the city. The attempts i've heard about usually end grimly for the person attempting it.

[bloodfromstone]

Mr. B, Halaster also said that magickers are designed to be they way they are to MINIMIZE spam-casting by allowing the magickers to branch a few spells quickly to have some survivability, thus encouraging interaction.

I never understood why magicker interaction is considered more important than mundane interaction. It's not like mundanes don't have to spend literal days sparring, sneaking, stealing, shooting, etc. in order to get to be survivable.
And, the truth of the matter is that some (if not most, I hate to generalize) magicker DON'T use that as a venue for increased interaction. Personally, I'd rather see less encouragement to play magickers to try to balance the population to the docs.

[spawnloser]

It's not more important, bloodfromstone, but mundanes practice their skills with each other mundanes...magickers do not practice with anyone but themselves.  They can't practice their skills in town, unlike the thieves and fighters of the world, nor the merchants which practically HAVE to practice some of their skills with other people, even if they're NPC people.

The people that still don't interact, however, is an issue that the staff can solve by restricting those that do not do so in favor of spam-branching from continuing to do so.

[Agent_137]

already a thread on this subject:

http://www.zalanthas.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=18361

[spawnloser]

...a locked one, Agent.  We can't continue discussion there.  Here, though, we've actually discussed some things that were not discussed on that thread.  I'm content.  How about you?

[Agent_137]

i know it was locked. i was trying to be subtle.

[Dan]

Im personally tired of people saying it doesn't take long for magickers to get powerful, that it can be done in a short amount of time.

It took me two years to get into a position where I felt my fire-elementalist was powerful. Two freaking real life years, and we are talking about the  ones supposed to be war-mages.

Seriously, it isn't -that- easy to get powerful... you just have to know how to survive a really long time.

[LoD]

Im personally tired of people saying it doesn't take long for magickers to get powerful, that it can be done in a short amount of time.

It took me two years to get into a position where I felt my fire-elementalist was powerful. Two freaking real life years, and we are talking about the  ones supposed to be war-mages.

Seriously, it isn't -that- easy to get powerful... you just have to know how to survive a really long time.

The problem is that some people playing magickers have brought their magicker into a position where they feel powerful in under 10 playing days.  When addressing a possible problem, you have to look at both ends of the spectrum.  Your fire elementalist may have taken 2 years to become powerful, but someone's elkran may have taken only 2 RL months to become powerful enough to put a hurt on nearly any single mundane they encountered.

Simply because you haven't experienced it doesn't make it impossible.  So, while I appreciate that you probably follow a path more closely aligned with how magickers should progress, there are many that advance much more quickly.  It is generally those magickers to whom people are referring when they complain about the process being too easy.

-LoD

[Tisiphone]

Shouldn't this be more "I hate twinks" rather than "I hate magickers"?

If the twinks went around playing half-giants, we'd have the same complaints. They're supposed to be rare, and 'tisn't fair at all when a 0 day half-giant can pick up a bench and have a decent chance at beating down a 20 or 40 day warrior.

[Fiona Deathspike]

I hate when a magicker is surprised that my character is scared to death of him or her.  Especially when meeting away from the city or in another uncontrolled situation.

[Doppelganger]

Shouldn't this be more "I hate twinks" rather than "I hate magickers"?

If the twinks went around playing half-giants, we'd have the same complaints. They're supposed to be rare, and 'tisn't fair at all when a 0 day half-giant can pick up a bench and have a decent chance at beating down a 20 or 40 day warrior.

So far, staff says that whatever happens with magickers is 100% completely and purely intentional, so I see no reason to rename this thread.

In theory though, I think that amount of twinkery is proportional to the room left for abuse. If half-giants were as powerful as magickers, we'd have the same complaints for certain. But it didn't really happen because downsides of being a HG are reflected by the code, namely by their low agility and wisdom, while magicker's weakneses are virtual and can be ignored.
While there is always a chance that HG will chop veteran warrior in half with a single blow, it is safe to say that more often then not veteran will be able to hold long enough to beat HG with a sparring needle before that lucky blow comes.

[Marauder Moe]

Which of the magickers' virtual weaknesses can be ignored?  All the clans that won't hire you?  The friends that turn you in when they find out?  The dull black gem?  The Faithful that comes to hunt your ass down?

*boggle*