I hate magickers, official thread.

[ale six]

Wait wait wait.

*rereads*

No WAY.

The problem is that by making progression harder you make it harder to just survive.

Is someone arguing the environment should be LESS harsh?

BURN THE HERETIC!!!

[jhunter]

But everyone is mad at Hymwen for branching 10 spells in 2 days or whatever.  You and Forest Junkie are furious about the entire situation, but you want the ability to branch 10 spells in 2 days to remain?

What are you angry about again?  I mean I'm really curious.

Because I don't do it. I don't want to see it made harder to progress and go back to the days of every mage being forced to hide out from the public LONGER to keep the first newbie warrior with no concept that he shoud FEAR magick from killing my pc.
All this is going to accomplish (to prevent the -possibility- of a -few- people from doing it) is force those who aren't doing it to hide out LONGER and create LESS interaction with the end result being EXACTLY THE SAME.

[jhunter]

Wait wait wait.

*rereads*

No WAY.

The problem is that by making progression harder you make it harder to just survive.

Is someone arguing the environment should be LESS harsh?

BURN THE HERETIC!!!

No, I'm arguing that it's fine as it is. I never said make it LESS harsh than it -currently- is. It doesn't need to be made more difficult (for the rest of us) because the problem isn't as bad as some people are making it out to be, influenced by their own personal biases.

[Ghost]

The problem is that by making progression harder you make it harder to just survive. As a gemmer, you aren't useful to anyone to support yourself until a certain point. As a rogue magicker, you are unable to keep from being killed by the first npc, pc, weather, or whatever else until you reach a certain point.

I can name three magicker types that can sustain themselves (in terms of nourishment) right out of the box.  Another two more, I can name for avoiding danger again right out of the box.  Is it risky?  Yes.  So is for every other ranger/merchant/warrior...etc character.  If you are living in the wastes, risk is what you are taking anyway.

Aside from all these, there are so easy ways to earn coins to survive, it is not even funny.  All it takes is, for you to be secret at what you do, and keep making coins, buying food/water if you are in the wastes.  So it is not impossible.  It is realistic in the way of considering it highly dangerous to survive Zalanthan wastes.  Code should not be tweaked for any type of character to make it easier for them.

[Malken]

False, if you are playing realistically and are not going to the same damned places with every pc and actually making them a different pc this is totally not true. You don't have to be a newbie to magickers for them to be difficult. You just have to stop rewriting the same pc with a few changes. Make an actual character.

If a majority of the magickers were played realistically and never went back to the same spots they always go to, then we wouldn't be having this discussion to begin with. And if it was realistic by the documentation, that magickers are RARE, that'd solve another problem.

But to be fair, I'm also going to admit that the current world, ROOM wise, is rather small. There's just so many places a rogue magicker can go to.

[ale six]

Okay, to add something serious:

This is exactly what a lot of us have been trying to say for months now. The sad, honest truth is that it's now harder to find mundane characters to RP with in the city of Tuluk than it is to find magicker characters to RP "with" in the northern wilderness.

It isn't just Tuluk. I've been playing a southern PC who has been responsible for hiring a fair number of aides and nonmilitary employees over a long period of time. From what I noticed, since the announcement, we actually had an increase in the number of people who wanted jobs, but in every single case but one or two (just from what I was aware of), all of these PCs were mages or mindbenders just trying to avoid notice.

And to be fair, they were all REALLY GOOD players and enjoyable to RP with, and I don't think any of them were twinking at all. But it got to the point where whenever I or somebody else prominent I knew hired a new PC as an "aide", my cynical OOC side was starting to say "Gee, I wonder what kind of mage this one is."

I could go on about yearning for the good ol' days when the big sekrits were "I'm a kleptomaniac" or "I'm an assassin, can you buy me a dagger?" rather than "I'm a mage", but I just wanted to further emphasize the point that magick is really not so rare anymore. It almost feels like it's getting to the point where the rare people are the ones who aren't.

[Gimfalisette]

...several of the "anti-magicker" people did something very foolish icly and lost their pcs because of it, then jumped on the bandwagon with the magickhaters.

I have never lost a PC to a magicker. I have only been in one combat situation against a magicker, though I have also been "attacked" in various non-combat ways on many many occasions. The one time that I did knowingly/willingly enter combat against a magicker, I would have totally accepted dying as my own damn fault, because it would have been.

I do not "hate" magick per se.

What I hate is that the current non-rarity of magick in the game is in direct conflict with the documentation.

I hate that there's been such a drain away from mundane characters in the game, to the point where it's hard to get mundane interaction.

I hate feeling blasé about magick and psionics.

I hate that this feeling comes from the fact that all of my mundane characters have had significant levels of interaction with non-mundane elements of the game, interaction that has only increased in the last few months. I have not had a choice as to whether magick is "rare" to my characters.

I hate that every large plot now revolves around magick, or has magick as an integral component of it.

I hate that my assumption about every new northlands character I meet is that he/she is a rogue magicker. I'm not kidding about that, that's always my first thought now, both ICly and OOCly. And it's not just me thinking it, either; I know that other characters are having the same thoughts, because it's so common now that it's all over our conversations.

I hate feeling like playing a mundane character is mostly pointless, because anything I can do in terms of plot-advancing skills, a non-mundane can do better. By "plot-advancing skills" I mean things like assassinations, spying, PC vs PC combat, travel, etc.; not things like general hunting or crafting.

I have nothing "against" the characters or players of non-mundanes in general. I don't think MOST of them are twinks, though some of them certainly are. In fact, I have roleplayed with some non-mundanes that I think have done an amazing job.

But I still think the game is suffering due to far too many non-mundanes (in proportion to the total PC population) right now.

[Nao]

A suggestion, if people branching in two days is really the main problem: Put a timer on how fast skills can increase. If you increased a skill recently, x amount of time has to pass before it can go up again. If a timer like that is already in place, increase  the time a bit.
Adjust the timer so that it takes a reasonable minimum time to branch.

This would hinder someone that spam-casts with very little time in between practiced spells, because the timer prevents the skill from going up for a certain amount of time no matter how much they're casting.
But it would not change the rate at all for someone that keeps casting to a reasonable frequency, since the timer wears off while they're sitting around chatting with a friend or otherwise doing non-magickal things, thus not changing things at all for someone that's not spam-casting.

On the other hand, does it really matter how much time played the guy that just killed you for no reason or otherwise misbehaved has on their hands? There's no way for me to see their time played, but I'm going to be pissed about it nonetheless.

[FiveDisgruntledMonkeysWit]

LauraMars wrote:

But everyone is mad at Hymwen for branching 10 spells in 2 days or whatever.

No, I think the reason some people are upset with Hymwen is because she created a mage-type that she had no intention of playing as an actual living, breathing character. She implied that she planned to store the character anyway, and was creating it just to prove a point. Personally, I think this goes against the very spirit of the game.
However, whether or not I or any one else agrees with what Hymwen did has very little relevance to this discussion.

[ale six]

Is someone arguing the environment should be LESS harsh?

No, I'm arguing that it's fine as it is. I never said make it LESS harsh than it -currently- is. It doesn't need to be made more difficult (for the rest of us) because the problem isn't as bad as some people are making it out to be, influenced by their own personal biases.

Everyone has their own personal bias here, jhunter. You're definitely not innocent of that. It seems like your argument is, "If we make it harder for mages to progress in skill, it will be harder for mages to survive out in the deserts than it is now."

To me, that doesn't seem like a bad thing at all. In fact it sounds like a really good thing. If nothing else it will put a little more risk vs. the reward of being a mage with a whole bunch of spells and lots of power. Maybe it will even encourage people to come back and play in the cities, where it's safe, because, y'know, that's how the docs say life is supposed to be.

[Hymwen]

In my defense, I never initiated interaction with that character, and mostly went out of my way to avoid in so as to not cause problems due to storing early. I don't see how it's such a big deal - plenty of people make throwaway characters, plenty of characters die really early due to mistakes and so on. In the few PC to PC encounters I had, I did roleplay fully and as much as I would have with any of my other characters. I didn't reduce the quality of the game by making this experiment. I was attempting to do the opposite.

[X_Scars]

Heh, only read the last post in this entire thread, but if anything, if you were to make it more difficult for magickers to get spells, then make sure every skill that a magicker gets is actually usuable in a reasonable way on a near regular basis, unless it's a spell of Doom.

There's a few spells that the only reason you might want to cast the spell is to branch it...and I find that a completely silly way to branch spells.

Not saying there shouldn't be those silly spells and cantrips (as some are actually pretty fun), but don't have it so you need to cast it to get anything from them.

In an ideal Armageddon world, I think magickers would be able to naturally learn and branch spells without having to sit down in a hole and cast all day, throwing in a few emotes and thinks once and a while, and expect to become better. Spells should be used practically and under situations that allows characters to grow in experience, rather than sitting down and casting, casting, casting.

[LoD]

LoD never openly spoke out some adamantly against magick in the game until after losing his really long lived warrior to a magickal being in the blink of an eye. I noticed this as well and that's why his arguments against magick hold no salt in my opinion.

Why don't we clear this silly arguement up right here:

I lost a long lived warrior to a magickal being in March, 2004.  My next post that had anything to do with magick was made in July, 2005 as a response to someone asking about the deaths of long-lived characters.

If I were jaded at losing a long lived character, don't you think I would've posted something in the next 14 months on the subject?

The first thread -I- started on magickal beings is Magick - Power and Place in Armageddon.  This was posted on July, 2006, which was 26 months after the death of my "long lived warrior".  One would assume that if I were jaded against the death of my character, I must obviously address those issues in the post?

Hrmmm, it seems to argue that I've felt magickers have been done a disservice since the destruction of Tuluk, and that the displacement of these magickers have had a negative impact on the perception of magick by the mundane populace.  You know, I might have just been biding my time and waiting for the right moment to speak over those 26 months.

Except that I participated in 185 threads and started 9 of them over those 26 months, and none of the threads I started were on the subject of magick in Armageddon.

So, either I patiently waited and bided my time to express my anger over the loss of one character for 26 months and have since let that frustration affect every post I've ever made on the subject...

or...

...there's an actual issue to be addressed.

I think the fact that several other players, exlcuding myself, have an opinion on the matter that seems very close to my own would indicate that there's more at play here than what you perceive as my "jaded" past.    There are very real and apparent issues with magickers and gameplay, and I'm sorry you disagree.

However, several people do agree.  I'm afraid you'll just have to argue the facts with me next time, as exaggeration and assumption simply don't get the job done.  There are problems with magickers and the gameworld.  Other people feel it.  Other people recognize it.  And it's important for these discussions to happen so that the next iteration can benefit from past mistakes.

-LoD

[Dalmeth]

As a gemmer, you aren't useful to anyone to support yourself until a certain point. As a rogue magicker, you are unable to keep from being killed by the first npc, pc, weather, or whatever else until you reach a certain point.
It's hard enough as it is if you are playing realistically. I don't want to see it become harder just to survive even.

I'm sorry, but this comment just pissed me off something royal.  Jhunter, I'm assuming you've played a ranger before, so I'm pretty sure you remember just how !^$&ing hard it is to get one up to the point where it can weather all the dangers of the wilderness.  Even then, a ranger's best tactic is hopping onto his mount and praying to whatever cruel gods that preside over Zalanthas that the animal has enough stamina left to get him to safety.

Still, everything out-rangers a human ranger.  It seems every last elf and definitely all the gith NPCs  can get better hiding skills along with being completely independent of a mount, which actually makes those hiding skills worthwhile.  Not to mention there's still that bug where if you start running on a mount, you have to dismount and set your character to walking speed so your mount won't keep running.  If you're being chased by a hunter-killer NPC, that's time you can't really afford to waste.  Warriors of any race quickly outclass all rangers in the area of weapons combat.  That archery ability doesn't help much, as not only do advanced warriors gain defenses against arrows, but the weapon switching delay, which includes taking an arrow in hand, makes a quick draw rather impossible.  So if anything pins down a ranger or his mount quits on him before he can get to safety, he's dead.

Because of a ranger's jack-of-all trades nature, they fall under almost any serious pressure.  At best, they just get by more easily than any other class.

Yet before the announcement, despite all these disadvantages, rangers were the most popularly played class, according to the staff.  So why are you complaining about the difficulty of survival when rangers have it so tough already?  Maybe you should start picking better subclasses with basic survival in mind.

[Gimfalisette]

It isn't just Tuluk. I've been playing a southern PC who has been responsible for hiring a fair number of aides and nonmilitary employees over a long period of time. From what I noticed, since the announcement, we actually had an increase in the number of people who wanted jobs, but in every single case but one or two (just from what I was aware of), all of these PCs were mages or mindbenders just trying to avoid notice.

So much for my plans for moving to Allanak in a desperate bid to get mundane interaction!

The whole issue is just very disappointing to me. I feel like I'm consistently being forced to play my character in conflict with the documentation. There's only so often that you can find out yet another friend is a sekret mage without starting to edge toward that dark place of, "yeah I guess mages aren't so bad after all..." Especially when, OOCly, I would really rather not solo-RP for the rest of my PC's life.

[ale six]

I didn't mean to make it sound that bad. In Allanak, the hidden mages are probably more hidden than in Tuluk, because they can't just go frolic out in the grasslands. There's also, ironically, less saturation because some people playing southern mages are gemmed, and the gemmers tend to isolate themselves a bit.

But it's hard to deny the game is less mage-centric than it was a year ago in any form. That's what makes me sad.

[Marauder Moe]

I wouldn't be suprised if there were just as many mages in Tuluk as there are in Allanak.  I mean, that would make sense, except for possibly that they have an easier time breeding in Allanak.

I'm sure there are far fewer secret mages in Allanak, though, because probably 80-90% of them get gemmed in the first two weeks of playing (which is a shame, because coming out after playing a long time can be so much fun if you're not in a position where it gets you killed).  And, as Ale Six said, the gemmed do tend to be more seperated from the rest of the population.

Fortunately, Arm Reborn seems to have a lot of great stuff to encourage mundane gameplay: a new world to explore, player-malleable economy, caravans, and probably more we don't even know about.  I still agree with Halaster that the karma system needs to stay, though.

[Dakkon Black]

the karma system needs to stay

And I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of cap. I don't like the SOI system of LOOSING your karma because I don't want to feel like I am loosing trust. However I would like to see something like a Karma a month regenerates.

Blow 8 Karma on a Sorc. Wait 8 Months to get it back. Etc.

[Nao]

The whole issue is just very disappointing to me. I feel like I'm consistently being forced to play my character in conflict with the documentation. There's only so often that you can find out yet another friend is a sekret mage without starting to edge toward that dark place of, "yeah I guess mages aren't so bad after all..." Especially when, OOCly, I would really rather not solo-RP for the rest of my PC's life.

Why not play it like that, then? Sure, they've been brought up to it, but if an experience that doesn't match what you're expecting repeats itself, eventually you're going to change your expectations and your attitude. It's only natural.
How often have you met that kind of person that keeps complaining about foreigners/chinese/muslims/(insert minority of your choice here), but has that friend that he obviously likes, even though they're part of that minority?
Also, every time in history that there's been a 'shunned' minority, there were also been 'normal' people being friendly with them, having affairs or helping them out. Despite of the lifetime of prejudice that they've faced before that.

This is a major safety issue on earth, by the way, when people notice that something supposedly dangerous doesn't kill them right away, often they'll start treating it as something harmless, no matter the actual risk involved.

[Malken]

If we all start becoming buddies with magickers because they are the only PCs left to interact with in a city like Tuluk, then we might just as well throw the whole documentation by the window, no?

The more magickers feel accepted by society, the less they'll be hunted on sight, and the more our mundane characters will be seen as 'traitors' by the powerups that run the city, aka, Templars, if we start softening up to them..

And on top of that, the more PLAYERS playing the magickers feel accepted by society, the more they'll feel like creating rogue ones in Tuluk isn't such a bad idea after all because they'll be 'accepted' by a few and then we'll just have more of them and it'll only serve to amplify the current problem, no?

[Ghost]

In a valley where thousand people lives, if one person has gun and everyone else just teeth and nails, that person is godlike.

If five people have guns, they are the drivers of the population.

If 300 people have guns, and 700 do not, it does not make guns special anymore.  It makes wielders of the teeth and nail insignificant, and the gun bringing not awe or fear anymore.

Seeing magick once may invoke all kinds of fear and awe.  Seeing it for the tenth times, does not.  Learning someone is a secret mage for the first time will bring surprise, learning it for the tenth time will bring boredom.

A character of mine had this talk once when talking to a magicker:  "Before you, I have worked with two nilazis, two drovians, two elkrans, four whirans, two krathi, two rukkian and one vivaduan."  This is the list of people I worked with, not the magickers I met.  The number of sorcerers I met was more than any single one of the elementalist type listed.  
All these people, I worked was within two IG years.  I was not living in a place called "Mage's den" nor was I nearby the Fountain of Mana, nor was I sitting on The Sorcerer's Stone to actually meet that many mages.  That character's first reaction to seeing a visible magick in play, was to run away till there is no more space to run.  Second time, he only showed his discomfort but stayed in place.  For the tenth time he showed his discomfort, and refused any magickal help that was offered all the while trying not to sound offending.  When it was hundreth time, he accepted the help, and by that time he knew, and heard and talked with so many mages, magick was just bread and butter.

I could give up all my karma and my probably favorite (or the second favorite) character, if the number of magickers in the game would be 5% of the active PC population.  For that, there can be a number of ways to do:  Pick one of the suggestions Rindan made (Awakening, or staff putting a quota on how many mages and distributing the options randomly etc..) or make it special app only, or make the karma regenerate (but one point at two months sound better to me really).
Or make it more challenging for the mages.  Multiply the skill timers of mages by ten.

[Malken]

I think that karma re-generation is a very fair compromise..

Jhunter and all, what is it that you have against karma re-generation? We could make it short enough that it would only take about a mundane average lifespan to get it back... So let's say you get yourself a Whiran, that's what, four karma? So, for the first day of playtime you have on him, if you die, you wouldn't lose any of your karma..

But if and when you die, you go back to 0 karma, and slowly, let's say, a karma every 2 weeks? You start regaining them that way.. So to get it back to enough karma to play a Whiran, you'd only have to wait 2 months, which give you plenty of time to play a mundane character or two in the meantime, just to keep the game in balance...

And if you REALLY just enjoy the game when you only get to play magickers, you could even use the special apps to be able to play another magicker, if you were desperate enough and really hated any other choices, but at least this way the admin in charge of special apps would be able to see if there's too many of a type of magickers currently in game to allow you to play that type while you wait for your karma to return..

Is that really asking too much?

[Gimfalisette]

The whole issue is just very disappointing to me. I feel like I'm consistently being forced to play my character in conflict with the documentation. There's only so often that you can find out yet another friend is a sekret mage without starting to edge toward that dark place of, "yeah I guess mages aren't so bad after all..." Especially when, OOCly, I would really rather not solo-RP for the rest of my PC's life.

Why not play it like that, then? Sure, they've been brought up to it, but if an experience that doesn't match what you're expecting repeats itself, eventually you're going to change your expectations and your attitude. It's only natural.

If we all start becoming buddies with magickers because they are the only PCs left to interact with in a city like Tuluk, then we might just as well throw the whole documentation by the window, no?

That's my point exactly. The documentatation is already out the window. And I'm not happy about it.

[Marauder Moe]

I suppose I can't neccesarily speak for all players of gemmed characters, but having everyone be friendly didn't really please me or anything.  The abuse is interesting and entertaining.  Abuse of the few mundane friends or lovers my character did have was immensely interesting and entertaining.  I don't really think you're doing a gemmed character's player a favor by ignoring what they are and acting friendly.

[Nao]

If we all start becoming buddies with magickers because they are the only PCs left to interact with in a city like Tuluk, then we might just as well throw the whole documentation by the window, no?

No. The docs tell you what you're most likely to start out with, which is magick-hating. This might increase because of IC events, or decrease gradually with time because you've run into the hundredth magicker now and you're still alive and kicking, even though you've been told that you'll get sick from looking at one.

If you feel that your character is getting used to things, it's probably a good time to LET them get used to things. It's called character development with time.

Yea, your usual zalanthian human is scared shitless of nobles and magickers. But your average PC might get used to it because they're much more likely to run into a magicker or a noble on a regular basis. Or they might turn the other way, but there's no point sticking to exactly the same attitude for years, no matter what happens. If a magicker kills your lover, you'll hate them even more, if your best buddy that you've known since you were three turns out to be a magicker, you -might- hate them a ittle less. It's called character development.