Why do you keep adding magickal stuff?

[mansa]

This thread has been heavily moderated over the past day.

The reasons have been:
Too much detail about Magick talk
Insults
Rude Comments about other Posters.
Insults - Calling others Assholes.
Sarcastic responses insulting other people's intelligence.


The General Discussion Board is not a debate.  You can't "win" conversations with logic and passion.  The discussion board is where we discuss topics as a community, and the community is varied in opinion, thought, and feelings.  We are anonymous players typing into computer devices about our passion of a particular roleplaying game.

People are allowed to dislike the HRPT.   People are allowed to hate magickers.   People are allowed to say that the HRPT was fun.   People are allowed to hate every half-giant character in the game, and think they should be removed from the game.  People are allowed to think the game should be desert elves and city play is stupid.   People are allowed to be wrong - it's not up to you to correct them on their opinions.

[Brokkr]

HRPT's are all different.

Sometimes it is the result of actions that have already happened.  Where there was player agency, and now there isn't, because we are showing the result of player agency.

Sometimes there is player agency during a HRPT.  Sometimes that player agency is shared amongst the collective actions of a fairly large number of players.  Sometimes that player agency is limited to just one person, so it may only be a limited number of people that understand there was player agency, and to the rest it looks like a pre-determined outcome.

Sometimes we tack stuff on, that we want to get accomplished.  Like realizing the Grey Forest is sort of messed up, mapping wise, and there is still all this leftover stuff from the flood, and other issues so...lets use this as a reason to close it and fix some stuff.

And yeah, sometimes its just a lightshow and no one could have changed it.  Like a volcano exploding.

[Nacria]

The hrrrprrrtrrr was fine. If anything events where players can get their heroic fantasy fix should be more common.

I don't care that much about the writing. We don't need to have a plot thats more complicated or bigger than "big bad attacks the city" for an entire community of roleplayers to make their own stories around it. Again. I want to see more of the above and I don't want any wedeling about "writing" to prevent that from happening.

As far as magic goes? In my short time playing It does seem like magick just gets way too much attention, time and cookies from the gamerunners. Not to mention if I want to be cool and do cool things it feels like I'll be competing with characters with huge magickal boons which I'm supposed to be deathly afraid of.

[GreenTransient]

So, per Brokkr looks like the system is functioning as intended.  Well as is intended, has me of the opinion that killing players PC's off, for a predetermined story, is pretty fucked.  If almost every pc on an HRPT that has ever died, realized that the outcome was already decided.  The only thing left, was if they lived or died maybe they'd be a little miffed about wasting their time being a sacrificial time sink on the altar of staff prerogative.  Focus on your own story I guess?  I know I won't bother adjusting my schedule again.  Especially as a zero karma player, with zero agency against staff's #1 story stick, magick.

[Halaster]

I think it might be a good idea to clear up some misconceptions for the new players who it seems, to me, might be getting the wrong impression.

From about 1995 until 2016 full guild elementalists were the norm.  They were generally accepted as being, more or less, glass cannons.  If you caught them when not on their guard, they were easy to take down.  They had a lot of power, but had a lot of weaknesses.

There was a period in the game (from about 07 to mid 2010's) where the people in charge at the time were planning to close the game down in favor of a new one (Arm 2.0).  During that time the game became increasingly high fantasy and over the top with magickal plots and people.  However, Arm 2.0 was cancelled and so the staff wanted to calm the game back down and there was a lot of 'nerfing' going on.

The conclusion was eventually reached that full guild elementalists were too powerful and were "plot ruiners" (right or wrong isn't important - it's what was made at the time).  So, they were split into subguilds and each element divided along their 'aspects' to make 2-4 subguilds per element.  EDIT:  when this happened, there was no real in-game storyline as to why magick became nerfed, which was a sore point with many players.

At the time the elementalists were divided into subguilds, we had a different set of full guilds:  Warrior, Ranger, Assassin, Merchant, Burglar, Pick-Pocket.  The subguilds were designed with those in mind.  A couple of years later, those full guilds retired and the current set were added:  Raider, Fighter, Enforcer, Laborer, Scout, Miscreant, and so on.  After a while it became apparent that the magickal subguilds combined with these new, better full guilds, were a bit OP.  Adding a magickal subguild to a heavy combat (raider, enforcer, fighter) or light combat (scout, soldier, infiltrator) basically erased all the negatives that came with magick in terms of physical weaknesses in combat.

More recently we redid all the mundane subguilds, giving them a rather significant boost.  So when you hear people state that "mundanes get nothing, magick gets all the attention" they are simply incorrect - perhaps misinformed, perhaps using some loose definition of facts to make an argument, perhaps just forgetful.

So to sum up, the magickal subguilds were introduced with a different set of full guilds in mind, and as time has shown us, they are rather OP for the current new full guilds.  This leads to them being much more commonplace than we'd like because, besides from the In-Character cultural aspects, there's no downside and they eliminate magick's weaknesses.

That brings us to the decision to make full guilds (for drov and vivadu) the default again.  But we understand a lot people do like the subguilds, thus they're still around as special apps.

[Fredd]

I think it might be a good idea to clear up some misconceptions for the new players who it seems, to me, might be getting the wrong impression.

From about 1995 until 2016 full guild elementalists were the norm.  They were generally accepted as being, more or less, glass cannons.  If you caught them when not on their guard, they were easy to take down.  They had a lot of power, but had a lot of weaknesses.

There was a period in the game (from about 07 to mid 2010's) where the people in charge at the time were planning to close the game down in favor of a new one (Arm 2.0).  During that time the game became increasingly high fantasy and over the top with magickal plots and people.  However, Arm 2.0 was cancelled and so the staff wanted to calm the game back down and there was a lot of 'nerfing' going on.

The conclusion was eventually reached that full guild elementalists were too powerful and were "plot ruiners" (right or wrong isn't important - it's what was made at the time).  So, they were split into subguilds and each element divided along their 'aspects' to make 2-4 subguilds per element.

At the time the elementalists were divided into subguilds, we had a different set of full guilds:  Warrior, Ranger, Assassin, Merchant, Burglar, Pick-Pocket.  The subguilds were designed with those in mind.  A couple of years later, those full guilds retired and the current set were added:  Raider, Fighter, Enforcer, Laborer, Scout, Miscreant, and so on.  After a while it became apparent that the magickal subguilds combined with these new, better full guilds, were a bit OP.  Adding a magickal subguild to a heavy combat (raider, enforcer, fighter) or light combat (scout, soldier, infiltrator) basically erased all the negatives that came with magick in terms of physical weaknesses in combat.

More recently we redid all the mundane subguilds, giving them a rather significant boost.  So when you hear people state that "mundanes get nothing, magick gets all the attention" they are simply incorrect - perhaps misinformed, perhaps using some loose definition of facts to make an argument, perhaps just forgetful.

So to sum up, the magickal subguilds were introduced with a different set of full guilds in mind, and as time has shown us, they are rather OP for the current new full guilds.  This leads to them being much more commonplace than we'd like because, besides from the In-Character cultural aspects, there's no downside and they eliminate magick's weaknesses.

That brings us to the decision to make full guilds (for drov and vivadu) the default again.  But we understand a lot people do like the subguilds, thus they're still around as special apps.

Great bit of history here.

My answer is : we've been asking for this for years. It looks like staff are trying to have fun with bringing some stuff back, fixing some flaws and updating areas of the game that could use love.

It's really nice to see IC happenings reinforce code changes. Makes it fun. Makes it involved.