[R3N3GAD3]

I originally made this as a reply under the forum poll for the tomes, but I feel like it should be a suggestion all on its own. I lightly edited it from the original post, so here it is:

I think tomes for the more advanced, non-elemental magics is actually quite fitting that it requires dev. I feel like making most of the tomes accessible will return us to the more battlechaddy meta we had back in spires and people just coming out of the woodwork with abilities out of nowhere when they hardly did any Dev for such advanced abilities. Personally, I think it's bad for the IC to allow unfiltered tome usage of more advanced magics.

Magics like Energy, Cosmic, Illusion, Time and Gravity are incredibly powerful all on their own, and they should require some decent IC Dev and approval before they are used. The IC on them, other than maybe energy is pretty specific, and energy is just plain powerful, and energy's just pretty easy  to Develop, so not being able to do that is just lazy, considering you start off with mana surge, which you can even weave into the dev to help start it off.

These magics are so powerful, they have never even been combined with any other magics officially in the past and they still maintained a pretty high place as far as the fighting meta went, even after they were tweaked with nerfs and such. I don't know if the Non-app tomes are going extend to the more intermediate, more advanced elemental magics too, but I think most of those should still be app-only as well, save for more basic things like Lightning, Riptide, Sand, Explosion, and I still doubt some of those, but I'm trying to meet people with opposing opinions halfway here. 

I liked the premise of Esshar's skill trees from the moment it was even mentioned to the public before the game even came out. It makes players put actual work into their characters with a bit of Admin regulation of the IC so players aren't just coming out of nowhere with extremely powerful magics. Back in Spires, sometimes it felt like people who hardly put work into their IC were coming out on top of the battle meta just because they made their build a certain way. It kind of resulted in the battlechads ruling everything, and I still like the taste of Esshar's development system, considering in order to be a powerful battlecuck, you have to have some decent Dev backing that up.


Let's not forget what this game is about, Creative Writing and making a story that even influences the world around you in Eternia. I feel like if we made these more advanced magics available to the public, we would begin to regress back into the battlecuck meta with very little IC to back it up again. This is my opinion, so take it with a grain of salt and don't hate me for this, but I think making the tomes more widely available for Chads to plan their ultimate build without some IC regulation would suck.



On my current character, I use energy magic and I was actually okay with developing it. It wasn't that hard, it only took me a few days and only a few hours each day, and I was done and had my app posted. The very next day, it was approved and I didn't even have to wait very long. On top of that, if you don't want to go through the app process, and you're that much against it, find a mentor. Mentors literally can teach you moves straight out of their skill trees, as long as one has the RPP and prereqs for it. All you have to do is RP with them and let them teach you the magic.



Making more of the tomes available without IC regulation I feel would put a dampener on the IC of Esshar, and make it so we have more people running around with exceptional abilities with no IC dev to actually back it up. Unfortunately, by the looks of this vote, it seems like we have more in favor of the opposite of me, but I guess it's worth stating my thoughts on it to vent it now before the bullsh** racks my brain. Either way, my opinion is stated, IC is important, don't forgo IC just because people don't want to actually work  for the cooler abilities that our artists and coders worked so hard to program and make.



I'm just saying, considering much hard work was put in over the years to make this game the wonderful way it is now, and on top of that our coders and artists still work on other games at the same time as well, like Severed World, we should have at least some resolve to put some work in and develop in a cool way to unlock such cool abilities. For coders and artists to work so hard for us, and the admins who work hard to keep us satisfied as players, for us to have the desire to put no work into IC sickens me in short. I bid whoever actually took the time out to read this a good day.


(Edit: I forgot to mention, making so many of the tomes publicly available would completely defeat the purpose of mentoring. Seriously, there's players who are entrusted the mentor ability in SO MANY different magics in which they could teach just about anyone. Again, if you don't want to app, find a friggin mentor. The premise of mentoring seems really cool to me, considering there's IC dev to be had on both sides of that. To toss such a thing away would be depressing.)

[Rod]

Someone summarize this for me please

[Magik]

Yeah but why? Why is fucking around with, say, gravity all the more powerful, impactful and in the need to be graded over the idea of suddenly making fire appear from your hand and on another person? That is by in large completely arbitrary and coupled with the assumption that ultimately these trees actually have an impact on someone's in character actions outside of flavor in a fight - which happens, sure, but by in large not really. (Outside of resident RP-but-ignored tree illusion, anyway.)

You're gating something that is intrinsically going to be solely mechanical beyond a mild bit of effort and an application that gets real awkward if you don't get it for whatever reason. If there is some lore reason to at least make sure the player is aware of what they're getting into - cosmic and occult, holy to a lesser degree - then sure. The current system is not IC, spells barely have an effect during actual scenes, it's all very much whatever.

As for mentorship, that's fine? I am a s s u m i n g that the advanced trees would still be applied for, but even barring that you have all the various exalted and etc etc special skills that exist, still. Oh no, potentially you have clipped the rich RP of someone running around trying to get a couple of moves for their verb to the tune of "hey, can you teach me kung-fu?" "uh, okay." a hour of back and forth later "god bless, now I know kung-fu. Maybe we'll talk at some point after." "Alright bye I didn't really get anything out of that myself here."

that's an extreme example but even in the case of it being far more nuanced it would be an instant approved application anyway for the whole tree

Does the application process do much for your character? Is your character defined solely by their moves? There's 100+~ people online at a time at the moment, that's a lot of potential applications team admin have to skim for for... not much actual benefit. And believe me, I have played a character who ended up as dev bait; it's a lot of rather repetitive, unfulfilling scenes of the mentor/knowledgeable person repeating footnotes and the other player writing how they follow along, nod, understand and then save that log for their application. Out of... eight? instances of this only one character even shared their name, or ever talked to mine again.

Bzzt.

[Lorelai]

I like that applications help stop dipping. That's all. Otherwise I think apps are dumb.

[Enginseer-42]

I like the applications system solely to encourage mentoring. But since applications are easier than finding a mentor, well that kinda shoots that in the foot.

[spellzer]

I like that applications help stop dipping. That's all. Otherwise I think apps are dumb.

I think the big rpp costs (especially on openers) has a bigger role in stopping dipping.

[Whatever]

Illusion, Time and Gravity are incredibly powerful all on their own

Illusion... Oh, honey. That's not even close to being true...

[Red Reika]

To put it shortly, I don't think application for most tomes is a healthy thing. In theory, you'll think that people simply start developing their abilities ICly from the moment they spawn and get a logical step by step on how they grow to that ability until they finish their app and dev for it. In reality, you have people literally treating it like an electronic RPG game asking people "Hey can you teach me X" as if they were NPCs waiting to give quests; and when it's not that, they just, I mean it, literally grind the dev for the trees they want and then completely ignore all of that. They stop their RP just to dev, and only start to RP when they actually finished dev'ing and never touch those subjects ever again.

And then there's the other end of the problem. Some people want to come up with some character concepts that they think they'd have fun with ICly and RP'ing with, but they don't have the time or energy to write a 5 part dev of 8,000 words each over the course of two or three weeks just to get there. It's a burn out that sometimes just kill any chance of that RP to be fun for them before they even finished it. And there's also the risk that you'll just die even before you finished the dev, or that IC events just make that take a 180 turn and not make sense to continue the dev anymore.

All in all, apping for -all- of the tomes is an unnecessary gatekeeping that doesn't add much in terms of IC RP'ing, by the contrary, it creates a culture of grinding dev. Only -some- trees should be app only, those that have a heavy lore tied to it such as Cosmic, Occult and Holy.

[Chance]

I think, when someone actually develops their magic in a meaningful way and that leads them to interacting with others, fleshing out the beginnings of their story, or even tailoring the theme of their character closer to their abilities. That's good. Your standards for yourself are pushed a little higher since you know someone's going to be reviewing your concept.

However, the barrier of typing up a thread, collecting logs, putting a post together, waiting for the reply, then a-helping for a tome, then waiting for a moderator, etc... isn't worth that trade off, unfortunately. It was in the beginning when specializations were rarer and had extra weight to them, but not at the present moment.

Applications for magic definitely did encourage more of a creative focus rather than "this looks strong, I want it", generally speaking, but the micromanagement involved is undesirable. A fair middle-ground is to introduce more cool intermediates that can showcase someone's mastery of a magic.

[Blue7x]

The basis of your point seems to be the assumption that people won't/don't roleplay developing their magic. And for the most part I think that's completely untrue. The world and setting of this Eternia and the past 2 has been a magic fantasy. There's no other way to get stronger other than RPing...so of course people will develop their skills through rping.

Besides that, no one benefits from them restricting magic, besides the elitists lmao. The staff have jobs and lives, they want to play the game, and then they gotta read and judge all these apps just to learn magic that was never restricted like this before since the first eternia. They probably want more time to play the game, and we would like to have more freedom with roleplaying, this is a downside for both sides.

Also Chance, sure they got more creative, but that's because they had to be. There is no canon explanation, or one true way to develop these abilities. And that's great. But this change was completely unnecessary. At that point your role playing to get something out of it more than doing it how you want. When the point of roleplay is the freedom to choose and develop your character the way you want, with other people doing the same thing. Shouldn't RPL suffice to be a measure of how someone has developed their character. That's kind of the point of it I would assume, it's also why I think these applications on "advanced" tier magic is a bit redundant imo, but I'd be fine with just having more than 5 magic available without going through a lengthy, unnecessary, process if finding out if I'm good enough to learn whatever type of magic according to the discretion of the staff judging it.