Shattered Kingdoms

I think you misunderstand my intent. There is no denying that enchanting has measurable rewards to the act of PK and Exploration. My stance is that a time sink should be FUN.

When we all came to SK for the first time we probably did so because we wanted to have fun (Roleplaying, PKing, or Exploring). No matter how you look at it, the act of enchanting makes us stop doing those vital things we came to SK to do. It is only after the enchanting has been accomplished that we can go back to having fun. I would be a lot wiser to incorporate enchanting / improving your gear directly into those fun activities.

This is sort of my sentiment, but it's not -quite- true because voodoo, final strike, etc all exist.

As do mistakes and lag and whatever.

The best engineered plans still fall to acts of god.

This is a powerful move: there are plenty of people who can reap acceptable benefits from the current system who see no reason in a need to change it, but the fact that they're missing key points of realities does not mean they do not exist all the same.

I seriously question if enchant armor is fundamentally working as intended.

Meh. To be -competitive- in pk you only need 25wp, 20fort, 30mp. That's like 2 hours of work if you start with decent but easily attainable pieces (which there are a lot of due to the small pbase).

So you admit that the problem only gets worse as more players enter. Or rather, that the equilibrium of the current situation implies an upper limit on the amount of people participating.

This is so obviously a problem to me that it hurts my fingers to come up with a polite way to point it out.

Eh. I was saying it's not a huge problem in the first place.

25wp, 20fort, 30mp adds up to 75 enchants. Not hard to get pieces that start with 3-4 runes. Add 2-3 to each piece. Should take a couple hours. If you're decent, you'll hold onto the suit.

If everyone was around to grab the loot up, you'd have to start with 2 runes a piece. Add 3-4 runes to that. Should take maybe 5 hours? If you're decent, you'll hold onto the suit.

If you're only able to play an hour here and there, or have to wait until someone else is willing to enchant, then yeah, it can take a week or two to get re-equipped. It's -the- penalty for dying in SK.

Runes. What a horrible term. Who's idea was that, anyway?

All your explanations still do not discount the fact that the spell is annoying and, by design, degrading towards play-time. All your contexts still reveal that you must rely on solutions to enchant armor present outside of enchant armor itself, and that those solutions are susceptible to fluctuations.

Even if you hold on to the suit, that does not excuse the fact that the suit could have been made better. Don't forget that you're making suits for other people, too, in many situations. Can you control if they're decent? Should you say, "Sorry, I don't want to enchant for you, because you will waste my time by getting your armor junked."

We're already forced to spend hours finishing up leveling on "complete" characters. I dare say that if you didn't know where the +3 willpower bracelets were or where the +4 protection silks lived you would be singing a different tune about the time you're asked to spend enchanting your gear. I'll say this a different way at the risk of pointing a finger: builders should not have to make up for problems the coders leave neglected.

Exactly. This is exactly what you should say.

I dunno, it's only a huge time sink if you insist on having a ridiculously nice suit. It's not hard to ask around and find out where some decent STORE-BOUGHT items are that you can enchant.

Saying that the builders shouldn't have to compensate for what the coders did wrong is baloney, grep. It is what it is (not terribly time-consuming to get an okay suit).

also:

How the mighty have fallen.

If everyone uses a spell generating random results to get the same result, in the case of your 25-20-30, why waste time making it random? Why make someone who wants to run around with a 36-24-36 suffer such spiraling costs? If they're allowed to be possible, why enact such barriers to entry? This is a concept I do not understand.

I guess what I truly find silly is that while mediocre things are easily had, a dress that could kill takes hours of work to slip into. I thought we didn't do the "let's use real-world sensibilities for fantasy game balance" thing.

The transition from garden variety to competitive with enchanting involves nigh exponentially excessive expenditures of time, and this seems like an archaic and unfitting mechanic. I just don't get it. There's something I'm missing, or this would not seem like a problem, I'm sure.

Coding is the only way enchant armor can truly change, so I will definitely say that it is no one's task but the people who code, if it is even seen as something that needs fixing by said persons.

PS I said who's for the same reason the last two words of One Vision aren't "One Vision." I am not on a high horse here, but it certainly feels like a saw horse. D:

I think that most people tend to approach this from the wrong direction. Let's map it out using a hypothetical priest as our POV.

Problem: I die a lot in pk.

contributing issues:
(a) I don't have good enchants -> so I'm vulnerable to charm, etc.
(b) I'm a newbie/bad pker -> I make a mistake and wind up front row or tripped and die to melee characters a lot.
(c) I'm a newbie/bad pker -> I forget to watch out for myself and wind up sitting around dying in group pk when my formation runs away.
(d) I'm a newbie/bad pker -> I picked a fight I wasn't ready for and got owned in some other way.

Now so often it seems people jump to (a) and decide this is the entire reason they are not "competitive". I think it's clear that I don't really buy that. As Baldric's pointed out, once you solve the other problems it is -not- that big a deal to put a suit together and hold onto it. I'm about as far from a pk god as it gets. However, you don't see me saying "man, if only I had enchants, I'd be competitive..." and I don't get what it is that makes so many people think just that. Enchants are such a small part of most people's PK issues that it's just funny such a big deal is made of them.