Shattered Kingdoms

I would be unopposed to that if you would simultaneously drop the lag time on grind abilities by about 20%. It would suck to have to sit around brewing and enchanting with your non-mastered abilities but suffer the same lag time there is at present. In short, you max out at superb until your first age tick, at which point you can get to mastered, then you get bonus training sessions on your second and third age tick. That would be cool IMO. Please go ahead and implement that ASAP. Thanks.

I'm on board with the idea of not mastering until the first age tick right up until the point where you suggest that there be additional training sessions at second and third age tick.

We'd see lots of griffons and centaurs with a huge drop in the longest-lived races, I wager.

Two extra training sessions over a character's lifetime shouldn't make a big difference. Also, those characters would get to enjoy that small benefit for a lot shorter. A griffon would get to enjoy that final 1 extra training session for a little over a month (6.5 IC years). An elf would get to enjoy it for over 4 times as long (27.5 IC years). I think that balances out griffons getting it sooner.

I like the idea. Of course, I'm also quite insane, so taking my advice may be a bit risky.


Don

How old is most of the pbase playing this MUD... still? I think you are in a quite similar crowd.

In the immortal words of Picard, "Make it so."

I dislike the idea of granting bonuses that can only be gained by hitting the age tick: That is effectively a penalty to all characters who have not hit their first age tick. What this would do is prompt all the twinkish players to immediately roll placeholder characters of every class and race and then not bother playing any of them until they hit the first age tick. That's not a meta-game that would really help SK that much IMO.

If you require an hour requirement of like 300+ hours or something like that. It would stop the twink players, unless they try to break the rules by botting.

I'm -definitely- against any sort of change that grants bonuses only obtainable by logging a lot of hours.

So, what incentives would you suggest for long term chars? Also, how do you stop twinks from abusing such system by making placeholders and what not? SK is only the better with long lived chars. The Syn revolving door of chars is at best does nothing for the game, at worst is annoying.

A character is not good solely, or even chiefly, because of his longevity. It's determined by quality. I'd much rather spend a week playing with a character who had strong RP, a solid backstory and made the game come alive than play with someone who walked around saying "i get plate drops kk" for 2 years.

I'm fine with granting bonuses to longer-lived characters. I am not fine with granting exclusive bonuses to longer lived characters, because that in effect is penalizing everyone else. Even then, I don't think that any sort of bonus for playing a long-lived character should be anything more than a fringe benefit. Playing a high-quality character should make you want to keep that character in and of itself, you shouldn't need some intense gameplay mechanic to incentivize it. An extra spec slot for mercs was a good option, because mercs always lose at the age ticks: That wasn't as much a buff to them as an offset to the innate penalty.