A controversial suggestion

[Tristam]

Taking some free time today to share some thoughts.

I have been playing Svengalf for soon 1 year. Despite some rare signups in war, I had no fights. And the number of times attacked in the wilderness count on the numbers of fingers in one hand.
Despite this, I still managed to get some hidden/unique spells/items across all the years ingame : I have been sticking to IC since the beginning, being this supportive "pacifist" character helping others, that has evolved from a simple artificier, to a medic, up to a Radiant of faith. All the abilities I have apped were "consequences" of my developpement rather than "goals" to achieve.
The Google Form app for abilities/class is very great, because if you are able to explain in 30 minutes why your character can have such ability through a good narration that makes sense and is relevant to your situation, it shows at how natural it is. I had 4 abilities request approved without the need to provide logs, just narrate what happened and what was done.

So I do agree with the initial post that people who roleplay their characters for a long time can succeed in some way and obtain "rewards". And people should be more aware of that way. Even as non combattants.
Remember when during the war between the Frontier/Enclave, there was a narration done by the people of faith to remove one perm inflicted upon the combattants after the war ? Or even a ritual that helped to fully heal a perm without needing white oil ? While these perhaps do not have the same weight of world building impact like the current state of PvP, non combattant people can still influence the other combattants in some way. After all, teaming up is part of the roleplay. Perhaps these people could need more determining actions.

Now I know that Eternia is combat heavy. Even through events, there are some fights to happen (altough sometimes if your DM is cool, it is possible to avoid battles through the power of talk too, which is neat). But what Eternia sold me primarly is collaborative RP and even through the most tense of moments, I still had some people agree/disagree/talk about what to follow/what to suggest. See everytime someone is inflicting an injury, asking if there are any preferences. This is neat, even in defeat, if people can organize together what would be the most interesting story to write. 

But I feel like lately, it's starting to become less collaborative and more competitive? The previous threads about the caps kills and the attacks show a lot of tension. I feel like at this point, it's not writing a story, but rather we have escalated too much about "destroying" the opponent.

The suggestion to make wilderness fights be aggro 0 by default is nice to mitigate the issue. 
Because if people are escalating in a collaborative roleplaying game, then they should be able to raise the stakes if both consent. We even have a Fated Rival rule to allow this kind of escalation, by progressively raising the stakes after each Dangerous battle. 
I am aware that you can still ask for aggro/danger 0 in wilderness for first case encounters though, but the default being the lowest risked option to start would be less tense for any beginners in terms of consequences. Regulars/Veterans will know when/how to raise the stakes for their fights anyway.
This is only for wilderness rules, I don't have any other idea for wars/settlements rules for now.
Not everyone is OOC combat skilled competitively and would rather try to RP IC their ways of fighting/strengths, but get shut down by a more competent player. Nowadays, the skill floor for any beginners to try to match with other players is sort of high, unless they are against other beginners. So trying to take it easy at first until you get more comfortable to be involved and take risks would be great. Hyped for turn based combat by the way !

And now for game balance/mechanics rambling :

Altough, people should not play with the goal of acquiring hiddens primarly. It feels better and more natural if these applications are done as consequences rather than actively pursuing it.
That's like the Discord thread about Earth TLC, and to my slight disappointement, it was more talking about the signatures potential, while I prefered that the base tree and subtree were rather more adjusted/refined to incite people to stay motivated to follow their elemental IC rather than following whatever is the meta.
I have been playing Crystal/Nature since the beginning, stuck to it. At some point I had summoning but I deved out of it, as I could not really play my IC around it.
Game balance is hard to please anyway. To the suggestion to buff a tree, then carpet pull to nerf it, I don't like that idea. You can play a specific tree for your IC, watch it get reworked, rise in popularity, then get bashed for following whatever FOTM and called for nerfs despite playing it since the beginning.

Also in my opinion, nerfing the availability of mana amnesia/rebirth potions, and even the arcanium trauma kits, just makes the poorer/less/ established/beginners character suffer more compared to those who are more confident/established/richer characters who would risk less than them. Altough keep rebirth potions limited to the RPL still, there is little explaination on why a long standing character would be able to take a sip and restart their magic from nothing without dev.

[ratqueen]

Get rid of restrained fights.

incredibly true and brave to say

as it stands some people are sparring as a full time job. delete restrained fights and there's a good chance that they'll instead be interacting with other characters in meaningful ways. even if they just afk in the plaza instead, you won't have newer players coming in feeling like they also have to spar 300 times before they can compete with the chronic sparrers. see:

Going to have to hard disagree with this one, it took me well over 300 spars before I started winning anything.

if you stop people from being able to crunch the numbers on every single skill and from being able to practice them all ad nauseum with effort equal to the pursuit of a PhD, they won't be as ahead of the curve come the next balance update, and the next, and the next, so on and so forth.

instead of forcing new players to invest unreasonable amounts of time into "catching up" to spar addicts (thereby instilling the PvP mentality into every new player who walks in the door), just delete restrained fights and watch the current hyperawareness of the meta fade away a little, evening the playing field that way so everyone can focus on just roleplaying.

[Malek]

All deleting spars does is make it so people can't catch up with those that have been playing the game for several years. 'Spar addicts' are usually people giving combat a proper shot for the first time and needing to learn everything.

The 'gap' doesn't exist because of chronic sparrers in this patch, it exists because people have always been way ahead. Even though seemingly people spar with enough effort for a PhD, some people have been playing long enough for an actual PhD

[Dandeli]

there will always be a skill gap. this is the nature of games that require competitiveness & skill. some ppl will just have a higher skill ceiling and groovier moves.

i think the answer is just allowing people other avenues to succeed other than combat / giving people stuff that allows them to be on-par if they deserve it (THE PITY UNIQUE.) 

as it stands you can dev stuff but maybe there should be stuff that's more explicitly mechanical. i guess there's magibane but it'd be cool if there were more efforts to be sneakily violent. maybe make some more non-combat avenues that are explicitly obtainable. yap yap yap yap. i'm sort of dumb hopefully you get the idea.

(restrained fights dying would be hilarious though. no more spar spam.)

[Malek]

A skill gap will always exist, that's fine. I think there's a skill canyon though if you've never sparred a build. There's plenty of players/builds you have 0 chance of beating if you've never fought something similarly before. 

You learn very little in a danger that ends in 0 seconds because it's 3 rounds and who knows when you're going to see the same person again. Spars let you not only learn what the spells do, but what kind of playstyles you should expect from each build.

It's fine if skill gaps exist and like you said, and there needs to be more pity systems. Too many things favor the people that already know what's meta and have already fought enough times to count for more than people's spars. If you lose a fight, it's almost exclusively a mechanical negative to you unless you're going to app for something (Of course, that's not the case narratively). You get weaker, either for a while or permanently, or you get capped and potentially killed.

The gap only allows the metabuilders and long time players to snowball. Getting rid of spars or knowledge on the meta doesn't stop the problem, it only stops people from knowing enough to point it out.

[Milly]

sorry but i agree with bog

[GSM]

sorry but i agree with bog

This is unironically how I learned to fight on Na'Ria, Shevaun and SCARLET KING NRVNQSR, and learned how to fight overall. Sparring for me didn't do much other than solidify that someone else of a roughly equal level/higher level than yours can and will probably beat you down over and over again, given they spar more than you. I have very few restrained fights for that reason, plus? Sparring away is usually boring, for me, with little RP in it and little to do but just practice your skills.

On Na'Ria, I'd often go to wars after doing a few fights to do a check-up and wake myself up more than actually genuinely practice- I was already familiar enough with how my build operated 20 dangers ago, a war is just another danger with higher stakes. With Harper, my sparring sessions were often cut short, and I just ended up not really engaging with the fights for very much, opting to just go do something more productive. SCARLET KING NRVNQSR was just meant to be a build test that I was prepared to die for trying, only to find success with it. Even for the war on Shevaun, before I went to fight Lykon, I sparred a grand total of once after making some radical adjustments to my build. When there's a genuine fire under your ass, sparring is just going to mess with your verbing prowess if you have no idea what you're up against.

As an additional confession? Before I went to fight Lykon in the most recent war, I thought I had my bar set up. But after losing round 1, I decided to do something a little unhinged- and bought Flashbeam to replace something else on my bar, since I had the spare RPP. At best, it would've been a gambit that let me win the fight overall- at worst, it was how I died. I won, barely, even without being able to see invisible Spirit Melds and Occult Energy Shields- which I've expressed before is a problem that needs correcting.

I don't hate restrained fights. I think they're silly for what I want to do- tell a story, either through a fight's results or through otherwise interacting with the world. Sparring does neither of those for me. Removing them is counter-intuitive, but there definitely is something to be said about skill gaps definitely existing, and they do exist, because some people genuinely are on the game for many many hours a day to pump their mechanical skill, whereas I can only be on for a select few hours at most, if at all, on given days, and have to allot my time wisely. If someone wants to do 300 restraineds to finally figure out what the fuck they're doing with their skillset and bar? More power to them. Not for me, however.

TL;DR light a fire under your ass for fights. Sort out your skill issues on your own time, however you want. Leave all avenues open.

Do what's best for your story.

[Lung]

If you all dislike restraint that much, make it cost energy like most tools so will force people rp to get back, if they want spar for hours straight, or take a long break , there is always ways to make player life harder for n subjects it be, if you think this is really a problem for overwall gameplay and community, 

What i dont get is people being made fun of ,for have lots of restraints , with the excuse that if they have that much, they should be out there doing dev or making dev for others trying dangers whatever , leave the confort zone may be good and all, try new approaches, but nobody need play this game like everyone else does if they dont want, as long are not inflicting the rules.

[Malek]

You can do both. 

I never seriously tried to learn combat before Fauste, so I had to do a lot to learn it, especially since I needed to learn castlocks to land PoP raw.

Now, I probably don't have much reason to spar anymore besides killing time, and I've just exclusively dangered on my magical beasts. Imo it's just putting several years into this game makes you out of touch with people that haven't. 

I wish it wasn't always the case that we prefer eliminating people's knowledge of an issue rather than the issue.

At the end of the day sparring has nothing to do w the story either positively or negatively. I don't think there's much point to that angle of the discussion.

[Cloutio2x]

This is still a game. Sometimes someone wants to wake up hit the spar drop a post or two, then chill. Taking away restrained fights is literally an insane suggestion. The PVP focus will remain. With or without them, its just now, people will have less fun logging into the game because they can no longer engage in one of the gameplay elements because it will render them weak for three to 96 hours. Just drop the rb pot usage like suggested. Most of the chronic sparring people don't even perform that well in real combat they rack up 286334656 spar wins and lose the dangerous fight and get capped. Let people enjoy the game for what it is, a game. I do think rb pots are silly as hell. If anything you should rework them so that while we'd only be allowed five, you could only refund one tree opener that way if someone wanted a full build respec they'd have to use all of their potions. Most people with their right mind use rb pots to go through their sub elements anyways. It'd be fair for people who stick to their ic, and it'd punish the guy going from time explosion to nature blood illusion (random trees mentioned not calling people out)