A controversial suggestion

[lizzy]

Yeah, I'm of the mind that rebirth potions and mana amnesias are a symptom and not the problem.

It's the feeling that if your build is bad or you suck at using it, your character is pretty much over. How true this is varies from character to character and person to person. Personally I'm
I'm almost always trying to punch up (I've lost my past 7 agg/dangers), so it feels like without the tools to try to get more optimal, we'd just get locked in.

Is that true? Idk. Regardless, people experience an excessive and intense need to Win PvP; what you would see instead is people constantly mulching their characters until they get a winning build. With the availability of new options intended to do exactly that (magical beasts), the world gets just a little less permeable for the people not doing that.

I've also used these potions extensively for effectively noncombat ends (hiding my magics or accessing different fluff temporarily, mostly) so I'm a big fan of them.

If there is a disease, it needs a cure. This would trim the fat not the meat

[BeauR]

i'm relatively new, I don't really change my build to match what's meta with mana amnesias. I just try to use them, to find a build that works, and won't get beat everytime. I'm yet to win a fight with anyone, within 10 RPL of me, and even then, I still lost the match. I've used plenty of mana amnesias though, because I've been told my build is dookie doo doo butter. I only changed my main magic once, though it was changing from nature/blood/bone/armed, to taking the nature out. I'd still have a horrendous 'build', aswell as

I imagine past 210, it can be much the same. I'm nearing that number, and the prospect still has me sweating.

Honestly though, from what I've seen? The people who are building cracked out builds, and verbing well, will be least effected.

While, I admit, I've seen people switch into absorbtion tree from w/e tree they were working with originally, likely because of the meta. I think it's probably more common for people chugging them to just be people trying to not have a doo doo butter build, than JUST meta-building.

[ForkAndKnife]

As a new player with a pretty 'meh' build that I'm now trying to salvage post-210, I really think rebirths are necessary. Necessary enough that I wish they weren't locked post-210, in fact. A lot of the meta-building comes down to balance in a lot of ways, which... Really, is a MASSIVE endeavor to try and fix. With so many moving parts, true balance is hard to achieve.

That said, there are a lot of things that have me scratching my head when I watch them. Things like Tesla getting nerfed, while stronger skills remain strong (and become even more-so by comparison, looking at you Fatal Strike). Certain kits don't have the same level of variety and power as others. I think before even considering stripping further a player's ability to stick with a character by changing what they don't like, seriously consider what trees don't see much use, and why. Don't nerf everything into the ground, but elevate the things you don't see often. Take special note of why undead like to run X a lot, or why all of the meta-built characters run Y, and spread more of those aspects to the lesser-used trees or tree combinations.

Limiting rebirths further would just have the effect of more characters being VERY short-term and being rebirthed as soon as the player sees that they'll forever be ass. This turns into a problem of even fewer long-lasting characters, and more of the ones that do make it having insane meta-builds. The exact opposite of the intended result.

Past that? Some sort of way to reward more 'unique' builds. Combos you've not seen, especially ones that aren't seeming to work too well.

EDIT: And maybe an ingame way to see how many people, of the ones online, are in X tree currently. Get a good headcount for where everyone is, for ease of looking into why.

[Milly]

I 100% agree and I've been feeling that for a while on Meranthe.
That for a lot of people, RPing and making an interactive and narratively interesting story has taken a backseat and instead the only thing that matters is PVP. Fighting as many restraineds as possible, etc. Also note: Matthew is not the only person who has hundreds of restrained fights under his belt, either.

And it's boring.

So instead of touching on your idea about rebirths etc -

Get rid of restrained fights.

Furthermore, whenever we do have tournaments - and I understand this is the nature of the beast - inevitably, the strongest crop of whoever signs up becomes even stronger due to the prizes. Perhaps work out a way to award others, somehow.

[Oicha]

I've been saying that the game feels impossible unless youre good at pvp since I started in E3, whether it was being denied on apps because you didnt go out and fight, or hearing things like Nidaz Rifting in a fucking nuke to Osrona only for it to not go off because they... Lost the fight? Weird. (This is what I was told, the situation could be wildly different. I was not there at the time.) There's way too much emphasis on fighting, and not enough of rewarding people who take roundabout ways to reach their goals. Because ultimately.

All of your progress can be undone, whatever goal you're working on. If you lose one fight that matters.

Thats cool sometimes, in a very high heat of the moment thing. But fuck me if I have to hear about another cool character or plot completely fizzling out because someone took too many perms or died randomly or their whole escapade was over after one fight. Yeah, idk.

Also I kinda agree with removing Restrained fights. It will mean more xp is delivered to people overall as people start aggroing to 'spar' but a spar SHOULD have a risk of injury. Always one of the weirder things that felt more like a game mechanic than a narrative thing to me.

[mat13295]

E4 might be the worst for the PVP mindset I've seen since maybe spires and I have a strong feeling it's because fighting has been so heavily incentivized mechanically. Incredibly boosted XP rates, mastery tokens, Necro/Witch classes and demon/magical beasts. Meanwhile non-PVP mechanics languish, or worse, they get nerfed. See the current state of Faith and Artisan being nerfed for examples.

This also all ties into the longest running problem Eternia has had: Permadeath and might makes right. If you lose a fight and roll a 1? There's a decent chance your character is done for. Either because they've been killed or because with capture rules, the prisoner gets no say in proceedings on what happens to them on an OOC level. They can be tortured and broken into a hollow husk of who they were, they can have their entire themes and personality twisted with the occult (I hate the mental injury antichrist) or they're turned into a puppet.

Hell they can even partly do some of that character assassination if you roll a 1 on a perm. Which is why quite a few people straight up ignore RPing the effects of it following treatment because...Well, it's butchering the person's plans and themes because edgy mcsad boi wants to make everyone else be as depressed as he is.

So this means if you don't want several days or weeks of effort thrown away, you need to be meta. Or else you are going to suffer if someone with a better skill level than you walks up and decides they want to throw down.

Quick edit but: Every war is a settlement destruction raid now so if you lose, you're the reason you no longer have a home and faction.

[Apollo Densin]

Quick edit but: Every war is a settlement destruction raid now so if you lose, you're the reason you no longer have a home and faction.

There was a suggestion I heard from someone. Can not remember it now. But if you wanted to have a town on your own, you needed to tie it to one of the big countries. So arcadia gets set up, but they ultimately would answer to Delphina as they are just one of the towns there. You could be the mayor/lord/whatever of that town still, you just had a bigger boss at end of day. So a war on a nation would require you to conquer all of their satellite towns before you got a chance at their capital or a good chunk of those towns at least.

I just wanted to repeat this suggestion I got DMed because of the edit I saw. Though make wars actual wars. Need to be several battles as you advance towards their heartland in order to defeat them. Reminds me of the Past wars of e1

[Oicha]

If only there were some sort of system we could use to track settlements health, we could call it... the Heart system?

No, no.... That would never work.

[Nullia]

I agree that neither of these changes incentivize much.

I also think that amnesias/rebirths aren't the root of the problem. I do think there is a definite problem regarding them though, and it's the fact that, with the short window you have to use a rebirth (0-210), if you're going to be one of the hypothetical meta-chaser problem people, you're only going to need the one rebirth. Or, you spawn in with the bar already planned.

I'm fairly sure myself that the main culprit of this grief is the fact that the meta shifts very, very slowly. Fire, armed, ether, blah blah blah. Everybody knows they're the top right now, and with spells like Cauterize it isn't hard to see why. An extremely large number of people are, for ic or ooc, currently some mixture of those trees. People are spawning into them and people are probably rebirthing into them too. The problem is that they haven't been shifted off the top for most of the time I've been playing, meaning that taking them is a very safe path to becoming another problem.

If the goal is to stop people from FOTM meta-chasing, the shortest route I see to it after about ten minutes of thought is to just shift the meta more often. At least once a month the top trees should be knocked down a peg, so that people who meta-chase are punished with the fear that it won't be good very soon, and people who don't are vaguely disgruntled when they start losing more. I don't participate in much balance discussion, nearly none at all, but I'm certain it's widely agreed what the meta is right now. The community seems to point out the new meta fairly quick. Kick it off course right now and you'll fuck a lot of people, but right now a lot of people are getting fucked by this meta anyway. This power boosting is great and all for people trying to catch up with established chars, but it is terrible to be a bog standard PC in this environment.

I agree with the might makes right criticisms. It's one of my biggest gripes with the gamestate and I think it ruins a bit of the magic of the permadeath wilderness encounters: in current state, it's a matter of whether a hypothetical IC build can circumvent a meta build. If it can, you're probably an established PC, or you're running something a little funny yourself (see: pop-link. rest in peace. forever in our hearts. (pop-link couldn't actually out-dps the meta)). If you can't, you're relegated to bench-sitting duty, a Camo aura addiction (me), or the low risk danger in the woods where you find out what bb->occult cannon->fire stream does to a health bar, snake eyes the dice, and pass away.


TLDR; don't kick rebirths, shake the meta more often to punish people who chase it since they'll be locked in at rpl210.

[Kayla]

The problem is that the single most rewarding thing in this game is combat.


You become relevant by winning.

You survive by winning.

You kill people and steal their shit by winning.

Your faction stays alive by winning fights.



The reason the game is competitive is NOT because of the rebirths.


Its because at core what matters the most is verbing because at the end of the day no matter how good your social skills or your diplomacy, if someone decide to war and destroy you they can.



My suggestion would be to find alternative ways to reward people that are NOT DM led because the problem is that DM led events are scarce and not reliable.



Anyway, thats my personal take on this. Verbing is just too center to a character's success. Its competitive focused because thats the one way where you can have all what you worked for just deleted.


In my opinion limiting rebirth won't change that at all other than make people saliter about nerfs and make new players who don't know what they are doing be stuck with really bad builds or something.


I think its a deeper issue than that.