Before the nerf: 2 squid gave 1% karma
After the nerf: 7 squid give 1% karma.

It took me about an hour's work to get a blessing before.

That's 50 karma in 60 minutes, or 0.83 per minute.

Now, it should take 3.5 times as long, making it take 3 and a half hours, or 270 minutes.

That works out at 0.18 karma per minute.

Thus, to pay the upkeep on even two blessings, I have to quest for 22 minutes out of 60.

36% of my time on Lusternia now has to be spent maintaining my blessings.

Not to mention that it would take me 7 hours to get 75 to lift a curse (I'll always be at 0 from doing the bare minimum to keep my blessings up)

I tried to avoid 'whining' but I guess it came off that way. My issue is that the system rewards questing, and does so very powerfully (+2 int, +10% experience, etc. are all very powerful effects) and by doing so discourages people from other activities, such as roleplaying. It also now continues to discourage other activities by requiring continuous questing. I personally feel that its unfair to me, because I spent 50 karma to get a blessing which did nothing. Then, once it was fixed, I was left with 0% karma and a 5% an hour upkeep. I can now choose to either let the 50% go to waste or to spend 45 minutes of every two hours getting 10% essence (This is how much time it took me). If I spend even a single hour doing anything else, such as sitting around and talking, or trying to roleplay I will lose my blessing.

EDIT: Just saw the changes to upkeep. The new change seems much more reasonable.

I believe only Lusternia has such a feature at all that allow you to get bonus rewards for you already doing things you enjoy, such as questing, hunting, or fighting, no other IRE games have any such things. Compare the Knowledge blessing, that's a +2 intelligence for 25 game time that took you an hour to get (according to Ceres), whereas in other IRE games, that +2 intelligence is 1000 credits worth. Where in any of that time are you not already being rewarded by gold or exp via questing/hunting? You are getting extra rewards for doing things that you would normally choose to do already.

Again, the upkeep is 1 karma per hour. I'm taking a wild shot here to assume that all of you guys got your blessings prior to the karma gaining downgrade, so why are you complaining, you already got your karma much easily from before. I'm really hard-pressed to understand how trying to keep up one karma is going to distract other people from other activites or RPing. If you don't want such a heavy upkeep, don't have more than one blessing, or better yet, don't get blessings.

Ceres, your acting like Squids are the best way to gain karma....

Which it isn't.

Well they probably were the best (or easiest) way to gain karma before the adjustment. However, because of the number of squids, they really shouldn't have been, which was one of the reasons for the adjustments. (Not just the squids but any easy quest in general.) Might want to compare them to other quests, like pilgrims.

I wonder... for offering, is the Karma gained proportional to the amount of essence the creature offered is worth? IE: Will we get more of a Karma boost offering difficult enemies vs. offering easy stupid enemies?

Yes.

I'm quite sure it is. You get 1% for 3-4 astral creatures, and I've heard you get much less for some prime (weaker) mobs.

The new lowered values are not good. It wasn't the way I wished things would have gone. I would have preferred to see blessings made less desireabe (notably, the Knowledge and War blessings), and instead appealing to those who influence, hunt, roleplay, and quest. Not to those who PK, who now feel it is a necessity to hold a great deal of blessings.

Yes, I noticed very much how certain blessings just seem to scream "get me, I will make you kill better". I raced off straight away to get War, Knowledge and Harmony to try a little Astral Bashing with. The improvements to me being able to kill through damage were also noticeable, but I don't find them very worthwhile. I don't like the downgrade so much, although I think it was a necessary step. The perma-questing was going to burn me out pretty quickly. I can see myself keeping up maybe one a lot of the time, but apart from that I don't feel a need to pay them much attention. I do feel less inclined to kill other players though. Definately a big warning that.

So, in general, what does karma accomplish? It removes the one "free" kill you got on someone, making you chose between RP and not having your ass kicked by a curse. It then implemented massive, artifact level bonuses for constantly questing. To balance that, they made you quest even more to keep your blessings.

Didn't we all end up agreeing that burnout was due to a lot of repetitative, tedious, but neccessary, things? Sort of like karma is now? Then karma was made even harder to get? How the hell does that make sense? Maybe, if you needed vengeance to curse someone, it'd be ok. Then I wouldn't have to stockpile karma against the time I'm going to have to kill someone (once) for RP (not randomly).

My biggest problem is that I'd now rather kill someone twice, skip getting cursed, and take a vengeance. This stops random PK, mainly by making any PK not in enemy territory really, really painful, whether it's deserved and RPed or not.

Down with karma.

/rant

I think you are mistaken.
I recently killed someone knowing that they might curse me, but felt it was worth it.

That is because curses aren't implemented yet Daganev, there is no way they could curse you anyway.

I have a funny feeling it will be less than 7 days before curses are in.

I thought about it, weighed both sides, and decided it would be worth it for me.

I have discoverd i'm not a big fan of blessings.
I sit around doing nothing too often, because I'm tired and don't trust my reflexes around the mobs and such.