Personally I think the Librarian of each city/commune should take some responsibility for what they publish and not just publish every tom, dick, and harry's essay simply because "We have been holding it in our guild library for just this purpose." Alot of people write crap, and if you are not proofing things before you publish, then you are publishing crap.

Take for example the essay Sylphas commented on regarding Ethereal. It is outdated, has grammatical errors, and is a shoddy piece of writing to begin with. Yet, Rhysus published it simply because it was in their library. I hope other librarian's take a lesson from this. If you publish crap, expect to get crap.

I know there are a lot of concerns about the critique ability and this influx of works. For now I suggest everyone to just go by what the helpfile says, but add the reason that you can critique things that are just outright wrong.

With outright wrong I mean things like "Kethuru is an Elder God" or "Varian is the Lord of Creation in Lusternia." Please do not use if for things like "Shamarah has been prince of celest since 121 years after the coming of estarra" when it was in fact 122 or something like that. We simply don't have time to go check every little thing about a book.

Also, it is of course not possible to critique either theories or opinions as "wrong".

As for people's concerns with publishing many books: Once more, the power amount for catalog size is a set amount, it doesn't change with more of less books.

And if librarians are concerned about the quality of the published books, remember that you can just stick them away in some dark annex where no one will ever come and all shall be well.

Why is this? Shouldn't we get more power for putting in more effort and publishing more books?

Because that would be gaming the system which is exactly what Estarra said they don't want people to have the ability to do.

Take for example Serenwilde publishing 50 books that just barely cut it for critiquing standards. We get more power for publishing garbage just because we can do so within the boundaries of the rules. The way it is now, this is not possible.

As I said, I think larger books should have more cultural weight than smaller books.

Which would be balanced by a larger book being much easier to critique (far more room for error).

This is really getting frustrating. I asked specifically how this worked and was told different than what's quoted above on a number of points by a Divinity. I understand you wanted to get this out ASAP so we could start using libraries, but it would have been nice to actually have some clear cut truth that we could abide by and know how things are actually meant to function, rather than getting different stories from everyone and wasting time, money, and effort on something that could very well just get blown up in the process.

You're mad that you spent 100k gold publishing this crap? Well, so are we. Hopefully, you get a refund and we get this drivel out of our library, so we don't have to find some dark hole of an annex to shove them in.

Could it be coded that, if in said dark hole of an annex, books could mold and have to be burnt? -innocence-

Sounds more like they are mad they spent gold on publishing it only to find out they don't get more power for increasing the size of thier library. Which is the only reason I can see for them throwing everything they have into it as fast they could without caring about content.

I'm not mad, I just don't think it makes sense for adding additional books to a library to not increase the culture amount. Just because a civilization has the world's greatest culture doesn't mean said culture can't improve.

My impression was that the contests were for the books that were to be considered above and beyond, publishing for books that were meant to be publically distributed and available to anyone who wanted them, and archived for books that you wanted to keep solely in your own library either for security reasons or because they hadn't been sufficiently examined yet. Not unreasonable assumptions, really, and when I queried the Divine on these things I was given an affirmative. So yes, I'm upset that we spent a fair deal of money archiving and publishing the books under false pretenses, but I don't really expect much to be done about it.

Not available for libraries that want them, forced into libraries that don't. That's the key problem I have with it.

I don't like the system either. I've advocated a central repository for published books to be reviewed and critiqued, probably somewhere along the Peak. Thoughts?

I have one request, could there please be a way to UNpublish books, at least for this point in time? I had some ideas beforehand to actually compile the writings and do some more organizing/editing, but I was also really busy and kinda rushing so I just sent all the archived scrolls to Rhysus. Anyway if we could unpublish the books then I'm sure this "accident" can all be sorted and ironed out. Libraries are fairly new and obstacles were bound to pop up.

Also, all those writings were done voluntarily and we don't force novices to write anything. I'm glad they're not here anymore because they'd be pretty offended.

Oh, and the author of the Ethereal study told me that it was out-dated and it was supposed to be updated, but in all the rush that was overlooked, my fault! Knowing Rhysus, he is NOT the type of guy that would do something to screw other people over or piss them off in order to achieve his goals. He only did what he thought was right and made sense, but obviously everyone else doesn't think so. Heheh, the Divine always try so hard to please everyone by going one step ahead in their designs...

The aim of the library system has always been to award quality over quantity. And I never said that the biggest library doesn't get power, what I said is that this is a set amount each year, and not an amount per book.

Because of the complexity of the system we're releasing it in bits, and at this point only the newbie score and scholars influence the power rates. Next year catalogue size will be inserted and eventually (once we get this piece ironed out, it's already causing more complaints then we anticipated because people get frustrated before even waiting to see how much power the libraries will generate in the first place) we'll add the crown parts that will evaluate quality and quality alone. In the end, a good quality book (and indirectly a library's credibility) will become much more important then who has the greatest number of books in its catalogue.

All these things can be read in the helpfiles, including criteria for critiquing, which haven't changed at all, apart from a simple impromptu rule added that should have been added in the first place. Further problems will be dealt with as they arise.

I have a question... why didn't you publish all of the novices essays in one tome? I mean... you could have pulled it out and edited it with new essays on a regular basis, and only have "wasted money" on a single book.

It seems to me, that by publishing them all as seperate books, you were blatantly trying to game the system, when it would have been a much more obvious choice to compile them into a single, updatable volume.

But that's just how it looks from my angle.

Either that, or it was just easier. TONS more expensive, but easier.

Also, a volume of novice essays is an entirely different thing then them by themselves. It would be a valuable piece of Aqua culture, I think, something to pull out when you get old and want to reminisce. But by themselves, it seems sloppy and haphazard.

I think Spam should be a catagory under formatting. If you publish 20 books all on the same topic, thats like spamming my email, and is poor format.

They're not on the same subject though