What?

Isn't the point of teleport moon/night (as far as the collegium goes) is to help novices get their exploration points faster? If so, then what I said makes sense.

Unless there's some part of the quest I completely forget about now.

Edit: For the edit, that's the price you pay for getting your construct disabled/taken down then, eh.

No, your original statement was completely the opposite of this. You said that if you lose teleport, you can just fly there instead, which isn't really viable for most novices.

How is it not viable?

Ct can someone fly me?

Market paying someone to fly me to x.

I don't see how anything I said is completely the opposite of what I meant, though.

I'm in favour of that aetherferry idea floating around, though.

I believe it was specifically set up to require visiting an aetherbubble (for the forests, at least), to "encourage use of aetherspace" or some such. Either way: Once again, everybody in the Communes can help a novice get to the Aetherbubble with teleport, while very, very few can do so if it's removed. It significantly changes how the thing can be done, for 30 days at a time. There are far fewer pilots/ships than population with >1000 mana.

I'm not sure how you can even try to argue it's close to the same thing. Even if there are pilots with flashpoints, there will be large swathes of time when they're not even around.

Edit to your edit: I suggested the aetherferry idea early on, and was told it was never going to happen. It's still a good solution, but eh. And I guarantee you that it will be thousands of times harder for a novice to get a ship to the bubble than to get someone to teleport them there.

Maybe build a novice-only portal to The moon bubble in the collegium or something

Well, they also wanted the Collegium quests to require some interaction between novices and elders, which the aetherferry/teleport thing provides. A portal would remove the need for it completely, but it is an option as well.

I think novices will just have to rough it (or ask for help) if those constructs are disabled or destroyed.

The cities are not required to visit an aetherbubble though you can. Having to go to the elemental plane of water, even without a construct would still be easier than flying to moon/night.

It is hard to come up with an idea though that does not remove the requirement to visit them when the constructs are down. Perhaps to be fair the cities should be required to visit a bubble as well? Though no bubbles would have the same tie to the cities as night/moon.

Still, it is an optional quest :shrug:

I believe the cities get the option of both Ethereal Glomdoring and Ethereal Serenwilde, no? I don't remember Ethereal Serenwilde being an option for us, but maybe it was.

And, to Morgfyre, that was already the case at a 7-day downtime. 30 days is a *much* longer window, though... as the announce post itself states. They already had to ask for help (didn't have enough mana to touch the Constructs themselves)... it just dramatically curtails the number of people who can assist.

Is this really that big a deal? I mean, when I was a novice, I was too busy trying to save the gnomes to worry about collegium quests. I didn't do a single one until I was an undersec and thought "you know, it would probably be a good idea if I knew how these were done." There are times that I feel like the collegiums are almost there for alts of old players to blow through their novice time with. Now, I know not every novice is as clueless as I was, but seriously, they're going to need help to get to astral anyway (where they may or may not be devoured, killed by idiots if they've rejected for some reason, or freak out and die to the atmosphere). I really don't think we need to worry about true novices being hindered or put off by the absense of a construct as a small part of one collegium quest.

In fact, I'd guess that most true novices don't go through the collegium fast enough for this to really be an issue.

They do, and you need to if you wish to avoid visiting a bubble. I do not think they can visit earth, or if they can it counts the same as water making it pointless.

Some do, some don't. I generally try to encourage real ones to spend more time in Newton and not worry about the Collegium until later, but the thing is: Every novice is different. Some of them see: "Ooo, Collegium quests, let's do them! I want to advance!" Some see: "Newton! I can hunt and level!" Some prefer to spend more time exploring in the forest, etc. What works best for you will not work best for all novices, nor should it be expected to.

Further, there's a huge amount of difference between "help getting to Astral" or "help teleporting to an aetherbubble" (intended to cause interactions between newer players and older ones), and "trying to find a pilot to an aetherbubble". There are far more people who can do the first two than the last.

Guild advance - it works even with collegium time, so if people decide they've done enough of the exploration bit without visiting the bubbles and there's no other option, wham. Done.

Of course, they won't get their little (honours) tag, but you can still recognize the effort via time cutting.

I don't believe it does. There's a separate collegium command for advancement. And, again, that one requires finding a professor and convincing them to advance you, instead of "CGT I'm trying to get to the Night Bubble... can someone help me?" and getting 3-4 offers for a quick teleport. Again, this is creating a 30-day window of making things tougher on the newbie trying to do the quests, and none of the proposed workarounds really change that at all. :/

I'm making the folly of anecdote here, but in my own experience, even if I was of a mind to advance quickly, I was too lost in a fog to actually do anything about it. I remember spending time trying to figure out what the difference was between (Glade) and (Braves) and how to talk on them, and wondering why in the world I was compelled to play a game where I had help scroll reading assignments longer than real college class assigned readings. And then there were the curelists. I remember thinking "They don't really want you to go out and get all these herbs. I mean, seriously. Look at all those afflictions, this is silly."

If I had been punted into the glade, unless someone seriously did some major hand holding, I would have taken a very long time to do the grocery-shopping quests. Eventually, I blundered my way to a general sense of not being utterly lost. Now, if a typical real novice is anywhere near as garbled as I was, I just don't see them worrying, or probably even being impacted by, not being able to use a construct (which, I found and activated quite by accident while trying to get to ethereal for the first time), understanding what it's about, and using it to complete a collegium quest. I mean, yeah, they can't be taken there by someone else either, but if you're just going to be ripped to an aetherbubble and back without any real understanding of "what just happened"... did they really learn anything?

There might be a few, like you say, but how many do you think that is, if we remove all the alts, and maybe even some of the players from other IRE games?

I think everyone is forgetting that these are novices we are talking about. You know, those ones that need help? The ones who may know very little about how things work around here? The ones we try to keep things relatively simple for?

Yes but if we take as a given that there will be no newbie only teleport, and no ferry type thing, what else is left? Each other plane is already represented, all that is left are the bubbles.

I suppose you could add in Muud, which would be interesting in its own way.

Are there other places to visit that make sense for the test?

Definitely not a majority, but that does not mean they do not exist-- especially if you are counting newcomers from other IRE games (and why would you discount them?) We want new players here... does it really matter if they came from another IRE or some other random MUD, or it's their first time? We want all of them to find something that keeps them happy and playing. That will be different from person to person, and they shouldn't all be expected to act the same way or find the same things interesting.

Exactly.

And to Enthralled: One option would be to just lower the points required for the Forests when the Construct's dead (I think that the total would need to be lowered by 5 or something, so it can be gained by visiting every other place on the list), or allowing us to create a "portal" to the Night/Moon worlds from the Prime forest (doable only in one place, takes 1000 mana like the Altar so that it still requires getting a bit of help, lasts 5 minutes or so). If they get stuck, can CGT asking for someone to reopen the portal for them.

There are options.

They already have to ask for help to complete it now. It's virtually impossible for a commune novice to complete without help. (The exception is the alt novice who already knows his way around and can spare the lessons to spend in Planar -- i.e., the novice for whom the collegium is not intended anyway.) We don't mind too much because "asking for help" is also a useful skill for them to learn.

Without teleport moon/night, we won't be able to give them that help. If we lose the construct, we'll be telling the novices to skip that quest, most likely.

I don't think it makes sense for us to all decide it makes sense to create this quest, give it a purpose (to teach novices something and expose them to something), encourage them to do it, and then make it impossible and brush that off as "it's an optional quest". It's optional, yes, but it's encouraged, it serves a purpose. Why bother to have it if we're going to dismiss and discourage it?

The simplest way to fix this would be to adjust the points so you can replace Moon/Night with Celestia or Nil, instead of Celestia and Nil. That'd mean we could help them by taking them there and getting them out before the cosmic winds kill them.