And what do people who have spent lots of money and become omnitrans do?

How about instead of making it retroactive, you just give people credits based on how many lessons they would have gained retroactively.

Get lessons for future skill changes / new released skills!

Like the coming MechWarrior common skillset, that lets you pilot a Construct around the Prime Plane and stomp on things.

riiiigght..

Lusternia is a richly designed world - possibly the most changeable and player-driven games I have ever played. That being said, I always felt that the curve to get 'into' Lusternia was too high. I had a lot of fun, even though I don't really play anymore, and so the comments I'm about to make aren't made from a "Damn, I wish I had more credits" standpoint, but rather from a "for a better game", developmental standpoint.

I was able to bash from levels 1-80 without any real idea of how to PvP. If I got jumped, I ran a few rooms away in random directions, and went back to prime. I always liked PvP, having come from a hardcore PvP mud, but I always put priority on levelling, and accruing credits, because I was told from day 1 that these things are necessary for competitive play. So I levelled, bought a fair amount of credits, and transed my guild skills, got focus mind, etc. but there are some very significant barriers to participating in Lusternian PvP:

-Shortage of lessons
-Set-in-stone "tiers" of competition
-'Other' requirements

Even including bonus credits, the lessons you get by levelling aren't enough to let you trans a skill. It's relatively easy to get enough gold to buy the credits needed to trans a skill, but most archetypes require 2-3 skills transed to be somewhat effective. This usually means credit purchases. For a new player who starts playing Lusternia because they are drawn to the combat system, this usually means shelling out ~$100 for something they're not even sure they will like. I realize this is IRE's business model, and Estarra does a great job providing alternate ways of getting credits (artisinals, bardics, contests), but the key to making combat more approachable is to lower the requirements to be an effective participant. This makes sense from a player's perspective, as well as a business perspective. I'm willing to bet a lot of players who would possibly love to PvP are dissuaded from starting because the cost to begin is so high. If these players got a taste of combat without being told to follow and do mindless things like web or shieldstun nonstop (actually got to see what real combat is like), I think there would be a lot more people who enjoy it.

The second point are the painfully clear "tiers" of competition. When I was playing, there were only 3-4 people who could deal with the likes of Diamante, Geb, Daevos, or Narsrim. I haven't logged on in a long time, so I don't know if they even still play, but that sense of hopelessness kills any drive to play. There should never be a situation where it is impossible for one player to kill another. Against guys like Daevos or Ixion, their armor ratings were so high that if they jumped a knight, the other guy's wounds would be negligible. By the same token, their weapons are so powerful that it is impossible to keep yourself alive enough to mount an offensive. It makes sense that artifacts provide an advantage to the people willing to shell out the cash to buy them, but these advantages should never be so extreme that it requires one artifact-loaded player to defeat another.

By this, I mean a combat system. The differences in combat system effectiveness are pretty large, and having a good one could mean the difference between life and death. It shouldn't be necessary to be able to read through lines and lines of complicated scripting to figure out why you died because you kept eating chervil pointlessly instead of applying arnica to chest. It is also almost impossible read all of the text that scrolls by. The reliance on clients to both stay alive, and to figure out how you're getting messed up so quickly makes the game extremely technical. I think combat would be much more fun if it were a system that was "easy to learn, difficult to master".

I downloaded a system once. The free MUSH. I had no idea how to use it or what it did. And every time I've asked for help in making my own (through messages, news posts, or tells), I've either been ignored or scoffed at. And every time someone says they're developing a bare essentials system for new combatants, they mysteriously disappear. So, unless people are actually devoted to it, it won't work.

My "system" is made of some aliases, keybindings, a few simple triggers. Anything else is beyond my reach at the moment, because when I focus on Lusternia I do it to play-- I do not have the time to spend 5 hours learning how to code + play.

Get CMUD. I know that costs a bit but my system really is 100% free, it is robust, it is updated, and it does have instructions.

On this note i've actually tought novices how to kill other novices. Gave a few of them mantakaya and taught them how to envenom it. you can be a combantant you just have to fight people at your level. You cant expect a novice to fight Forren, on another note though if you want to keep players who havent gotten good enough yet people Like Forren need to police themselves and not jump everyone for hurting a member of their city. I'd have to say its less about the high costs to get into pvp as much as it is the you attack novice b expect uber person c to crush you instantly.

Er, it's probably a good idea if you don't encourage novices to jump and kill other novices. Most orgs are hyper protective of their novices. Perhaps have your novices spar each other in the arena or something.

You're free to inform me of when I've jumped a lowbie in the past year or two.

If you don't like having novices stay in the game, just tell Krin to teach people how to 'fight'.

People like Forren would incline that i said people like Forren and never said Forren jumps lowbies. did I?

What...? Sorry, but this post is full of fail.

Hm. I'm not sure it rates that high.

By using Forren's name you implied he was doing it.

nope i implied people like him do it?

He meant people of the higher tiers of PvP. It was pretty clear, though I can understand why some were confused.

Some thoughts...

While the lesson cost is high in Lusternia, the artifact curve is not. I managed to push through an FFA (Sharael, Forren, Kaervas, and Daevos) a long time ago with just trans Axelord and Night. People who have equivalent credit expenditure in other IRE games to the people you can compete against here with just skills would be annihilating you with 1600 cr artifacts. I can't even begin to describe to you how "hopeless" it is to go up against insanely artifacted people on the other IRE incarnations.

I'm honestly on the fence for this one. While I do recognize that it takes a HELL of a lot more investment than other IRE's to compete even on the mid-level, we don't have the ridiculous artifact saturation that prevents you from ever entering the top tiers of combat if you aren't packing arti-heat or whatever the ridiculous OP class of the month is. While I can and have beat people with L3's, it's depressing to know that if a good player ever got ahold of said artifacts you simply have no chance at all to win unless you join the nuclear arms race. Getting tipslashed by a L3 glaive for 3/4 of your hp as the "tank" race is absurd, believe it.

I'm just very glad that we don't have stat-altering artifacts here, but everyone gets various abilities to alter their stats just slightly. Stats here are so fluid that it makes for a more dynamic and challenging environment.

Agreed. Artifacts weight for much less here than they do on other IREs.

With the weighting system here coupled alongside the scaling down of effectiveness the further you travel up the stat spectrum, I doubt such artifacts would be much of a problem regardless now.