I am on Shiri's boat (Or bot? Oh, the pun!) for the record.

Actually, I'm going to make a slight retraction. Looking at HELP TRIGGERS, auto-influencing and the like is against the rules - the way I remember it once being explained to me as a mortal, was that so long as I had to do something to start it for each mob, it was acceptable. I'm not sure however, and I'll poke one of our administrators who will be more informed on this sort of rule/ruling and see what they think on the matter.

Just throwing out my two cents here.

The only problem I really have with Ascendants is that it increases the amount of combat demigods in the game, and furthers the notion that you have to be a demigod in order to be a combatant. The way it sits now, looks like the consensus is that you can't even really start in serious combat until you hit 85, and I remember being fairly successful at 60 almost two years ago. As time goes on, I fear that the entry level for combat will get higher and the number of people willing to grind to it will get lower.

What I don't want to see is new players (who could potentially be interesting combatants) never giving the game a chance because they're not interested in bashing to demigod.

The rules for implementing auto-anything are quite simple really.

1. You must be present at the computer and be paying attention.
2. For hunting/harvesting herbs/influencing and other tasks that involve frequent moving between rooms, the script should not be doing that for you. Having a script that moves you to every room through an area, to influence every mob automatically is a no.
3. For hunting/influencing, the script should require you to manually move after your target and start it up. It should not activate by itself upon detecting a potential target in the room. (Though, I do note spectacular mistakes being committed with this sort of script, so I leave this up more as a warning of what not to do or get enemied to your own org when you hit the guards sort of mistake.)

There is one idea I see thrown out here that I feel a need to say a vehement "no!" to. That is the idea of increasing the cost of Ascendants as more Ascendants are raised. I am against this, because in the end it punishes players who join the game at a later date. Now you could raise four ascendants a year. Next year only two, then one, and then one every two years, and so on. Making Ascendance less and less accessible to newcomers.

Aside from me and one other person (and him jokingly) no one has mentioned the idea of ONLY being able to raise Demigods as Vernal Ascendants.

Is it such a bad idea that no one would even consider it?

If you want to raise only fighters as Ascendants it isn't a bad idea. However I, and hopefully more, want Ascendants to not be fighters. I want an Ascendant to be chosen because he or she represents the city/commune well. Not because he/she is a good griefer and has spent more time killing textmobs than trying to improve the city/commune through politics, religion or culture.

Name three Ascendants (or five Demis, even!) who actively RP. I don't think I can. This is something that saddens me.

I don't think it's a worthless idea, but you could consider it a positive that ascendance can elevate a mortal who doesn't want to bash forever to demigod. Making boring bashing a requirement on top of the actual work and reliability for the org is thus kind of sad.

Unfortunately that capability completely eclipses everything else, because there's much else to speak of, so that's where we stand now.

@Kiradawea: that's understandable, but it's at least a compromise between "no more ascendants ever!" and "eventual flooding of them."

You could also just implement a power gain cap on orgs to slow the rate drastically, like was suggested for exp a while ago, but that opens up a whole different can of worms so I wouldn't lean too heavily on it.

EDIT: WTF at above post. Is this using the definition of "RP" that involves paragraph long custom emotes and constant drama? 'cause if not there's...pretty much all of them. I can name at least six ascendants that I actually encounter these days.

Viynain, nejii, myself, sarrasri, sidd, xenthos, kelysa, celina, romero, hadrian, lendren, ragniliff, melville, eamon, aramel, rika, asmodea, aison, valandriel, .. that's just off the top of my head.

Speaking from experience, I'd say Stag > Sacraments > Crow and I'm being generous. I'm not sure what experience or knowledge you have on the matter, but you're kinda off. Sacraments does not tie in well with warriors and is incredibly power intensive.

/Okay, back to your lovely topic. - Oh and I agree with Kharvik.

You know the arrow means he thinks sacraments is the worst, right?

Oh, I c!

Demigod+ is quite an exclusive club already. I'd throw my estimates around 5% of all characters are demigod+. I don't lose my unique place in Lusternia because some player gets voted to ascendancy.

As the populace grows older, more players will become demigods. This is inevitable, regardless if we had ascendancy or not. It takes about 3-4 months to get from level 1 to 100 for a dedicated individual (ex. Veyrzhul, Romero, Hadrian). Many more demigods will come after these folks. I'm already watching certain characters in the game as they speed through levels. If the "churn rate" of ascendants is a concern, then evaluate what impact it has on your gameplay.

Are you worried that combat will be skewed towards high-level combat? Raids already involve several demigods and I'm in the opinion that numbers and strategy have a greater impact in large conflicts than your level. As stated above, you're not going to stem the flood of demigod players by slowing down the ascendancy process. I'd estimate for every ascendant raised, there's probably another 3 characters that hit demigod.

Some are also concerned about the roleplay value of ascendants as they are churned out. I'd argue that this is another reason to roleplay as opposed to not roleplay. Certainly having 10 more ascendants isn't going to ruin my roleplaying.

And maybe you don't want to admit it but you're a bit envious? Not a big deal, it's a rather normal human reaction. But if it's that easy to become ascendant, then why are you worried? Just wait your turn patiently and that day will come.

//two cents.

I killed demigods as a level 82. It certainly was a boost, but it wasn't like I wasn't able to kill these people beforehand. Waaaaaaaaay back when Ceren and I fought he refreshed and I as a non demigod ran out of endurance. It USED to mean a lot more, but stat weights and formula changes make an arti'd warrior with good weapons effective at 19-21 str (which is doable pre-demi). It's more about being able to use surge or refresh power to actually trueheal (lawlpowerattacks).

Kharvik's tears are just for the "old days" when it was "special" to grind up and he had to use "pre-buff skill here" which is so much harder than monk bashing or exp faucets. Geb wasn't a demigod before monks went in, and somehow, someway, he managed to be a badass. So cuhrazy I NO RITE?!

There is something that Demigod provides that impacts the game as we know it today greatly:

HEALTH AND MANA POOLS

Now that the game is based almost exclusively on group combat, having a giant health pool with various defensive skills is how you survive. That's it. That's all. People bitched and moaned till 20+ stats mean practically nothing. The gain from 19 int to 22 was something on the range of 40 damage TOTAL for staffcasting.

That's why demigod is seen as some sort of entry point. Before the racial nerfs, it was far more absurd because you could take the "extreme" races with large malus/bonuses and produce some super-race. Not so, now.

Mathematical signs, Malicia! And I do think that Crow is a bit better than Sacraments these days. Might be close, might not be (I don't have enough experience with Sacraments to easily be able to tell), but I'm definitely happier with Crow than I used to be.

Your bias in this is so apparent. How much essence does it cost to reform if you don't mind to sit around for a few minutes? Nothing?

"Your bias in this is so apparent. How much essence more does it take to cost if you don't want to wait 15 minutes to get back into the fight? 150,000 every time?"

Establishing bias over a comment where I concede that the change wouldn't even be negative enough to complain about does not make your case look strong. Besides, everyone - mortal, demigod or ascendant is pretty much by definition biased since no one's "neutral" and outside of those things except the admin.

EDITed slightly for niceness

Offtopic: Do demigods even have an option to not phoenix? I wasn't aware there was one.

Well...technically, yes, they can wait for a rezz from a sacraments/moon/avatar-in-their-order. But they can't just wait it out like ascendants.

(Incidentally I think ascendants do lose 50k when they die even if they sit, but I'm not sure and that's obviously pretty minor anyway.)