You can't so much stop it, I guess, as you can do things to limit it. Limiting their time out there, for example, in a way that isn't as obnoxious as astral insanity. The WP/Endurance drain was a good idea, it adds more importance to mechanics like campfires, maidens, benedictions, the works.

FYI, the arena willpower/endurance gain bug was fixed a little while ago.

I'm in favor of the willpower drain, just to give my chalice a use finally.

Chest board baby

What's wrong with using insanity, and then adding a few tweaks so the more insane you get, the more likely you are to do things that are dangerous to the ship?

CHEST board?

Edit@Lendren: It's boring, that's what's wrong with it. And we don't get to crack the whip at Charune as much.

Oh, yeah, and willpower regen is so much more interesting!

(Of course I might sell more rocking chairs that way. Build a rocking chair into every module room of your aethership... oh yeah.)

Gero likes touching breasts?

Well, I wouldn't support using player willpower/endurance. I hate that. Make it come from the ship, and IT can be bored and regen while we're off doing something fun.

If it comes from the ship, you go hunting for an hour or three, come home, change ships, and keep going. If it comes from the player, you can switch crews for those times when you need to keep traveling for some quest or event and it puts the XP limit on the individual players, not penalizing others who didn't get to go out into aetherspace and you just broke the ship they wanted to use. (Wow, run-on sentence.)

I don't see any changes needed other than looking at the XP ratio and giving the crew some way do deal with AFK-ers (Unlocking comes to mind). I know that at least the Aetherfoal always carries a full change of crew anyways (or at least, we did before the ranged change), most of whom are looking to get on a turret. If one of our turrets goes AFK, they unlock for us, but if they didn't, it'd be nice to see a way to force them to.

Let's not complicate things further, I agree that that is the wrong direction to go.

Is insanity really that bad? I find it mildly annoying but manageable. I've never gone past highly neurotic though for fear of afflictions though.

Anyways I'd rather function at some lesser state than to meditate for an hour or two and basically idle. You can't even read help files or chat to pass the time. Maybe chess or rocking chairs help but I've never used either so I won't comment.

Celestians can BATHE FONT too, if I remember right.

I think fixing the essentially unlimited number of aetherbeasts you can find would help. Vortexes were made harder to find recently, but there are still a ton of them out there that never ever fade until they've been completely drained. Even if new vortexes never appeared, it would probably take us weeks to use up all the ones that are near Etherwilde alone, mostly because a single vortex also seems to last through a huge number of links. I don't even have a vague idea how long one lasts because I've never seen one been used up. When Karibideans start showing up, I always just move to another vortex, and so far I haven't even needed to move far enough away that I can't see the dock as I kite them.

I think a time limit should be placed on vortexes, a day or two and then they poof so there's plenty of time to make use of one, but not so that they start building up in big clumps like they do now. Should probably do the same with aetherbeasts, make them last an hour so people can't build up these big hordes around gnome ships or docks.

I never thought it was necessary for mechanical limits placed to hold players back (eg insanity). If players want to put in the required number of hours to get gold or experience, why should you want to hinder playtime? Just enforce the afk rules and let everyone play!

Insanity is a highly annoying mechanic that makes it so you can't really play your character for a couple of hours if you let it stack up enough. You get to AFK in a manse.

Or have fun acting insane around people.

Just have the modules go insane.

Which gets old after the first time, much less the hundredth. Or thousandth.

No, it's pretty much just "go AFK for a while".

Towards the end I was able to code my basher to take into account anything up to highly neurotic. Defending/Raiding whilst neurotic is a pain in the ass though, as is autowalking.

I'm talking about sociopathic+.