Oh yeah, that could be a good idea. Instead of having power in the turrets, you can convert it to make a shield around the ship so you aren't hit by aetherbeasts, but the shield will go away if you attack. Could help with people just wanting to get to point A to B without having to worry about aetherbeasts sticking parasites!

Here are the skills up to Gliding. Gliding is the utility tool of the aether-explorer, so the face-hugger shield should be anywhere before this ability. My suggestion is to push modules up to apprentice 75% and put Energy-shield at Capable. This does put two commander abilities after one another, but it'll make sense if the shield is considered to be using module energies to shield the ship (as ideally, this shield can be put up without a shield module).

So is aetherspace defunct utterly now? I hear one high level warrior can't deal with slivvens, which honestly I am still skeptical about. I don't get why slivvens had to exist besides the whole 'people getting mutilated by them when AFK' bit. Honestly, to reply to AFK on siphon, they could have made it so locked modules 'timeout' and detach a person after a certain amount of time and 'reject' them for an extended period after that - the timeout only being 'decreased' or 'stopped' by use of module commands, not any command. The other AFKing was/is bound to happen - captaining is not AFKable, I'm not sure on empath (never done it), and turret is easily AFKable. Throwing in curveballs that are hard to code would have been a better idea, but I don't think slivvens were a good answer.

I guess my point is that while I'm sure a few people (myself included on the point of AFKers) appreciate the attempts to balance aetherspace out/prevent AFKing, I don't think finding a solution is well, uh.. the solution. Doing nothing about aetherspace besides shrubbing AFKers would have been a better idea (albeit more time-consuming), because multiple people have already rode the EXPTrain to Demigod Town off of aetherspace bashing. As somebody else put it, the genie is out the bottle now - and shoving it back in forcibly would be/is just unfair to those in the progress of doing so.

Of course, I can foresee the counterpoint: "But Rodngar, I worked hard and bashed my way to Demigod years ago, so there shouldn't be an easier way!"

To that, I can really only say this: how you spend your time in Lusternia is your business. That is really that. It was your choice to devote all your time to working 'hard' pressing a handful of keys to go from level five to level one-hundred. I wasn't difficult - it was merely mind-numbingly boring. To be honest, so is aetherspace, but it is much more lucrative. When Demigod becomes much less essential to provide support to your city/guild/order on multiple levels, maybe I'll be willing to concede that the rate at which aetherspace did/still does(?) provide Demigod is unfair. Until then, honestly, it was your fault you did not wait for an easier way. In my eyes, Aetherspace bashing is kind of like how Blizzard redid the process of leveling from one to sixty in World of Warcraft - it was blatantly dull and slow, especially when end game was at level seventy. The developers realized this, and.. well.. just sped the process up drastically with some form of system or quest streamlining or EXP reduction.

Not defunct. I haven't gotten a chance to try it myself, but this may force smaller crews to take small breaks where their gunners unlock to deal with the Slivvens before hunting may resume. That's the worst consequence I can see (except for exploration ships, which has already been covered).

I'd say this is probably a bit understated ... slivvens are pretty annoying to deal with because they afflict with charybdon poison, have roomwide aeon and can heal themselves fully in one attack like dream leeches. Plus they can build up pretty fast so its almost necessary to have people dealing with them as they build up while gunners finish off whatever they're shooting at.

I know people are going to say, "Well yeah, UR DEMI ALREADY!", but I disagree with the genie out of the bottle argument I've heard a few times. That's akin to saying, "Well, the flooding has already killed 100 people and destroyed 1000 homes, may as well let it swallow the rest of the town and its inhabitants."

Or if you want a positive spin on it - if there was a computer error on Dell's web site that gave everyone a 90% discount for an hour before they realize it, them saying, "Well, may as well just keep the discount there now!"

I get that having aetherspace as it was for as long as it was has severely put the experience spread out of whack. But you don't keep polluting a polluted river to clean it up. I don't have a good solution to the problem, I just don't think letting it be how it was would be a good one.

I imagine that there's a better solution than slivven out there, too.

The reason it's akin to genie out of the bottle is that honestly, in this game, Demigod is needed for certain steps of systems that help with the strength of your city. If you revert back to making it an incredibly slow process, you will see less Demigods about to ensure the use of the Domoth system for instance. Not only this, but for people looking to break in to the big boy portion of PK, a lot of them are Demigods/Ascendants. Being outside of their health/mana/ego total, etc is a disadvantage in some cases.

Oh, also, your post implies that people getting Demigod fast is a 'problem'.

Vortex spawn rates too low.

Vortex decay time way too fast. At LEAST make them stay around for a full 24 hours. At LEAST.

Trying to put in place a fair mechanical method to stop afk aetherhunting is hard (I still like my idea of randomly making someone who is locked into a module the pilot ).

As far as slowing down aether based exp I would rather have seen some incentives added for regular hunting, especially for areas that give insanity or are open pk (astral, muud, perhaps UV, etc). I have no problems with people who have spent millions of gold on their ships having an advantage in group exp gain. As long as the achievement and double exp bonus days are in place you are going to see a much larger max level population. Trying to argue for one method to be slowed down is pointless.

Given a lot of time, patience, and some gold, you already have this. You can build new exits and remove old exits at will, so you can rearrange your ship willy-nilly, completely redesign its layout without losing any rooms. It just takes a little planning to work out what set of exit creations and destructions will get you to the desired configuration.

There are some limits: you can't change which room is the fulcrux (and thus which module is in that room, if any is), and you can't move things like willpower gems, gardens, concealment stakes, etc. or furniture. But if the ship is primarily a ship, not a home that also flies, that's probably not much of a limit; and even if it is a factor, you can still move rooms closer together or farther apart easily within the existing arrangement of room add-ons.

The big thing is the fulcrux room. On Gregori I had a module in the fulcrux room because at the time I had no other place to put it if I wanted to use the manse as a ship. Now on Kalin I bought a used ship and again there is a module on the fulcrux room and there is no way to move it. It would just be nicer if they could make it so you can move modules, despite how easy it may be to move rooms you are always left with the fulcrux room.

Just as a point of conversation, randomly swapping pilots... you may as well blow the ship up in terms of the more lucrative hunting. The timing required coupled with the disorienation of the swap would just kill people.

Of course, some people can fly with scripts, but if you could script around the switch, you're back to square one anyway.

Additionally, this would be pretty annoying to people who like to keep their proficiency in a certain module ramped up.

I had the same problem with a command chair in my fulcrux of a manse I later decided to turn into a home. I inquired about various ways of hiding it since it didn't fit the decor, and eventually I got it moved mostly as a favor, but I probably shouldn't say that as I don't know if that favor is repeatable. I agree it would sure be nice to have a method of moving them; I just wanted to point out the moving-exits approach because a lot of people forget that the option exists, or don't realize how much they can do with it.

It was not a serious suggestion (though I can think of a few ways to address your first point)

aha. slivers.

On a related note, I do not like this change. That's one of the reasons why I saw the big death sight list and decided maybe now isn't the perfect time to look for an aetherhunt. I just simply won't go with the added threat. Here's an idea I was thinking that instead of the slivvens which could only lead to death and stop people hunting for a while could do this instead. Perhaps make each module have a certain time limit on it 30:00 minutes or 15 whatever the number and it will do it's own ready check. Perhaps like have the ship programmed a certain password or whatnot and if they arn't there to announce the password it deactivates or unlocks. This might require more coding but it'll save time in the long run for the admins that have to manually do the ready checks themselves.

Any coded question must have a coded answer and therefore can be coded by players to respond correctly once the list of questions has been learned.

And, theoretically, I could even make a trigger that takes two sections (Question, answer), so someone could (when they first find a new question that has just been added to the list) announce the new question / answer when they see it and everyone else automatically gets it inserted into their system.

Not that that's a great thing on the whole, heh. Would have to strip out certain characters (#, for example) just to make sure it wasn't overly exploited, put it in a folder that's only activated in aetherspace, whatever. Still, would be plausible.

Obviously the solution is to put captchas in game.

Right here, the real reason we have MXP support.