It looks fine to me.

You're discounting the analogy based on the 'fact' that artifacts aren't changed as often as skills. Just because something does not happen as frequently as another, it doesn't make the former okay. That's like saying 'hey oil spills don't happen as frequently as car accidents, so I think we're allowed to care less about them'. They're both bad.

P.S. Here is a list of artifact changes that I can recall: artie pipes -> runes, surfboard upgrade, cubix change, reduction in weapon rune price, change in dragon gauntlet, change in artie soap, can customize pig noses, and more. Not all of them are upgrades, some of them have been important downgrades (like the soap), and whenever it happened, it was for balance. How frequently it happened did not matter.

They may be rare, but they can and do happen when the Administration decides it needs to be done.

I guess I'm not seeing how saying "it is rare" is meant to be a valid point; the fact that it does happen would seem to be enough of one, despite the rarity, no?

I'm not saying I'm for/against any changes (personally, if it happened to me I'd be pretty peeved, but that's besides the point), I just like to argue.

The difference between artifact changes in general, and Ceren's in particular, is that the other artifacts mentioned are available to everyone, aren't they? Warrior weapon runes, for example. If there's a problem with those, there's a problem with all warriors who buy them.

Ceren's artifact, afaik, is a one off thing, isn't it? And, also afaik, he hasn't been nearly as grieferish with it as he could be - it's not like he's single handedly ruining the game or anything.

That said, it does seem excessively powerful.

Lessons come from credits. What else comes from credits? Artifacts do!

Not to mention the fact that often a change in class leads to a change in certain artifacts. For example, warriors could lose up to 3150 credits just from the runes they put on their weapons.

The fire wand was an auction-only artifact when it got nerfed, by the way.

Also, Iasmos has one (and could theoretically loan it to any mage as well).

I'm not really sure defending a broken artifact because of its rarity holds either. If someone paid 3k credits for an artie that gave them truechokehealresurgembutterflyshatterplex that also halves balance loss, then it's fine because only one person owns it?

And the reason why the rune was nerfed to begin with was because he did abuse it to kill all of Glomdoring's guards when there were no defenders . So yes, it was already abused.

It doesn't. That's not what my argument is.

What I'm arguing is that the analogy between artifact investment and skill investment doesn't hold because one person can reasonably invest into an artifact not expecting a change (note: I'm not discounting the possibility) whereas skill investment is much more of a risk (monthly changes).

Nor am I claiming that the artifact is or isn't broken. I'm stating that Ceren may have a legal agreement that the artifact does x, and that for Lusternia to fix it would be a breach of contract.

Personal feelings: I would be disappointed if Lusternia fixed the artifact because there's a good chance that Ceren bought it for that purpose. I'd like to think, though, that Lusternia is careful with how it handles its sales. From my understanding of it, it's pretty clear why Ceren bought the artifact. To change how the artifact works is a disservice to Ceren regardless of if its good for game balance or not; Lusternia should be careful to prevent such situations.

It's a lose-lose situation.

Tbh between one person bitching and a significant population bitching, I'd rather have one person.

I'd prefer no one bitching.

Well yes, but what's done is done, so might as well do damage control and minimize casualties.

I would suggest a large red signature campaign to FIX GREAT RUNES OF CHARISMA but we know how well those work.

Read my post. Skills/classes are often linked to artifacts. The loss of an OP skill could easily mean you lost out by buying all those artifacts.

How can you not see that 25% flat damage mitigation is not OP?

I guess if it's any consolation, I fully expect the rune to be abused again one day, which will probably get it irreversibly nerfed. Then we can do the Glom thing and Smug It Up ™

I read your post. I didn't disagree with your statements. I did and still do disagree that the analogy you made is a strong one.

I haven't once said that 25% flat damage mitigation is not OP. Nor have I said that it is.

I'm pretty sure Sahmiam is just defending the admin reasoning behind returning it to the way it is. But I disagree with the notion that one person should trump an entire group of people saying it's wrong.

Regarding the 25% reduction thing-

Its all about context. Mages aren't exactly known for being big balls of damage reduction to begin with. How much is DD/NK? 24 DMP, right? That's 22% right there. Hell, if you want to get silly, how much poison DMP can gloms stack? Magic DMP for serens?

So how much can a geo stack?

25% off everything, especially with a now-ascendant TK riding the illithoid ego-train, is a big deal. Probably a big broken deal. Especially since the 25% isn't impacting the stack factor for other DMPs (attunement, etc.). So, given that Ceren/Fillin is a smart cookie, you know he'll take full advantage of this. Given that it's Ceren/Fillin, you know he'd be scarier than the vast bulk of people, even without this.

Its not something you'd want to mass market. Probably not something you'd even want one person to have, but broken, ridiculous outliers aren't exactly uncommon here- artis, skills, or otherwise. So how do we cherry pick who gets to keep what broken super power?

Forum lynch? Seems to work for more things than it should, go for it.

Personally, if you wanted to be more elegant about it, I'd try to circumvent the thing entirely. Change how forcefield works. Make it a straight DMP value maybe. Make ego take f(x) reduction every time a hit is taken, where X is damage done. That way, you could have a fixed balance for how much damage management forcefield is allowing, and the artifact would just make sustaining the forcefield much more managable.

Of course, that would devalue the artifact as well, so around and 'round we go.

This implies that benefits gained from credits are not guaranteed, and are subject to change. And as far as I know, this has been in HELP CREDITS pretty much forever.

For the sake of argument:

Coding an artifact that conveys a powerful benefit, auctioning it off to the highest bidder for a vast sum of credits, and then altering it shortly thereafter to be substantially less powerful (without refunding the winner any credits) is a an exercise in destroying customer confidence — even if the artifact is universally agreed to be too powerful. That's a pretty clear-cut ripoff.

Is the administration allowed to do that? Certainly. IRE wrote the rules, and they hold the keys to the kingdom. But just because something is legal doesn't mean it's a wise move.

I should qualify this by stating that, in my limited experience, IRE tries to act in good faith and be as fair as possible to players where "credit devaluation" situations are concerned. They try pretty hard not to render people's credit purchases useless. My point is simply that just because the rules allow it, doesn't mean it should be done.

No problem there. The problem is if Lusternia created--inadvertently or not--another contract, which is and has been my point.

I have no problems with Ceren having the arti. It's potent, it was expensive, it's enviable. I also think there's worse abuses of odd mechanics abounding in the game. He spent mucho value. He gained mucho benefit. I'm ok with that.

But I wouldn't bat an eyelash if the Admins decided that on second thought, the rune created too much of an imbalance and needed to be changed. This assumes they were willing to refund the credits fully, or even considered refunding the cash. Just as they have a customer service obligation to act in good faith with Ceren, they likewise have multiple concurrent customer service obligations to every single other player of the game to keep the game fair.

They picked one course of action and not the other. Eh.

It's just a little shady that they announce the nerf, but didn't announce the repeal of the nerf. When something like that exists in the game, it shouldn't come up as a surprise tidbit long after the fact in the manner it just did here. I quoted the above game text just to show that they could have gone either way with it, and everyone should be aware of it.

Back on topic though... I've found that I much prefer tanky race mages over frail race mages. This might explain why I focused so much more on building my mage's offensive potency.