Aside from the fact that Glom gets virtually no power from villages anymore...

A result of my point, not a proof of yours. Cause, meet effect.

Huh? How is it a result of your point that we get no power?

You do realize that you might as well stop, right?

Years of massive power income resulted in no longer needing power as a high priority. Somewhat spurred by the comms change, their need shifted their governance.

Cause. Effect.

And.. less trolling Shaddus. I figured it would be obvious.

Well, considering we get no power because we switched to a commercial government, likely as a direct result of the admins bump in comm prices... it must mean that Ixion considers himself be the reason they made such a decision.

Okay, now you're definitely missing the point of his argument.

Considers himself ^to be.

I'm not sure where you got that from, being I just explained what I meant. You could cease projecting random assertions though. Read above, I never claimed having anything to do with Glom or their power...

Sorry, meant to say that your point was that the admins raised comm cost... And you wrote your resopnse as I wrote mine, so I hadn't read it as I wrote mine. Sure, Glom doesn't really prioritize power input (because honestly, all it's really good for these days is raising ascendants; even the passive income, sans villages and domoths, is enough to support guards and the occational discretionary). No big secret there.

Actually Glomdoring got next to no power in Conquest mode (less than they do in Commercial I think, by a little bit), too.

Though yes, having several villages for a while under the old interim system probably helped!

And more tweaking to villages is to come, not to worry.

We got no power directly, no, but we did get a rather sizeable conquest pool. So we saved all the upkeep on guards (and, to a smaller degree, discretionaries) by being a Conquest government.

All I demand is a random surge of power that occasionally strikes someone in the game and makes them a demigod. Hopefully, with the Ironbeard formula, but reversed so I get it for once.

I'm pretty sure most of us stated that we'd prefer to see it all come back, since it was essence we had worked for to begin with... and it's also extremely harsh for a lot of it to just poof.

Consider the following:
Krellan was a Demigod with a pile of essence. He wished to be ascended. He made a choice, knowing that it would cost him 2/3 of his essence; so he intentionally went through with it knowing full-well the ramifications.
Now, Krellan has just once again lost a huge chunk of the essence he has gathered (another 80,000,000), and this time it was not through his own choice.

Personally, the first one was acceptable since it was a decision he made in good faith (he may not have liked it, but it was clearly stated and known by everyone prior). The second one which just compounds the loss, not so much.

The second is also relevant for, say, the essence I've dumped in as well of course. I'm using Krellan as this example since he's lost the most in this, but there are quite a few of us who aren't entirely sure why it's needing to be taken away. So what if we have an extra 80,000,000? The time was put in for it, and given that this system is already limited by "sparks" in terms of how much one can permanently buy at once... does it hurt anything, really, except in that it might allow us to buy a bunch of temporary stuff at once for fun and play around until it runs out?

It seems more to me a way to somewhat create a more level playing field- not in the interests of equity (we could go all day on the subject of "what is fair", I'd rather not. The answer to that question is "nothing and everything is."), but rather, keeping subset A of the playerbase from being so far ahead of the curve that it would create issues.

The important factor here is retaining the rate of essence gain. If that is kept high, the real costs of the changes in terms of effort are much lower.

Unless all demigods are given a "freebie", max load initial set? Axe the essence. Frontloading the system isn't necessarily good for the game.

Finally, losing ascendance is a great move. I don't think having a restricted tier of character like that is very appealing. One thing I like about much of the game is, anything personal is largely attainable on your own, with enough effort. Ascendance meant either you were elected org Jeebus one day, or you are Ilyarin/Shuyin/Xiels/Fillin.

Part of me is hoping we get to pick our powers for free for the first day or week or so, but I'm fairly certain we won't get to. Not to mention we haven't spent any essence at all getting our powers like Ascendants have, so from that point of view it wouldn't make much sense.

As for Ascendants... Heck, give them back the full essence. I don't care much about that. Plus, odds are the majority of them will be axed down to Demi anyway (and likely lose even more essence in that conversion), so might as well give them the full essence from Ascendancy back.

The problem with this is that I am the only Ascendant who will 'break the curve'. I'm pretty sure that every other Ascendant, upon getting their full essence set back, would still have less than Lendren (much less Ragniliff). Ceren, for example, has almost no essence. He didn't even have enough to reincarnate during Wildnodes.

Ragniliff, Lendren, and I already 'break the curve' just by existing. Giving other Ascendants their essence back isn't going to change that we're still in the hundreds of millions.

So, if the concern is me, I'm willing to just take the 1/3 hit with that reasoning; but don't punish all the rest just because this would push me further up.

(That's only if this is the reasoning; if not, I'd really like to have the essence back that I spent 3 RL months hunting!)

So few? That's a good thing, especially taken in a strictly practical view of who those three are.

To be candid, emotionally, after a massive thread where a small subset of the population raged against a change to VA's in favor of nerfing every demigod out there? It is hard not to be snarky and snide, and respond with a one liner like, "When you said, nerf everyone (except for me), perhaps you should have used caps AND paratheses."

More objectively, I understand that people from all orgs who were fortunate enough to enjoy large amounts of aetherspace gains had a sense of security in "no matter what the administration do, I'll just buy back my stuff immediately". And now, some have lost it. To me, in part, that is a casualty of life on the high tail of the curve. The grind people are annoyed about now was one of the big reasons I argued against this change way back when arguing against it might have actually mattered.

I'm glad the administration are taking this approach. It certainly won't help me personally, despite having 30 million slogged up, I expect that I won't be able to buy everything I need. But perhaps this also means that they won't have to price everyone who isn't a Xenthos or a Ragniliff out of the market to react to outlier essence scores.

Honestly, if it was Goddess Akui doing this, I would have normalized all essence scores of existing demigods and ascednants, putting everyone at roughly an equitable starting point that would allow them to purchase a few good solid demi-shop things, whatever they wind up being.

Then again, see sig. I don't do well with aristocracies, even if said aristocracy is largely a product of my own perceptions.

Bravo! I'm so glad that being a combatant automatically means you hate RP. Or that if you like to RP, you automatically want less to do with combat. I play Lusternia for both. I'm psyched for the Avatar cults thing, but beside that, everything that has been said is discouraging. Ranging from things like the bold text above to ascendants being refunded 1/3 their essence (with no apparent logical reason), it sounds very much like the admin only care to do what they please, perhaps justifying it by quoting one person who is not in the majority.

What is the justification for "flavourization" taking away from combat ability?

If you like to do both, why would you go with an all-combat build then?

Edit: To make the argument more clear: Who knows what's going to be in the essence shop. It is within reason to assume that pieces of ascendance will be in it, but that's about it. So I really doubt that anyone will want to go with an all-combat build unless there is some sort of super OP build if you want to pk, which, if the admin did their weights right, there won't be.

Yea, I don't really see any proof in this thread that suggests you can't achieve both eventually. Have some flavour and beat people with it, too.