No, you can set a new message at any time. If you wanted to change your messages mid-command in combat, you could at the moment do that.


We'll be implementing an in-game table to display the messages for each number.


We can add this.. suggestions for a syntax? POWERS SET ENTERMSG DEFAULT?


We see your bug and are looking into it. To everyone else, please use the in-game bug system to report issues.

Well, this is just going to be my perspective, but I'll take a swing at this.

Loss was expected. Demigod came with a wide variety of great stuff, and some of it had to go away. Fine. So maybe the stat boosts were too much, and I really was expecting Divinefire to vanish entirely, as much as I enjoyed the power of cheese. But with that came talk of new skills, more customization to ease the transition.

So, my major grievances with the new system are as follows:

1) Loss of powers was near-total. Part of the problem here was in my own expectations, but I honestly expected demis to keep some of their minor perks. I expected Seek to remain standard, as it's a basic Havens ability. I expected Shrink and Expand to remain standard, as they were Titan abilities. I expected CustomShout to remain standard, minor bit of RP fluff that it is. In the end, demigods got to keep regeneration and Ascend. Didn't expect much, didn't get that.

2) There are many, many awesome new powers... for Ascendants. This would be great if there were any feasible means of actually working towards these powers. TA comes once a year, and efforts are underway to reduce the size of the Super Cool Vernal Kids Club to two or maybe three per nation. I suppose it's great for the fifteen or so people who have access to the stuff, but there's a pretty large segment who are never going to have so much as a chance at seeing it. This leads into my next point...

3) There is nothing interesting and new about being a demigod. Power selection falls into either "stuff demigods had before" or "stuff that is lousy and questionably priced," with some overlap between the two. While the prospect of buying stats might be amazing for new demigods, paying for what one was accustomed to just having is somewhat irritating. As for the new items, while the buyable enter/exit/teleport/look messages are all rather beautiful, someone on the admin team needs to re-examine what "custom" means. PlanarQuickening might be worth the supernumerary weight if you could still use Gateweaving for raiding purposes. The best new power, a secondary active tradeskill, is going to require a long and rather unappealing grind to attain, even sitting on a sizable essence buffer as I am.

In summary, all loss, no gain, shiny interesting stuff dangling out of reach, pissy demi.

I think the essence costs should be reviewed with a 500k per hour rate (siphoners) That is what the majority of people at optimal level. You also hear of pilots getting 600k per hour on abash. Well that means siphoners are getting 300k.

Full refund for ascendance plz

Add in essence cost to use each ability (if any) under POWERS INFO

This here's actually a fair point. It would be good if the demis had a much better selection of powers...especially once divinefire's weight is increased to 51 or higher!

This is well said.

And we do NOT need to be giving seal powers for seal holders. Geebus.

Special powers for special snowflakes is part of what got us in to this mess in the first place. There's enough "major advantage for small part of playerbase" already here without throwing more disheartening crap on the heads of those of us who will never see it.

Seriously.

This started when a thread about restricting the VA mob got turned in to a thread about an essence shop and making sure VA's remained special. That demigods were getting thrown in the wood chipper was apparent then. I guess it took actually getting kicked in the throat for people to say, "oh hey, I don't like this change."

When somebody finally gets Demigod, do they start with zero essence? So they'd have to continue grinding for essence to get any neat powers at all?

You get 300,000 essence, but you have to keep earning essence to buy your powers.

I can understand this. It was perhaps more of a hit than most were expecting.




Ok, I definitely understand being a bit irritated at having to rebuy things you're used to having. And I'm all for demigods getting more Neat Stuff™ they can potentially buy. And it sounds like, from everything the admin have said about it, adding new things which are buyable will be quite easy, now they've got the framework in. Though I imagine they mean it when they say they wanna let it burn in for a bit before they start doing that.

This is a pretty big point here because I think we all have forgotten -- or at least the people who designed this system have forgotten -- where this started. Remember when it was the "demigod essence shop"? What we got started from was that demigod was a dead end, there was nothing more to do, nothing more to earn, nothing more to work for. Then Ascendance and domoths came out, and for a moment it almost seemed like there was an answer to the dead end; then we found out that being a demigod actually made you far less likely to get to be an Ascendant, and not very good at being in a domoth either. So we actually made that dead-end brick wall worse, and the desire for an "essence shop" where demigods could buy cool, but not combat-imbalancing, things was even stronger.

So what we actually got was not at all a way past that sense of being at a dead end, but in fact, we are at an even deader end than we were before. We lost the stuff we had, and now we're having dangled in front of us a chance to get back about a third of it, but no more, and we have to make hard choices to decide where the dead end will sit. We have almost no new choices for anything to get, and also no budget with which we could have gotten them even if we had any to get. PlanarQuickening is kind of a joke, so SecondTradeskill is the only, the only, example of something that matches what we originally were trying to accomplish. And by its nature you really have to buy it supernumerary, because losing an entire skillset just because you couldn't log on for a week and a half is just too harsh to consider. Which further crunches the harsh and unchangeable limit -- you can't get back even a third of what you had before if you want to get the one and only new goodie in the essence-shop.

At the same time they're dangling a huge essence shop, full of just exactly the kind of things we were originally talking about, in front of us. Utility things that don't imbalance combat and are cool enough to be worth grinding essence for. But we can't get them, ever. Ever. They finally built the essence shop we wanted, just so they could lock out of it forever the very people who wanted it in the first place. What's worse is, if we sit around brainstorming new ideas for demigod powers that will be cool and interesting and not combat-imbalancing, most the possible good ones are now pre-emptively shot down because they're already in the Ascendant Country Club's pro shop -- and therefore we can't even propose anything even like them.

And to top all this off, this is being done just at the same time that they're also revoking half the keys to that country club, and in doing so, ensuring that pretty much no one who doesn't already have one can ever get one, no matter how much they contribute or do.

So basically take the sense of "dead end" we had before, and they pretty much just quadrupled it across the board. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of the design of the system. It just seems like somewhere along the way a few decisions were made which changed it from a great way of addressing the concern it originally grew out of, into a great way of magnifying that concern, making it far worse, and making it more impossible that it can ever be fixed. It's a solution that forgot its problem. A classic case of losing your mission statement along the way and ending up solving exactly the wrong problem. Too bad it's such an elegant, well-designed solution, because it makes me feel bad leveling this criticism at it. But nevertheless, demigod is now four times worse a dead end than it ever was before, and if I were nearing titan I would absolutely plan on stopping there, because frankly, conglutinate is probably better for many people than demigod is. Again.

It does seem weird to me, at just level 85, that all of the coolest stuff is available only to, like, fifteen players?

I'm getting really tired of saying it, but we're open to ideas for new powers. We're aware it feels kind of 'barren', and we've said since before it released, we're absolutely willing to listen to ideas for new stuff. It's -not- easy filling in these empty spaces we'd like to put stuff. And it's getting really irritating hearing people keep saying, 'omg, they just don't want to give it to us' - yes, we do! We want you to have the greatest demishop in the world that brings all the boys (and girls) to our yard. We want to look at the other IRE games and be like, 'It's better than yours, we can teach you - but we'd have to charge.' We just need ideas! We filled out an extra 18 abilities for demigods, we added in probably 20 some abilities into Veneration on top of what already existed, and really, I, personally, feel really tapped!

Give us some ideas, we'll see what we can do, what we can come up with, and hopefully we'll come up with a great end-result!

We have things for the PKers and the RPers, what about the mudsecks Demigods?

We need a power that lets the Demi steal underwear from people that the target is currently wearing.

Go log in an ascendant and type POWERS LIST for about 2/3 of our suggestions for demigod-essence-shop powers. "Cool, interesting, but not combat-imbalancing" is already a tremendously difficult thing to come up with, given how creative people are about finding ways to turn everything into either a way to Win At Any Cost™ or to Make Other People Miserable Just To Be A ™. It's a lot harder when you've taken so many of the limited number of possibilities and ruled them out forever by giving them to only the 25-going-on-15 ultra-cool kids.

That said, I'll go throw a few more ideas into the relevant thread.

I'm not so much underwhelmed by what's available (well, being an ascendant, it's much like Lendren has said), but I'm overwhelmed by the cost of it all. You've taken all the fun out of it and turned it into a chore, honestly. I just want my fun back.

Well, basically what happened was we said, 'Okay, Ascendance is kind of lacking.' then, as the Demipowers theory was coming into play, we started converting the non-cult abilities into Ascendant demipowers.

Wow, my ADD kicked in a bit - so we converted them plus the new abilities in Ascendance into Ascendant-only powers. The end result is that the 'demishop' everyone is asked for is here. It even includes everything feasible that was asked for, as far as I can remember. Please (and this is directed at everyone complaining) give us some ideas for abilities, at least as jumping points for us to brainstorm from, and I'm certain we'd be happy to add to the shop!

Ok!

Remove ascendance all together. Give everyone 150 weight to spend. Open up all that ascendance stuff to everyone. I guarantee, absolutely, that this will make the complaints go away forever.

The unwashed masses are sick of special snowflakes. The demigod proletariat shall rise!

Sure! Then we give Ascendance 500 points to spend.

They can have 155. Or if they managed to get TA, 160.

Hmm... Well. True Ascendants get their domoth's abilities for free. Maybe we should give each city 3 abilities that their VAs get, and remove the ability to select domoth ones if it isn't your domoth... Hmmmm... (I'm kidding.)

That actually seems entirely fair.