I disagree on a couple of these points, mainly the commune stuff, which I feel like you're observing as an outsider.
Small point - you can't chop down a totem, you would have to wait for an opportunity where that totem has reverted into just a tree. Honestly, since we get power and wood from totems, I think it's not a big deal to have this difference. I would love it if there were ever an artifact to carve totems though. It's a pain when elders get chopped down, but since it doesn't happen that often it is really not a big deal (even when we communes are bitching up a storm at each other, we're only ever talking about <5 total trees).For a second I thought you were going to exaggerate there. This is actually an old complaint with affinity. It's true, one ascendant melder will out-meld one regular guy melder when they are the only two components in the equation. I think that's the point of the ability.
Distort has uses besides distorting the planar rifts... it prevents cubix/orgbix instant-out, other planar travel out or within and the magical forced movement abilities generally. Archways are effected by gravity, so there is at least that tiny delay possible. Ethereal is not like Elemental or Cosmic in its rp-nature and is not intended to be. The open layout reflects this. Also the fact that we can't trap people in goes a long way toward combating the Ethereal Fortress stuff. Plus, if they allowed us to distort archways they would have to put cubix exits into the forests and, no thanks.

There's a couple of issues with that. I find that the best way to keep an enemy in etherwilde to kill is by setting up one north so that your actual movement hindering skills/icewalls/whatever actually work since obviously the archway isn't impacted by those things. When you fight in that actual room it just takes one command without sufficient hindering to get them out. I think the (valid) comparison Arcanis is making is that on say earth distort is sufficient to trap everyone up there (assuming there's enough fighting to stop someone from waiting 2 minutes to bix) where as on etherwilde distort and gravity ALMOST do it. You can argue about whether or not that disparity is important but it definitely exists. That being said it's pretty obvious design-wise that ethereal is supposed to be unique in this way so I'm not sure how one would change it (if one wanted to) that would take that in to account.

I personally find it a lot easier to escape elemental planes than ethereal, heh. Just because we always have ships there, and flux has this nice tendency to fling us to safety.

Maybe the fact that shrines are hardly ever called on elemental planes helps too.

Quite a bit wrong with this assumption here. One, Affinity lengthens the equilibrium time to break a room, but does not actually prevent a room from being broken. Proper meld building and associated skills would prevent a particular room from being broken, but Affinity doesn't do this.

As for the censers, they do not remove equilibrium outright from terraining a room, no. They let non-melders terrain normally (not break), and for melders with a censer, they just terrain/break faster, but still consume equilibrium and power costs.

A bit of research is advised before wide, sweeping assumptions like this are incorrectly made. Will read more after my class is done.

Pretty sure it's because the affinity message takes precedence over the 'trying to break an unbreakable room' message.

Yeah. The messages misdirect a lot of people, but feel free to typo that or fix the placement or something.

About the godly melds, I got my information a bit wrong. Being a guild champion of a mage guild reduces meld down by half, and the censer itself will reduce the time needed to combust/forcecombust a room by 0.5 seconds. Adding thsi with Ascendant powers is what made combating this meld also impossible and made it seem so very fast.


edit: ah seems it was already mentioned. Alright then, and yes I got a bit confused also

Regarding gnomes, as someone who was probably in the top five when it comes to most gnomes collected last Christmas, I agree that there needs to be a limit to how many of these things you can get. In all honesty, one of the big reasons why I continued to search for gnomes last Christmas was because I know if I didn't get them, someone else who definitely doesn't need them will get it. I gave a large number of my presents away.

Regarding automation in general, I feel the issue isn't just with automation, but with the rules in general. The majority of players will follow these rules as they are laid out, but there are a few people (and I'm sure we all know who they are) will push these rules right to the limit and just get away with nothing more than a warning. It just leaves everyone else wondering why they should all be following the rules.

Fast, but not impossible.

Part of my point is that there will pretty much always be something to chop down though. I'd be willing to have some of the benefits associated with totems toned down if some buff was put in to compensate.

Usually, we don't chop each other's totems down because we know it's a major pain in the ass. If totems get chopped, it's usually in direct response to something done by the other side and isn't an ongoing event, otherwise it would easily be more then 5 totems. (which already is a RL day's worth of pixies/shadows?) If someone went on a dedicated spat of returning every day to find a totem to chop, things could quickly get out of hand if a LARGE amount of guards aren't summoned and posted around, and it seems like someone may have suddenly developed such a grudge against Serenwilde. We'll see how that plays out.

- Glomdoring didn't summon a whole lot of guards when our side was getting chopped down. We were just really vigilant and whored less costly things (Prime distortion, Shrine Gravity) to deter choppers.

- I really don't like starting this argument, but: it wasn't Glomdoring who started the recent chopping spree. Sure, we raid a lot etc. etc. and your chopper probably lashed out in frustration but we all know how much of a pain elder chopping causes (for both sides) so we generally don't start that kind of war.

Well, it's not Glomdoring but rather Gaudiguch that's doing most of the chopping. The unspoken mutual non-choppiness was going so well too until recently.

I never said it was Glomdoring. In fact I said that it's usually not Glomdoring, because generally we recognize what a pain the in ass it is. Usually, that's why chopping stops after a few times, because while it is possible to chop to infinity, most people recognize it's an ass act. But really, just because something generally doesn't get done doesn't mean it should always be possible if someone feels like being abusive.