Timer on Roll

[Ruzuke]

Hi everyone. As you can see by my Arelith forum date, I have been around for years. My original character concept was changed byy alterations in the server. I still have had a lot of fun RPing and creating characters. The introduction of writs ended up being fun. When Guldorand (now Westcliff) was hell balled into oblivion, my Druid who made healing supplies in defense of the arch fey was rolled (no epic sacrifice. He used all his XP making healing wands) he was one level away and there were no writs back then.

So three years later and making level 30 and 26 characters and doing epic sacrfices. When do I get to play the character I want? I understand the change was because people where levelling up and rolling characters to make the characters they wanted. So other wanting more RP with people complained. Me on the other hand I made each character leveled them up, RPed (once writs where added used the banked XP and mostly RP in town) so I never ended up with the rewarded needed to play what I want.

I have played dwarves, elves, hin, gnomes, and had a lot of fun. Made some friends, tried to effect storylines. Likely annoyed staff, and enjoyed fun staff scenes and plots. But none of it is on the character I want to play. More then three years later… it is meh. I rolled a character I had received a normal. 2 months ago I received a greater. The next roll character is already level 21. That one will hit 30 and I will make a soulless character mechanically capable to get to 30 so I can roll that one as well to hopefully play what I want.

So I am asking staff what is the point in the added time? My RP quality is not improving it is decreasing. Taking a break won’t make it better. Me not playing what I want now or latter won’t make it better. Before the itmer I played characters past level 30. I enjoyed them. Now I say I better end it after two months on the dot otherwise I have extra waiting time.

In the past it was mentioned that there would be a system to combine rewards for a higher one. So I held onto 4 greater rewards for more than a year and it never happened. Friends with the reward tier asked staff could they donate it to me and was told no.

[Sincra]

I believe it was an error on the Teams part to ever announce that an alternative system was in the works.
The individual responsible for the rework has been too busy for a considerable amount of time to actually undertake the project and while I personally could take it on I have other projects I am more interested in, as such, until any progress is announced people should consider the rework of awards on pause.

As for the timers, they were put in to slow grinding and rolling. We were seeing a turnover that effectively left people not knowing if the person they were talking to would be gone in 3-7 days due to the speed at which level 26 can be attained.
So while I sympathise, I think the issue is more that people feel they NEED a special race or award for some purpose, something that is not true as ultimately if your character concept revolves around the race it will often be underwhelming and grow tiresome quickly.

The part on timers I am not happy with is the durations being 2 months for normals AND greaters. But I can see the logic to a degree as normals are guaranteed at level 26.

[Xerah]

Greater reward options have changed a bunch of times over the years. What was once a major reward has become a greater reward and cycled back and forth. Lots of people would love to have the option to have 4 greater rewards in that time.

I'm not a staff member, but the idea is that you shouldn't need to roll more than 6 times in a year; that's a lot of characters in a year! You can disagree with that, but I can certainly understand the mindset of the staff. I can think about the last 6 characters that I rolled and they probably all aren't "major reward worthy". If you're honest with yourself, I'm sure all the ones you rolled aren't either. And let's be honest here; now we can get to level 26 in about two weeks of casual playing time (quicker if you actually try). I also know that a lot of people are banking up character to mass roll on the new system, but I wouldn't plan on that happening on any timeline you're going to be happy with.

A lot of the complaints around the rolling are approached with the idea that "since I play a bunch I should be given their major reward" and that's not a great view of things. It's always been a sort of a "maybe you get a bonus for the next character!" Arelith over the years has made a lot of progress in turning that from a maybe into something useful but it's gone a bit too far towards what people feel is an entitlement over major rewards.

For me, the worst part of this theoretical point buy system is that it seems to eventually guarantee the major reward and so many more players will lock themselves into these forever major reward characters. I'm not looking forward to that.

Just play the game. Stop focusing on rewards. Make cool characters (no, they don't need special races to be cool) and roll after 2 months if that's really what you want. Use those normals for the level 16 start (I use this on almost every character) so it doesn't take as long. Maybe you'll get that major eventually.

[Hazard]

I counted and 87% of my characters have been normies, that is, no real special awards of any kind, just normals, minors or none at all. Likely more than 87% but there's likely a few I just couldn't remember as hard as I try. It's been a long ride.

I've never played a short-term character, or leveled one up just for the purpose of sacrificing them, although I have made characters I thought would be possible sacrifices at some point because they're not restricted in some way. For example, I'm very unlikely to roll one of the 4 characters that did cost me a greater or above, becasuse ... Well. Why should I? I don't get anything from it (except, probably a normal award, of which I have plenty) and I like to play them, and will continue to like to play them until I finally leave the server. There's no incentive at all to be rid of them, unless we start punishing people for being lucky and not deleting their characters. The only reason would be if I get involved in some cool death, but that hasn't happened yet and no one's killed them yet, so they keep chugging along.

Every character I've ever played has been around for 1-2+ RL years, 6+ months at the shortest if something went wrong, like I realised I messed up the build (arelith didn't used to allow rebuilds), or I just didn't like them and I stopped playing them.

My advice to OP would be 3 things:

1: to find a character concept you can really get behind without an award/the awards you have, and stick with it. You can absolutely fall in love with a character concept without needing an award, my favourite dearest character of mine to this day had no award at all, not even a minor. RIP Magpie, I rolled her because she was old enough to die of natural causes (that how long I kept her around, lol). Just play that character, and in your spare time try out other chars and builds, and then by the time the silly CD timer is up you'll have something to sacrifice to the RNG gods.

2: If you have greaters, just sit on them. Stuff I spent greaters on became majors, and stuff from majors sometimes also move to greaters. Whatever major thing you're after might get cycled down.

3: Forget the out of reach concepts you don't have an award for. Just tell yourself they don't exist. It's a low % chance, and there's a possibility you never get one. They're meant to be rare. There's nothing you can really do about it. If we worry too much about the future or the past we totally miss the present. Just focus on what you can enjoy now, and if that's nothing, then just take a break. Arelith is the kind of place everyone should take breaks from, for their mental health. Roleplaying is a creative act, and you're pouring a lot of yourself into this creativity and sharing it with others and it doesn't always go as planned and that's taxing, but even when everything goes perfectly it's still going to drain you. Nothing wrong with a break if you're feeling burnt out.

[Ruzuke]

The response of just playing the game is the same mindset of this added to stop people from rolling characters. This is my free time. Arelith is not my job, it does not pay my bills. It is a hobby that I, the player do for my entertainment.

Somewhere, other players felt they had the right to tell other players well, I enjoyed your RP now you owe it to me to continue playing a character in your free time. That is not right or acceptable. The problem also did not get solved. What happened is a lot of people made second or third alts. They log in, level up, log off, and switch to other characters to play.

The insulting question of if I am honest with myself all the characters I rolled… except for 1 character I rolled for a minor reward my characters were primed for the 5% reward. Please do not assume I was not rolling characters properly. Before the timer went into effect, I rolled characters for the maximum reward possible I just did not wait every two months I typically played a character 4-6 months with no leveling background leveling alt. I remember he 3-6 day speed runs that happened. The speedruns is also part of the problem of the previous two paragraphs. People wanted to play what they wanted to play. They did not want to play what others wanted them to play. Have you joined the group and everyone is, well I am a damage dealer, I am the rogue, you play the cleric and heal us?

There has been major changes in the game since I started. My surface Kobold can no longer live on the surface (and has an eternal grudge to Cordor because of it). My druid was there when Guldorand (now Westcliff) was hellballed into oblivion and was deleted because death should matter. Since then, I made characters I enjoyed made a lot of fun IC friends and enemies.

Some amazing RP this week alone has been random sailors taking a new character with them sailing in the UD. In Sencliff breaking up idling for a quick sail with a dread pirate for a writ (and the fun conversation of singing, being on a boat, and just loving the water). The battle occurring in Skal. It’s not groundbreaking but all of them remind me of tabletop experience friends having fun.

A for my three greater. One of them is ICly out of town because the story led him there. He is awesome and hopefully will be back one day. Another is waiting for a certain update and then he can be played again (waiting for the male fey models so people will stop mistaking him for Tinkerbell) the third I love the concept and the character, but mechanically he doesn’t work in the game. I think I know how to rework it so he is playable. I still however have a concept and a character I have played before that I would love to bring to Arelith.

[LichBait]

Perhaps a salty post, but I'd feel blessed with a Greater. I've been here since before awards were a thing and have never gotten above a normal. Combining awards would be neat.

[Kythana]

The award system is just some very legacy design with a mindset not really suited for modern audiences.

I can completely sympathize with players being upset at it. Especially now when we have an entire subset of greater-major races that have their own racially themed location. Not being able to participate in that niche angle or playing a concept you have in mind for no other reason than rng feels bad.

And as someone who has been able to play a major award, I feel really bad for the amazing RPers out there who are gated from concepts they want to play. Meanwhile you have horrible, low-effort majors that don't abide any lore running around who just happened to get lucky.

It's a trash system that ultimately still encourages making characters exclusively for the purpose of grinding awards, but only now they sit in the vault until cd comes up.

[Paint]

I can completely sympathize with players being upset at it. Especially now when we have an entire subset of greater-major races that have their own racially themed location. Not being able to participate in that niche angle or playing a concept you have in mind for no other reason than rng feels bad.

Speaking for the Jotunhold at least, I can assure you that you're perfectly capable of roleplaying there without being a half-giant, as I've managed to do so on two separate characters, neither of which were a half-giant. I've even seen entire characters based on giant lore and explored concepts related to giants who weren't giants. So while I understand the sentiment of this argument, I think it would only be correct if the people who are running the Jotunhold right now were particularly exclusionary. Participation or lack thereof is entirely on the player.

Is it frustrating that you can't own property there? Yes. But the property there is supposed to be for characters of those races, taking extra pressure off of the rest of the properties of Arelith.

That being said, I agree with almost the rest of this; I literally have characters in my vault I'm never going to touch except to roll when the roll timer goes up. Most of them were experiments, but ones I ended up not being very invested in. I would have rolled them already, but with the roll timer being the way it is, there's not much incentive to.

[Itikar]

I think that the award system should at least use a pity system, if anything. Right now it is on the level of an extremely punitive gacha game. Even though nobody has to play such races and that they are not required to RP well, there may be good reason for somebody to like giants, tieflings or some other greater than normal award races.

Hopefully the rework will eventually come online and be better.

Personally I would not recommend to aim to play anything more than Normal Award, and not to roll any character one is even distantly attached to, or they may be in doubt to play again. It is really not worth it, especially without being able to know how the new character will fare. There is a considerable risk to be disappointed in more than one way.

[AstralUniverse]

Not a fan of the current system.

I feel like the most optimal way to play the game now is to run one late-blooming, heavily gear dependent, s-tier powerbuild, as my serious main character and never bother rolling it, and just running a roll-bait meme build for fast 1 mil gold + lvl 26 every 2 months. This does not encourage RP, and it certainly does not help against stagnation. But at least it made me actually play wizard and cleric my most hated classes.

Cheers.

[The GrumpyCat]

The system in the Old Days was designed to do two things essentially
1) Let people play some special concepts, whilst keeping them rare.
2) Encourage a turnover of very long term characters.

Now mark you, this was back in the day when it took the vast majority of characters up to nine months to get to level 30, so it really was an 'epic sacrifice'. Not 'Oh I'll grind this guy up to 26 in a couple of weeks of play then delete' but more

'This is a character who I've spent almost a year with, roleplaying, getting to know people, building up, leveling... now I must say goodbye to him forever.'

It was a way of encouraging movement of long term pc.

Sadly because it was based off leveling, and the fact we've got a much, much, much faster leveling system that is no longer the case.

And yes, I'm not so fond of the RNG aspect of it either.

The system has needed an overhall for a long, long time now. I hope it happens.

[DM Herald]

Building off of Grumpycat's response here. Greater and major awards are meant to be rare. We do not want the server to become even more of an exotic zoo in terms of rare character races than it already is. Increasingly the likelihood of getting higher tier awards, or implementing a pity system, or decreasing the epic sacrifice timer will only put out more higher tier awards in the long run. If there are more high tier awards out in the server, then something else has to give, to ensure special and exotic races remain rare. So some of the solutions to that would be to make higher tier awards less special overall, population gate special races, or have a system in place to ensure special races are killed off occasionally to keep population numbers low. None of these alternative solutions are likely to be well received, so while the current system is not ideal, it does achieve the desired result.

[Ork]

We've added so many new races to this game that we should consider reuniting with amia.

[Biolab00]

Contrary to Amia...there've not just plenty of exotic races which are gated but these races are also imbalanced as well and are tailored to specific classes, making overpowered build an actual thing.

Specifically looking through the past number of characters created under specific races, the exotic race does not represent even 5% of the overall population though. That is, if it has changed.

[Anomandaris]

Crazy idea but maybe frequency cap greater or majors to disincentivize rolling for them over and over? And conversely ramp the probability of getting one if you keep rolling normals? I think I’ve rolled somewhere around 8x full % probability epic sacrifices and never gotten anything more than a normal.

I tell you what though, it definitely makes me not want to ever grind a roll char because I have come to believe I’ll never get anything else other than a normal. I’m sure it has the opposite effect on some that really want one though.

[-XXX-]

I think it's safe to say that the award system missed its mark:

• incentivizes the creation and high turnover of throwaway characters
• heavily incentivezes the retention of award characters that pile up over time

= populates the server with superficial short-lived speedrunny toons AND slowly but steadily floods it with rare stuff

[Kythana]

I think it's safe to say that the award system missed its mark:

• incentivizes the creation and high turnover of throwaway characters
• heavily incentivezes the retention of award characters that pile up over time

= populates the server with superficial short-lived speedrunny toons AND slowly but steadily floods it with rare stuff

The throwaway characters aren't that bad. Admittedly, it makes it a bit worse, but that just happens naturally anyways. You're always going to have those, reward system or not.

However, the build up of special races/majors is absolutely a problem. Almost every time I hear someone talking about no longer playing their major, it's always, "I'm going to shelf them." When you have a 50% chance per year and things like vampire waiting lists that can take up to a year to get through, I don't understand how anyone thought there would be any incentive to roll those.

Crazy idea but maybe frequency cap greater or majors to disincentivize rolling for them over and over?

Make it so that you can only have 1 greater and 1 major award at any given time, whether it's in use or not. As in, if you try to roll a character while you have an unspent major, or a major in your vault, you could only get a greater or below.

And I say that as someone who has a major and a greater sitting in their vault. Force people sitting on legacy, shelved characters to roll if they want to play the newly released stuff, or a different concept altogether.

[The GrumpyCat]

I think it's safe to say that the award system missed its mark:

• incentivizes the creation and high turnover of throwaway characters
• heavily incentivezes the retention of award characters that pile up over time

= populates the server with superficial short-lived speedrunny toons AND slowly but steadily floods it with rare stuff

Just to say - I absolutly agree with this. And whilst I do think the system worked pretty well 10+ years ago, when leveling was slower, it absolutly does not work at present - in case anyone thinks I'm particularly defending it.

[TheDoctor]

I think it's safe to say that the award system missed its mark:

• incentivizes the creation and high turnover of throwaway characters
• heavily incentivezes the retention of award characters that pile up over time

= populates the server with superficial short-lived speedrunny toons AND slowly but steadily floods it with rare stuff

Just to say - I absolutly agree with this. And whilst I do think the system worked pretty well 10+ years ago, when leveling was slower, it absolutly does not work at present - in case anyone thinks I'm particularly defending it.

This.... This right here is the crux of it all.

While having people makin alts and tossaway chars is a thing the shear amount of them that we have here is insane. It detracts from us being an actual RP server and makes us look like just another action/pvp. The point of arileth isnt RP anymore its who can roll for the better reward faster.

[MissEvelyn]

It's become so normalized to have throwaway characters that I've run into people who ICly claimed their purpose was to become really powerful and die in battle, so another stronger warrior might take their place.

I'm not saying it's wrong to RP that, but it is extremely cheesy and something about that interaction makes me wonder whether to post this here or in the setting integrity thread.

To be clear, I was glad that they at least put in some kind of effort to roleplay, unlike those you meet who just run past without responding. But it did leave a weird taste in my mouth. Like our dear server has been reduced to an Exotic Race Rewards Factory machine that you grind through until you get it.

[Iceborn]

Clearly the solution is to go back to super slow grinding and extremely harsh death penalties.
And I'm only half joking at this.

[Wrips]

half fiend and half celestial when?

[Eyeliner]

First thing that needs to go is the slot machine aspect that brings out people’s urge to keep trying to get lucky. I feel like it should just be a straight process with heavy limitations. Like once a month you can trade an epic for a guaranteed minor, two months for a normal, one year for a greater, two or three for a major with application. Let everyone have a chance to play that special race that appeals to them, but then there’s a long cooldown so they can’t have a vault full of rare characters

[Xerah]

You get fast levelling and a timer, or slow levelling and no timer.

It's definitely understandable to be unhappy after rolling another normal (just got another yesterday...so many in a row), but looking at it as a whole, I hope that people can understand that filling the server with wild races might not be what's desired. Any sort of guarantee of it will lead that way (pity timers, point buy, etc.).

Realizing that my opinion isn't the same as everyone else, Eyeliner might have one of the better middle ground options. I still like the rolling aspects as a way to "get rid of the character" though, but maybe that's just me.

[whitewingeddove]

I’m personally a fan of painfully slow leveling, so if that’s not what anyone wants, then we’ll have to live with this tradeoff.