The Mystics

[Sebryn]

[theobserver]

I skimmed through the last five pages so forgive me if I missed / misinterpreted any points:

Herald imms are too inactive – We are mostly college people and its exam time. Personally I cannot juggle AR and studying. I log on for five minutes and before I know it, five hours have passed and its 4am in the morning again; so for the sake of my degree, I don’t play AR during exams.

Boot inactive imms – As you know people don’t get immed until they have proved their long term commitment to the game but inevitably everyone needs to take a few weeks break to sort real life shit out.

Heralds don’t fucking do anything!!! The problem has always been how to distribute their work to the masses. Spamming people with note to alls is not a solution because the more herald notes people receive, the less they will read. Instead note to all is reserved for a major incident – such as news of the death of a cabal leader etc.

We tried using producing scrolls and having the heralds approach and haggle with players over the price. Personally, I like this approach because it encouraged interaction. But 1) the scrolls required immortal approval 2) the immortal approved scrolls were hard to maintain because they had to be stored in the cabal for the heralds to copy 3)heralds ended up spamming the mud with cabal notes requesting this or that note to be approved and most importantly 4) heralds simply got bored risking their life standing around in town trying to sell their scrolls.

Then we tried the echo point. Again we had the same problems – immortal approval needed alongwith a high level imm (56+) willing to update the board.

Finally the mystique. Lydana somehow managed to write this thing up herself but frankly the reward was not worth the effort. We are letting the heralds themselves gather the information so its taking a lot longer to archive interesting good quality articles and information like cabal rosters change a lot. The current issue is very nearly finished however.

Personally, once we have cleared the backlog, I am in favour of a much smaller and more regular mystique rather than our current format.

A new mystic cabal will improve the game and attract more new players!! I disagree with this. I see lots of new players coming to give us a try and most last until the mid 20’s before growing bored with their current character and recreating a few times before moving onto another mud. In my opinion we need new game mechanisms designed for the level 50’s encourage new and old players to reach and stay at 50. Adding a new cabal may excite the current players for about two weeks but that’s about it.

Replace useless hoarding heralds with useless hoarding Mystics!!! Urm whats the point? We don’t have the player base to support another pking cabal so whatever cabal philosophy you suggest will have to be non aggressive. And anything you suggest can be modified and assimilated nto the herald philosophy if the imps wish it. The guidelines currently say that a herald can fight to discover the weakness and strengths of his opponents so to better record his history (Im paraphrasing here). As part of their mission to record all history, every cabal could be offered an high ranking herald as an ambassador to better promote their philosophy to the masses. Legion could use their herald to issue anonymous death threats to their enemies, Warlord to record their battles or mock cowardly opponents., knights to approach evils they intend to purge in an attempt to convert them to the light.

And if you want intrigue, all these Herald ambassador might deceide that to better record and understand history, they should influence its outcome and begin turning certain cabals against each other. Meanwhile, lower ranked heralds would be continuing with the core activitiy of gather gossip/news.

Anyway, whatever. That was just an example. We don’t need to rename one cabal, limit its selection to just magic users because we will end up with even more problems than we have with the heralds at the moment.

Heralds are hoarders!! Boo-hoo. They form in character alliances and make those winter trips.

Herald is full of newbies! So? It is a good cabal for learning the realms with. They have cabal mates to help them rank to 50, they get forced to go exploring on their assignments and they get to observe and learn how more skillful players fight. I have talked players like Sebryn and Seryie out of deleting and quitting over getting constantly trash killed by pointing them towards the heralds where they can interact with others of a similar mind. And both of them have gone on to play more aggressive pk characters. I am not partically concerned with having a large amount of responsible new players in the Heralds espeically when we have two immortals and a core of three or four long term cabal members to guide them.

[Avendin]

Well put, Observer. I withdraw any statement I made that falls under one of those bold categories.