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Let's improve the library!
I've been a librarian for way too long now, and I've built up a little list of things that I think would improve the library experience for everybody involved. They're all pretty small changes, but they might help get people into culture and they'll definitely help make life more pleasant for librarians.
1. Automate approvals
There's a 300 day period after you publish a book for librarians to critique it. That's good, since it helps regulate quality. And if a book gets critiqued, it goes to the administration to decide if the critique is valid. That's also good, as a check on critiquing power. Here's the thing, though. Books go to the admin even if nobody critiques them, and they still have to be manually approved. This slows down the process a lot, which causes stress and annoyance for people who want to see their stuff finish up publication and for librarians who want to submit it for prestige. Plus, it means you can't rely on getting fastest growing library for the culture score on any given year. I don't think there's any need for manual approval of most books, either.
Change the process so that any book that is not critiqued gets approved automatically and instantly upon finishing the 300 days. This solves all of those problems, and reduces admin workload to boot. If you're worried about plagiarism and copyright issues, expand the critiquing criteria to include those and let the librarians handle it. It's a competition, so we have an incentive to be attentive and catch everything!
2. Experience for publishing
There's very little overlap between the culture people and the fighting people. There's a lot of reasons for that, of course, but I think one that might play a role is the opportunity cost of writing. If you spend X hours writing a book, you cannot spend X hours bashing. Assuming your Lusternia time is finite, that means you're passing up a significant amount of bashing time for each book. Since death has an experience cost, that might contribute to making culture people not fight, since they don't want to give up culture work to pay that cost.
The solution here is simple. Upon a book leaving the 300 day period and getting approved, and again when/if the book wins prestige the author gets essence. We don't want this to be better than bashing, but we do want it to be comparable. So, look up the average essence per hour gained by a demigod bashing, and multiply that with the length of the book divided by the average words written per hour, and give that much essence per word. You can even round it to follow the same tiers the library points use. Assuming that a person averages 300 words per hour (roughly correct in my experience. Some write faster, some write slower, but some people bash faster than others too.) and an average demi bashes 1 million essence per hour (a number obtained through a very rough survey of exactly one person) we get essence rewards like this:
1000-2499 words: 3 million
2500--5999 words: 6.5 million
6000-9999 words: 18 million
10000+ words: 30 million
That hourly estimate already includes experience modifiers like goldentonic, so those shouldn't modify these gains.
Disregarding things like adjusting the actual scoring that goes into choosing culture winning, I think that there's not much you could do mechanically to improve culture than to add those two things.
EDIT: I want to make sure other library people see this, so @Kalnid @Nimhuire @Savea @Diniah and @Iorwen all need to be tagged.
1. Automate approvals
There's a 300 day period after you publish a book for librarians to critique it. That's good, since it helps regulate quality. And if a book gets critiqued, it goes to the administration to decide if the critique is valid. That's also good, as a check on critiquing power. Here's the thing, though. Books go to the admin even if nobody critiques them, and they still have to be manually approved. This slows down the process a lot, which causes stress and annoyance for people who want to see their stuff finish up publication and for librarians who want to submit it for prestige. Plus, it means you can't rely on getting fastest growing library for the culture score on any given year. I don't think there's any need for manual approval of most books, either.
Change the process so that any book that is not critiqued gets approved automatically and instantly upon finishing the 300 days. This solves all of those problems, and reduces admin workload to boot. If you're worried about plagiarism and copyright issues, expand the critiquing criteria to include those and let the librarians handle it. It's a competition, so we have an incentive to be attentive and catch everything!
2. Experience for publishing
There's very little overlap between the culture people and the fighting people. There's a lot of reasons for that, of course, but I think one that might play a role is the opportunity cost of writing. If you spend X hours writing a book, you cannot spend X hours bashing. Assuming your Lusternia time is finite, that means you're passing up a significant amount of bashing time for each book. Since death has an experience cost, that might contribute to making culture people not fight, since they don't want to give up culture work to pay that cost.
The solution here is simple. Upon a book leaving the 300 day period and getting approved, and again when/if the book wins prestige the author gets essence. We don't want this to be better than bashing, but we do want it to be comparable. So, look up the average essence per hour gained by a demigod bashing, and multiply that with the length of the book divided by the average words written per hour, and give that much essence per word. You can even round it to follow the same tiers the library points use. Assuming that a person averages 300 words per hour (roughly correct in my experience. Some write faster, some write slower, but some people bash faster than others too.) and an average demi bashes 1 million essence per hour (a number obtained through a very rough survey of exactly one person) we get essence rewards like this:
1000-2499 words: 3 million
2500--5999 words: 6.5 million
6000-9999 words: 18 million
10000+ words: 30 million
That hourly estimate already includes experience modifiers like goldentonic, so those shouldn't modify these gains.
Disregarding things like adjusting the actual scoring that goes into choosing culture winning, I think that there's not much you could do mechanically to improve culture than to add those two things.
EDIT: I want to make sure other library people see this, so @Kalnid @Nimhuire @Savea @Diniah and @Iorwen all need to be tagged.
Any sufficiently advanced pun is indistinguishable from comedy.
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Comments
I dunno how I feel about automated approval, since the general activity of librarians is limited enough that I would feel comfortable assuming that at some points you won't actually have any actively checking for critiques. Maybe that would be infrequent enough to not matter? Eh, would probably be fine.
Re: publishing delays being an issue, I don't really see it(although I do admittedly operate on a rather slower basis than Portius). Yearly growth is erratic at best. I don't really know why authors would care about their book finishing publication(you are paying them beforehand, yes? If you're publishing a book that gets critiqued, that's your fault, not theirs). I can see the necessity for prestige, since recent sch/lit points, but if it's a uniform delay across the basin that's more of an annoyance than a problem.
Concerning experience gains: do you want a level 30 gaining exp at the same rate as a demi? I don't know if it'd really matter, but keep in mind that writing output doesn't really scale with level.
... Man, even as a nihilist that's a whole bunch of devil's advocate.
I don't think I have ever seen a book that was not critiqued by mortals but was rejected on the Divine review process, so it may not even be necessary at all; however, it does seem that it is supposed to be a critical part of the library cycle, so the above idea would enable the whole process to be much smoother.
(Kalnid, the reason for this is simple: It is so that, if you have a book you really want to submit to Scholarly / Prestige, you will know when it will be available instead of sitting around hoping for it to be approved in time for the current cycle)
As to your second part (the experience part), I know that this is one of your pet projects, but I just don't see any need for it. Books written can be submitted for Bardic and net large numbers of credits, which is already an absolutely excellent potential reward for writing. The same amount of time invested in hunting or influencing cannot get you the same number that even placing in the Bardic will achieve. There are also additional in-game credit incentives for publishing that do not exist for the other tasks, but these vary by organization.
PS: No average Demi will ever bash at a rate of 1 million essence per hour. You can achieve / surpass that under limited circumstances (such as a good Astral bash or aetherhunt), but solo hunting will generally be much lower except for a very privileged few. As such, your suggested essence rewards are absolutely insane. 120,000,000 essence is roughly the same as going from level 1 to level 100. Your highest ratio there is one quarter of that rate; four books published could get you Demigod, without doing a single other thing! Plus the credits from submission to Bardics, of course.
----------------------------------
You're also leaving out something which (to me) is far more problematic; the new Library Browse system feels extraordinarily clunky and unwieldy, and makes going through books far more difficult than it should be. Instead of experience added to books, I'd much rather see this change reviewed and something much friendlier implemented in its place.
Experience gain from writing, even when you have a realistic grasp of the average joe demigod's essence /hour figures before bonuses, should never come close. Less risk should always come with less reward, and while I understand and appreciate that writing and storytelling and culture as a whole has a very valued place in the game, it already has its own rewards and benefits elsewhere, it shouldn't be stepping on the ground other activities cover. Ultimately this is a game where to get the most out of your experience, it benefits you to partake in several different areas. Want prestige, culture and the family honour and power it brings? Write books and plays. Want to level up? Go bashing or influencing.
That's not to say I'm against xp for writing, but your figures need drastically toning down to the point where any experience is a nice added bonus, not a staple reason to write.
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
Also agreed that the BROWSE system could do with improvements, but I'm given to understand that there's technical reasons that it has to be the way it is.
The formula I used for experience numbers is E*(L/W) where E=Average essence per hour, L=Length of book, and W=average words per hour. Fill in appropriate rounded values (XP is high, then, but I'm quite confident in 300 words per hour being representative of people who write on the internet, if not Lusternians in particular. In the interest of full disclosure, I write significantly faster than that and would gain proportionally more from this, personally.) whatever those are, and you get what I would consider the appropriate rate. So drop the numbers, but even as they are I don't think they're as excessive as they've been made out to be. Four books to demi, if those books are 10k words each, is most of a novel. That's a very significant amount of time and effort. If there's a worry about this being way too good for early experience for new character it could be (easily?) scaled to level, but I don't think that'd be a common enough problem to matter, really.
I do think you're overstating the general benefits of publishing Bardics aren't guaranteed, after all. If you do the 1k words or more you'll
probably get merit or higher, which is 50 credits plus one quarter of an increasing bonus. Plus every book gets whatever its city offers which ranges from nothing (well, small amounts of gold, which is functionally nothing) to credits equal to the library weight (Hallifax and Mag are tied for highest there, I think) That is more than you get by bashing, but writing enough credits to do much more than get a set of artifact vials is pretty monumental. You get family honour from bashing just like from writing, and an individual book won't have a significant effect on culture scores unless it wins prestige. Bashing's unique side benefit is offerings, which I'll agree are worth way less than the credits, though.
I don't really know about the risk/reward argument for why bashing should be better experience. Personally, I've never bashed anywhere that gaining XP is in question, although that might just be me being conservative about bashing locations. Even when doing things that I know are likely to get me killed, like big astral, I know that the odds of me coming away with a net loss or anything less than a large gain per hour are essentially nil. Influencing, well, I don't think I've ever been shattered by an NPC, but I'm a cloud trill so I think there's basically no risk of that anywhere.
I do feel that the big thing I want to respond to specifically is @Karlach though. I think that XP should absolutely become a staple reason to write. Partly because the existing ones don't work very well for most people, but mostly because I think that having largely separate writer and fighter populations is a bad thing. I don't know if this would do much to help encourage overlap, but I think that overlap would be a good thing. Besides helping to boost the population in both areas (which Lusternia needs because its active population is tiny) but it helps encourage interaction within orgs between those populations. I'm also not concerned with pushing people away from bashing, really. Bashing is terrible. I can't speak for everyone, of course, but if bashing had wound up being presented as the main thing to spend time doing in Lusternia when I was new, I never would have stuck around. It's an unfun grinding mechanic, and I am super in favor of anything that makes it less necessary to do the fun parts of the game.
I understand your "anything but bashing/influencing" gripe, it is a boring mechanic and a repetitive slog grindfest I agree, but writing a book and getting 30 million essence on top of other rewards (Glom's paying silly amounts right now thanks to the Shadowdancers) is skewing the game in a different manner. Why bother doing anything else when all you need to do is write? Why interact with the world when you can get everything you need from the comfort of your desk. If you make any activity a one stop solution for game mechanics, you risk making other things obsolete.
No intent to disrespect here, but I will dismiss your personal experiences with bashing, regards to risk vs reward. Don't compare this to a group astral bash or an aetherhunt, because unless you've 10-15 other people writing a book with you, it's not comparing a solo effort, to a solo effort. The places that you'd have to hunt alone, to generate the same essence as you're asking for from these books, are not risk free, and require far more character investment than a desk, a chair and a journal.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for encouraging writing in different ways, I just don't think this is the way to do it, making it the single best exp/essence generator is unnecessary. If anything in this game should have high amounts of exp attached, it should be quests. If doing various quests (honours and non honours) gave more xp for levelling than bashing, and bashing became a demigod essence generator activity, the game would be much better off.
I don't believe the first reason to write a book should be to get experience, it should be because you want to write the book. Tone down your numbers significantly, and remove the prestige requirement. It should require passing critique (otherwise people will write all sorts of crap) but winning prestige shouldn't be a necessity. That way people are encouraged to write books, and even if they don't win, they get a little something extra out of it. There's few people in this game who couldn't use a little extra essence, and I don't think any of them actually write.
If you really think book writing needs more attraction, how about esteem? That I could get behind, if you can get esteem for chatting someone up or telling them their mother dresses them terribly, how much frigging esteem do you think should be given to someone who wrote the best damn book the Basin has seen in the last two years? Should be a one time infusion that can go way over the 500 limit which you can dump into a figurine. Write books, get esteem for offering (TF's and family honour ticks, woo!)/selling/ or shrines (not that shrine wars are much of a thing anymore) there's possibly other solutions, but making a desk job an essence bomb is something I really can't support.
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
I feel as though I might have been unclear on a few points. So I shall clarify.
1. Reduce the numbers I proposed to whatever is appropriate, as based on that formula. That should put it as equal to bashing, regardless of what that comes to in terms of precise numbers. The whole point of that formula is to prevent skewing the game in favor of writing! I apparently inserted a bad value for essence/hour, but that's an easy fix. Propose a value for that variable based on your experience solo bashing! Actually, given that an editor is involved in the writing process, it should probably be for duo bashing if that's meaningfully different, but I suspect that it is not.
2. Prestige should not be a requirement to get experience from publishing. What I was proposing was that you get one tick of experience for publishing upon approval, and then a second tick if a book wins prestige.
Now, clarifications are done, so discussion can happen. Fair warning, there will be algebra. So, let's talk about why I link fighting and bashing.
When a person dies, they lose essence. Lose too much and you lose levels/demi, which makes you a worse figher and just kind of sucks all around. To avoid that, you have to bash to get more essence. This means in the long run, you have to bash if you want to fight. You can model the cost of being a fighter as things are now in hours of your life as follows :
D=Deaths per fight
C=Essence cost per death
X=Experience per hour of bashing
H=Cost of fighting in hours of bashing
(D*C)/X=H
Fill in values as appropriate. This assumes that the bashing is a net negative in terms of fun, and as such won't be done for its own sake.
Changing either D, C, or X will change H. So if you want to lower the cost of participating in combat, you can either reduce D, reduce C, or raise X. As an interesting point of trivia, while C is constant the newest fighters will tend to have higher D relative to their target priority due to inexperience, and thus have a higher cost of participation in fighting. Probably not optimal for getting people into combat, but I suppose also not terribly relevant to the topic at hand.
Now, you may be asking yourself why I think that is relevant. I shall explain, hypothetical reader in my head. We can presume that all fighters think the cost of fighting (neglecting artifacts, because those are optional and one-time costs) is worth paying. Nonfighters can be broken up into two groups. Those who don't want to fight at all, because they don't like it or for some other reason, and those who would like to fight but think the cost of doing so is too high as calculated above!) is too high. These are the potential fighters that you want to target if you want increased fight participation, and the way to recruit them is to make them think the price is worth paying.
You can model this choice like this, if you like to express things with math.
A=Value of fighting, represented numerically. This is the sum of any mechanical benefits to fighting, any intangible social benefits, and the enjoyment of fighting.
H=Cost of fighting
if A>H, they will fight.
if A<H, the will not fight.
There are, in turn, two ways that I see to do that. The first is to improve fighting, that is to say, make D higher. The rework will hopefully do so, and you can do other things like improving balance to contribute to that. The other option is to make H lower. There's thing an org can do here, like arranging big astral bashes and whatnot.
If you add experience gains to publishing, you get a new cost formula!
D=Deaths per fight
C=Essence cost per death
X=Experience per hour of bashing
H=Cost of fighting in hours of effort
R=Experience per hour of writing
(D*C)/(X+R)=H
Fill in values as before. This gives the player choice to pay the cost of fighting in whichever way they prefer, either bashing or writing. Now, this formula also assumes that writing is, like bashing, a net negative to fun and thus just a way of paying a cost. For most people who are not already writing, I suspect that is the case. However, for people who already are writing but not fighting, it's likely a net gain instead. You can adjust the above formula to account for that by waiting multiplying X and R by their fun values. A negative fun value on a payment methods increases the cost of fighting if you use that to pay, since you dislike doing it, but a positive value reduces it since you like doing it. Positive and negative might be bad words to use to express that, but I don't have better. If you want to input values and do the math, a negative value would be from 0 to.99, a neutral would be 0, and a positive would be greater than one.
You can do the same thing to increase writing. Cost of writing is just the time and effort spent (which varies wildly from person to person based on practice and whatnot) and that cost is compared to the rewards, which amount to bardic entries, any city/guild payouts, any enjoyment that comes from writing itself and any sort of intangible social benefit type things There's nothing you can mechanically to reduce the cost of writing, unlike with fighting, and there's not a lot cities can do reduce it either except having a helpful librarian giving advice. Both cities and mechanics can increase the value of writing, though. Adding experience is just one way to increase the value of writing, and I think it's the best one since it also reduces the cost of combat for a group of players that is almost entirely noncombatants at this point.
That was long and mathy. So here's the short version. Fighting is linked to bashing because bashing is a cost of fighting. You can increase fighting participation by either lowering the cost or increasing the value of fighting. There's lots of ways to do both, but one way to decrease the cost is to add experience to books, since the people who write generally don't consider writing to be a significant cost to begin with!
All of that kind of addresses the point about writing because you want to write as opposed to experience gain. They're all reasons to write, and they all play into the determination of writing be worth doing or not. I'm disinclined to weigh one as more important than any other for that reason.
Adding esteem for writing also increases the value of writing. I don't know if you could make it give enough to be relevant without destroying the market for esteem, though. On the other hand, it totally fits from a flavor perspective, which I like. I think it's worse than giving XP because it does less to contribute to lowering the price of fighting, but it's certainly a thing to consider.
Quests should absolutely give more experience too. I don't think I've even noticed XP gain on a quest since I was a little newbling, and quests are aboslutely more engaging than bashing and htus a better way to get XP from a gameplay perspective.
Having scholarly/literary winners suddenly pick up a nice fat chunk of it once every 24 days isn't going to murder the economy.
I can appreciate that time/effort should generate some kind of reward, but as writing has its own rewards, it shouldn't also add equal amounts of xp/essence generation. Otherwise one would ask what's the point of bashing when we can all write books and get even more for our time?
At that point while I can see some people with big doe eyes going "That would be wonderful" you'd end up with an entire chunk of the game's system being neglected. I dislike any aspect of a game being taken and tossed aside, I already weep for the abject lack of aethership combat outside of the odd flare over flares, and will firmly oppose anything that makes a section of a game obsolete. Make it a % of (it doesn't have to be a small number like 10%, heck even 2/3rd-3/4 of average joe Demigod would be fair in my mind) and it'd be fair, you can write books and get advantages, but if you want to spend the same god knows how many hours staring at scrolling text, trying to keep yourself alive (not everyone can faceroll like some of us) and competing at times for mobs being alive, then it works out better.
Out of curiosity, what's your idea of the average time it takes someone in hours, to come up with a 10,000 word novel, write it and prep it for submission (assuming the librarian doesn't do the edit work?)
Also, and I really apologise for using this I'm not going to stand on it as a point of argument, there's this overbearing feeling that this gripe would be less of a gripe if you weren't 91, and didn't have to dredge through those last 9 levels. I understand, they're an absolute slog and no they're not fun unless you tank yourself with a crap ton of XP buffs and jump on the XP train to demitown with an aetherhunt or astral bash, or you've someone who can keep you alive and mass murder everything at the same time. It just seems that's the large point of the basis for wanting experience, above all else for writing.
This is why I suggested quests. More people can easily get into quests, than can get into writing, and if it rewards people at pre-demigod levels far better than it does now that'd be awesome. Post demigod is a different matter (you'd just get a group of people locking down certain quests and farming them) but you'd have other options there then. Speaking of other options, why just more xp for writing? There's other aspects of the game that could also use a nice boost in popularity, the stage for one and then there's other things that aren't even culture related.
Also one other large concern for giving anything a large chunk of essence all at once, when you hit diminishing returns, static essence amounts that cannot be modified by xp bonuses also aren't affected by xp maluses. If you deliver a large chunk of xp to someone over the 70 million cap, it will be more than you can bash in the same amount of time. Even at a 2/3rds-3/4 reduced rate, it will be more, the DR scales quickly. If this was implicated, regardless of however much essence it gives in the end, it must be affected by the same caps and penalties everything else is.
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
@Karlach first things first. I've had a fabulous idea. Esteem should absolutely be given for publishing, but it shouldn't go in the normal reserves. No, that is insufficiently cool. Instead, the player should get a special book item titled after whatever they published that can be offered for the appropriate amount of essence, either by them or by someone else. It's mechanically the same thing, but fluffier in the extreme. I love the idea of sacrificing books to divine like @Isune instead of corpses or figurines.
If there are concerns with the publishing being too good if XP equal to bashing is added, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to set it to 3/4 or 2/3 (or some other such number I suppose, but I like round numbers) of that amount of time in demigod bashing. I'm not sure setting them equal in XP would necessarily stop bashing, on the basis that they go into fairly different niches and that some people are unlikely to write regardless of benefits, but if that's deemed a significant risk it's absolutely reasonable to reduce XP to compensate for it.
I think that stage stuff should generate XP too, but frankly I don't understand stage mechanics very well so I'm not in a great place to make suggestions for it besides that it should happen.
Writing speed though, that I can comment on with some authority. Now, understand that I'm giving numbers that are, in my experience, representative of a person on the internet who writes as a hobby. I'm also giving numbers with the assumption that the person is writing to what I call the Lusternia standard, which is trying to be good enough to compete in prestige and bardics but not putting in the effort required to make it professionally publishable. I feel very secure in these numbers, which come from both personal experience as a freelance translator and writer and a couple semesters spent teaching writing. That said, I cannot say with any degree of certainty where Lusternia's population, specifically, falls relative to hobbyist writers as a whole.
You're looking at about 300 words per hour, but there's a pretty huge degree of variation on that. A lot of it is practice. For scale, I produce about 700 per hour. This includes all editing that the author should do.
There's a few other things that need to be considered for writing speed, though. As a rule of thumb, the longer a book is, the more time it takes to plan it, which functionally reduces the words per hour. This doesn't become noticeable until you hit the 5-6k mark. You're looking at maybe 250 for the really long ones, like the 10k books. Furthermore, genre matters a lot for determining writing speed. Adventures tend to be faster to write than others, for example.
So including the author's editing time, I'll say that a 10k book takes a normal person about 40 hours to produce, plus or minus 5 hours for genre. A 1k book will take 3-4 hours.
The editor (as distinct from the author. You really really want an outside editor if you don't want your book to be awful) will spend between a quarter and a fifth of that time on it, assuming the hobbyist average and that it's be edited to the Lusternia standard. This is more variable, since some authors will want to spend more time on this stage than others.
Moving onto diminishing returns, I had not thought of that. It'd be best if they diminish like everything else, if that's possible. I assume that setting this up would just involve taking whatever the system is for making truefavours give out experience when they wear off and triggering it with different numbers whenever things get published.
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Now, motivation for wanting this. I probably am biased by the awfulness that is 80-100 bashing. But on the other hand, demi isn't really useful to me unless I become a fighter anyway. And guys, I would love to join in the combat scene. It looks really great. But I cannot justify the cost in time to do it. This would allow me to change that, and that would be great! I'd love that! I can't say if it would do the same for anyone else, but that's absolutely a position of bias for me in wanting this, and specifically wanting it on the library.
On the whole, though, I think that the biggest problem Lusternia as a game has is that the things which do the most to contribute to character advancement are the least interesting. The parts of the game that are fun and engaging (Combat, culture, questing depending on preferences) do next to nothing to advance a character. You have to go to the boring part, the bashing, for that. So you have a system set up where if you want to do most of the fun parts of the game, you have to pay for it with a tedious slog. I feel like that probably contributes to low populations, and I would love to see it fixed. XP for writing is only one part of that, of course. Ideally all of those engaging parts would have comparable rewards to bashing, and then each would be its own niche. You'd pick what you did based on what you found interesting. The engaging parts would be for the people who found each individual one interesting, and that would leave bashing for people who wanted to advance without doing something as difficult as questing or as competitive as combat or culture. That would be a great system. Probably a pipe dream, but I think it'd be great.
I will say this, Combat and bashing are not the same at all. PvP is not a source of experience (more likely going to lose not gain xp), bashing is. Bashing is not a form of organizational conflict (one could argue the domothing stages are, but that's more filler to the PvP side).
If you want the rewards of books to be comparable to combat rewards, you're basically asking for negative essence gains.
Just saying.
I agree the levelling system feels like a slog, I'm taking the discussion we started here on quests and running over a post idea at the moment I'll throw up later that would also address that issue. As to the rest, I feel I've contributed as much as I can here so I'll bow out and leave it for others to debate. Thanks for discussing feedback and having an honest approach.
Though if it is as Siam said, if it's been raised before, it'll have to be a great argument to overturn whatever reasons were given to reject it before.
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
If you're interested in combat, Portius, you should use the credits you get from whatever and trans your guild skills, then learn some relevant other things, and then start saving for combat arties. Most people have to shell out cash for that kind of nonsense, but your writing prowess allows you a different, if slower option!
Obviously I'm not saying that culture experience should be the same as combat experience. Likewise, I'm not saying that combat and bashing are the same, only that they're linked. I'm not entirely sure where that idea started, in fact. I'm saying that it should be on par with bashing, and that in a side note on motivation combat would, ideally, also give experience and be a mode of progression, which it currently is not.
@Iasmos I could not, in fact, do that. Firstly because I think we've moved beyond taking the values in the first post as sound (discuss the formula, not the roughly estimated variables I inserted for the example!) but also because the posts are not the sort of thing that could be published in game. The content precludes it, of course, but for reasons of quality I also shouldn't. I'm going to take the liberty of explaining why that is in hopes of making it clear what sort of efforts go into writing, on the basis that a lot of people probably don't know what all goes into it.
They're unedited, so lots of typos. This one is interesting, because while it's what most people think of when they start thinking of editing, it's also the least important thing.
They're unorganized. This is a bigger concern, if you're looking at quality in a book. I just sort of threw out ideas and explanations in no particular order without any particular connection between them in response to points raised. That's fine in an early design and discussion thing like this, but it's terrible for publishing and it's often a thing I have to correct in essay-style books.
The tone is inappropriate for publishing, too. These would be a scholarly, and for that you really want something more formal than this.
Notice how none of those concerns address the content of the posts themselves. Those are all things that you have to consider when publishing in addition to the content of whatever you're writing, and they're often bigger contributors to the time spent writing than the content is.
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I like the idea of having some sort time period in which books are automatically improved, with or without Divine review. I have run into the problem of having published books which I planned to submit to prestige, but they have not yet been approved by the Divine, and therefore cannot be submitted. It's a little frustrating as a player, although I completely understand that the Divine have lives outside of Lusternia. It's not always reasonable to expect them to review a book within a timely manner, depending on what has been going on in their lives at present. We all have duties and responsibilities to attend to outside of the game.
That said, it would help with the workload if the books do not have to be reviewed by the Divine at all, freeing up more time for them to focus on other things, however, I see that as something unlikely to happen. It also presents the concern of having that responsibility rely solely on the librarians. We are only human and all make mistakes.
So, with that in mind, I think that @Xenthos suggestion of having them undergo a period of time in which they *can* be reviewed by a Divine, before they automatically pass the review (provided they have no critiques) is the best way to go about changing that system.
As for the experience gain, I am not entirely certain how I feel about that proposal. I do like the idea of having a standardised in-game reward for writing books and plays, beyond what rewards are agreed upon by the commune/city. However, I don't really foresee how this would be a viable or reasonable option, simply because books and plays by nature *do* take a considerable amount of time to write and write well, compared to bashing or influencing. A higher experience gain for each word written seems like a solution to this concern, however, that leaves the concern of having it be a balanced system.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it has a bigger effect on Hallifax than anywhere else, and through that on me than anyone else, simply because we/I publish so much more than the other libraries. Right now I have books in there that have been waiting for over a month to be approved. This annoys me for the mechanical reasons previously mentioned, but also at an emotional level.
I've accepted the fact that culture doesn't matter to the vast majority of people here, and most books will be read by only a few people at most. But as an author here (and maybe I just have a fragile ego, I dunno. I have to acknowledge that possibility.) I like to at least pretend that they matter a little bit, both in terms of being competitive and value as books. The problem is, that's really hard to do when your books are getting ignored for that long. It feels awful, because not only does that set of work get ignored by most of the playerbase, it's also being ignored by the people who set up the system and decided at some point in the distant past the culture things are supposed to matter! And this happens a lot. Not as bad as it has been recently, but there's often long delays in approval that I've had to resolve by issuing. It sucks to be as emotionally invested in culture in Lusternia as the avid combatants are in fighting. You have all the feelings of being ignored from not getting things approved that they get from things not getting rebalanced, but you have a much smaller grouo of people that care about it. This is a problem, and I have no idea how to fix it at all. I think the best thing I've seen with it is @Daraius doing his yearly posts to Hallifax, and that does help, but it doesn't do all that much for the overwhelming feelings of being ignored and unloved.
So, yeah. That's why that's a problem, even beyond the mechanical ones. It disgruntles at least one of the culture people.
+1 for culture for city designs! Or family honour!
Generally speaking, the barriers of entry to combat are wide and varied, but game experience (ie. levels) is not one of them. Plenty of low level characters have participated successfully in combat, and plenty of demigods have failed. The argument that improving more avenues to gain experience (or increasing experience gain itself) will lead to more combat has no substance. You can make every character in the game a demigod right now, and participation in the combat scene is unlikely to see a significant change. If the biggest argument for adding exp to writing is that it can lead to a higher combat participation rate, then you'll want to think of another reason, because that's not helping your case at all.
There's only one reason to change the rewards for writing, publishing, prestige and bardics system. That the rewards are insufficient. Are they? I don't know for sure, since I don't write in Lusternia, but as an active combatant, my only piece of advice is that exp is the least attractive reward you can offer me for writing, even assuming the rate is higher than bashing. If I want to grind for essence or exp, I'll grind for it. When I write, I'd expect something far more significantly rewarding for my time and effort than exp, thank you.