I'm not sure how Guilds are supposed to always have background vnpcs (a fact that past GL's have tried to use to immunize themselves from criticism due to understaffing) yet also the 2GL is personally vetting every single promotion and promotion ceremony in that guild (by anything other than proverb...

There's a very good reason for that culture of 'doing your time'. No, there isn't. The restrictions you describe, especially around cyan players, are strictly personal decisions and interpretations unless stated otherwise by Staff or code. Guild leaders are allowed to permit, deny, promote, and dem...

My opinion is that Guild promotion culture is often unnecessarily bureaucratic to begin with. Many seekers have obvious experience in the lore, mechanics, etc of the Guild they want to join. Despite this, there is a very strong culture of making sure everyone "does their time" in Ranks 1 and 2, even...

I'm putting a note on wax as a separate aside. Players who have used and experimented with it know more about it than is let on in public, out of a sense of sportsmanship and to protect game secrets. I am one of those players. We are essentially being told by everyone who's in favor of the current s...

Hi Kinaed, regarding teaching: The reason I call out learn speed is how many layers of learning have to be done to pick up one spell. You usually end up having to do multiple teach threads: One for moon, one for element, one for spell. Mage skills are the only skills with these properties: -Potentia...

Some of the most prolific and game-wide impacting mages as far as I remember were from them manus-off "eras", so I don't think that's the core of the problem. In the end it's relatively easy to have a safe meeting/hiding spot with being able to get covert phomes with unorthodox entries, and then us...

And it seems to perpetually cycle to the idea that -other mages- should be the ones doing these things or that someone else will. I don't know why the aversion to any kind of support for Mages is so strong here. I have tried to kickstart this across multiple characters now. It does not happen for a...

I know this is just trying to shoot the moon, but this makes me wish there could be a review of dual guilding. With the pbase so small, making every character hyperspecialize not only limits covert players, but means it's really hard to cover all of the "essential services" ingame like Merchanting a...

I think if the time and risk investment of magic lessons were more favorable, phomes would see more use here. But the impression I get is that mutually revealing each other to the other invests too much risk for the minimal trickle of progression you get from lessons by general pbase standards.

Thanks for the clarification on wax. There are other reasons for the dearth of mage RP of late and I hope to see them discussed as well.