Wronging the Rights of the Past [Snow Elven Removal]

[Shiredom 1545]

This is depressing, just why?

 

I understand why you remove some other things, but just why? Why must you make us suffer Story Team, Why must you make us suffer more pain than we already have in these past months? 

W H Y ?

(also this isn’t a meme, don’t hurt me mod team)

Edited September 25, 2020 by Mali_ker

[Auriel_ 651]

woah

[Ioannis 1478]

Hello there friends of Malinor!

 

I would like to say a few things as LT = bad people.

 

The Snow Elven lore was never a “cannon” one, as their origin was never really cannonised to begin with. RP wise, nobody knows how they came to be, the royal family (Tundraks) have their story to promote their propaganda and then the rest of the people have their own stories. It was a legend of its own, a fairytale for the children. So yes, you dont have to tell us about that but I doubt you even had a single snow elf in those discussions. 

 

After the whole origin fairytales, you state that the rest of the snow elves must re-make their appearance to fit the High Elven height standards. I dont agree with this at all and it goes against what the server is all about. We are not talking about a group that just appeared on LotC. We are talking about a group that has been around for 3-4 years now, for good or bad. You cannot force them to simply undo all their progress just because you are doing your usual “MUST PURGE” business. The snow elves do originate from the High Elves but due to them living in the snow, they became “buffer” as they have to survive in the snowy weather, it takes effort to do anything in a place where its cold all the time. Their lifespam also decreased due to their living condition, not due to some curse or any of that. All the above is called evolution, when you take something from its home and you place it somewhere else, it will either evolve to match the new place or it will die. Sadly, the snow elves evolved instead of dying.

 

Overall, I believe that you just handled this poorly. I dont see an issue with people wanting to RP something different. I wont mention other races as thats scummy and not helpful but you should truly focus on other things that are more urgent than wasting your time and the time of lots of people who spent countless hours making the Snow Elves something fun. If this is about to reduce the amount of races and sub-races a new player has to sort through, sure, remove the snow elves from that. There is only a handful of people who enjoy RPing as them. But you should not force people who spent years on their characters to change them just because you felt like it. 

 

X

 

 

 

 

[tgrt 744]

This post should be deleted.

It erases years of a community with a few paragraphs.
There has been no discussion with the community on this, and it’s irresponsible to completely remove years of built up lore out of the blue.

This is a punch to the gut to all of the snow elven community and it has been the nail on the coffin for many players I personally know.

Do they need better lore? Make new changes before deleting the old ones. 
Why cut off the whole limb? Why not just heal the wounds? Bad doctors do that.

Snelfs aren’t a lost cause- They offer unique rp opportunities and removing them as a subrace for so few reasons isn’t how things should go.

[Fekr 418]

This post is a failure at all levels of staff, I only hope the remaining LoTC player-base can see how bad of a job the staff continue to do. Its only a matter of time until another race is screwed over. The Snow Elf community itself is unanimus in agreeing that our lore is sub-par and many changes needed to happen, which is why many of us were in the midst of rewriting and refining new and better lore, the attempts to reach out with staff has been met with no response or complete boycotting. There wouldn’t be this sheer amount of anger in our community if we had gotten any communication from staff at all.

 

We know how much staff hates our group, how could we not know by now since in the past three years have been the target of discrimination and the lack of equal treatment over the multiple races, we are well aware that event team never came near our nation even once over the past two years of Arcas, we’re well aware that CT monks who held prominent positions in human cities would use their position to guide our new snow elf players to human cities rather than their racial home, we’re well aware that world team has no interest in fixing our city or even giving any pointers, we’re completely aware that even though many of the rare ores had descriptions that perfectly fit our tile yet zero were actually placed inside of the nation tile, we’re aware that staff cared soo little that they literally put the wood elf nation 15 blocks from our walls and our community understand all of this yet even still soo many of us chose to RP as this race and what we get in return is the loss of our racial status.

 

To explain why losing racial status is soo crippling: The loss thereof is our small stream of new players that keeps every group on the server going into the future, to remove our racial status after three years of OOC & inRP history is a full attack on our community at large, staff understand that without new players the Snow Elf groups die and is why we’re witnessing this post right now.

 

It should come as no surprise at the sheer amount of players that have left LoTC over these years because of staff neglect and it should also come as no surprise that this post has made many question whether this server can be trusted to facilitate their RP and their conjointed dynamic stories.

Edited September 26, 2020 by beng363

[ScreamingDingo 16795]

7 hours ago, Ioannis said:

Hello there friends of Malinor!

 

I would like to say a few things as LT = bad people.

 

The Snow Elven lore was never a “cannon” one, as their origin was never really cannonised to begin with. RP wise, nobody knows how they came to be, the royal family (Tundraks) have their story to promote their propaganda and then the rest of the people have their own stories. It was a legend of its own, a fairytale for the children. So yes, you dont have to tell us about that but I doubt you even had a single snow elf in those discussions. 

 

After the whole origin fairytales, you state that the rest of the snow elves must re-make their appearance to fit the High Elven height standards. I dont agree with this at all and it goes against what the server is all about. We are not talking about a group that just appeared on LotC. We are talking about a group that has been around for 3-4 years now, for good or bad. You cannot force them to simply undo all their progress just because you are doing your usual “MUST PURGE” business. The snow elves do originate from the High Elves but due to them living in the snow, they became “buffer” as they have to survive in the snowy weather, it takes effort to do anything in a place where its cold all the time. Their lifespam also decreased due to their living condition, not due to some curse or any of that. All the above is called evolution, when you take something from its home and you place it somewhere else, it will either evolve to match the new place or it will die. Sadly, the snow elves evolved instead of dying.

 

Overall, I believe that you just handled this poorly. I dont see an issue with people wanting to RP something different. I wont mention other races as thats scummy and not helpful but you should truly focus on other things that are more urgent than wasting your time and the time of lots of people who spent countless hours making the Snow Elves something fun. If this is about to reduce the amount of races and sub-races a new player has to sort through, sure, remove the snow elves from that. There is only a handful of people who enjoy RPing as them. But you should not force people who spent years on their characters to change them just because you felt like it. 

 

X

 

 

 

 

 

Just as a reference for what has actually changed, I’ll show you two screenshots comparing the High Elf and Snow Elf specifications.

 

 

 

The weight categories fluctuate, but the heights remain basically the exact same and there’s simply the loss of ‘silver eyes’ within the appearance. The Snow Elven Origin /was/ a canon one, but done in the way you said. The actual loss of this and having it RP’d as it was prior changes absolutely nothing to the approach of how Snow Elves roleplay their origins and culture. Since a majority of them barely acknowledged the main issue I was cleaning up lore wise, which was around Wyvurn and Word Altar implementation. There’s a bunch of other reasons which have been stated above, but that is one of the many that were taken into consideration. Snelves as a race existed prior to the origins, with buff sniping players from the helves six months before getting stomped by the next coalition that saw them rise and fall.

The whole thing is that the appearance stuff is very arbitrary, but part of the conditions of us reverting the race back to High Elven Blood. In reality, the appearance change does /absolutely/ nothing to characters and people can continue to roleplay them as they were prior. It’s not just a ‘must purge’ thing, it’s us having to clean up the messes of various lore administrations accepting lore that should’ve never been done. Racial Nation status was lost this map, the snelves are able to still roleplay their culture, military and religion however they wish. They are simply now not protected by OOC barriers of being a race.

Snow Elves have been an outlier of subraces and are hard to compare to Highlander/Heartlander, since those two are cultures with a few distinctions that are broken down into various different sub-types and cultures within. Heartlanders and Highlanders aren’t really a “sub-race”, but they are a relic of the Aegis/Asulon “three sub-types” that were enforced to all descendant races.

 

They were

Dwarf → Mountain, Cave, Forest

Elf → High, Wood, Dark

Human → Highlander, Heartlander, Farfolk

Orc → Uruk, Olog, Goblin

Out of these, they were all subsects of the various children, though the snow elves are more akin to the Kharajyr or Hou-Zi in terms of their actual origins and not a sub-race of Malin’s Children at all. They were aengudaemonic mutants taken from High Elves that somehow became super cold resistant and muscular through the plethora of word altars and barely canonised aengudaemon that was the obsession of the time (Wyvurn).

 

The main change that people will realise is that simply, snelves lose their ‘subrace’ persona card tag. Everything else remains the same, the appearance tag was placed on that to just ensure that people knew they were reverted to high elf blood, but otherwise I believe basically all snow elves fall under what a high elf can look like, if anything they get more options and variations for their character while being grouped up with them. Snow Elves still exist as a culture and a playerbase, snow elves still exist within IRP, people can RP them as a race or a distinct culture, as they have done for the various years even prior to the acceptance of them as a ‘subrace’. Nothing actually changes, instead its a backdoor cleaning of lore and trimming things that should’ve never been accepted.

Once again – Nothing Changes

[TrueBananaz 46]

This is just dumb. We’ve had Snow Elves for I don’t even now how long now, and then with no warning, yall are suddenly like “Nope. They don’t exist. Never have existed.”

 

This is not it.

 

Also, I keep on seeing people saying stuff like “it doesn’t matter; you can still RP the culture”. If that’s the case, then what’s the point of getting rid of the subrace in general then?

Edited September 26, 2020 by TrueBananaz

[Fwied 301]

1 hour ago, ScreamingDingo said:

 

Human → Highlander, Heartlander, Farfolk

 

smh, Those are cultures not races. smh

 

lol 

[𝙻𝚞𝚟 XO 3062]

On 9/24/2020 at 10:57 PM, TimberBuff said:

I don’t see the issue some have. Their culture exists, their city existed in history, they’re just removing them as a dedicated subrace. You don’t need a subrace to rp a certain culture.

This. Not super familiar with he said she said, or what they didn’t say, but nothing was really all the visually different from High Elves at all nor was I ever really faced with any sort of defining culture that set them apart from just being liberal High Elves; which you can just be without needing to be a whole subrace. 
 

Yes, the argument of Heartlander, Highlander, and Farfolk can be met with argument, but the point being made is that there are three distinct cultures that are vastly different from one another and are also met with apparent visual distinguishing factors. 
 

The point that’s trying to be made is that there isn’t anything in the visuals or strong enough unique culture that would be enough to really classify them as their own race from the Wood Elves, High Elves, and Dark Elves.

[Harold 3239]

What a shame.

[Monkee 7356]

 

[monkeypoacher 6993]

I get that removing small niches is telanir’s 200iq silicon valley brain genius idea to improve player retention but it’s also really, deeply gay. Nobody cares that the Snow Elves’ origin lore was “ham-fisted.” People complained about this six years ago. Snow elves survived multiple attempts to remove their race through role-play and drove multiple massive player wars, developing a rich history through real, in-character events. This easily overshadows any supposed contrivance in their origin story. Their existence was an uphill battle and they earned the right to be a part of LoTC’s canon. Not as a “culture,” which is something inactive, detached Lore Team members have been suggesting since 2014, but as a player race. This decision pisses in the face of anyone who’s role-played on this server before 2020. Truly disgraceful. 

 

Snow Elves are inseparable from LoTC’s player-written history, and unironically more compelling and well-written than any half-baked plagiaristic CA race the story team could fart out. I just hope that the powers that be on this server make life as hard for whatever race the ST comes up with next as it was for the ‘fenn. It’s only fair.

 

P.S. remove “heartlander” and “highlander.” There was never any lore written to generate these distinctions, Telanir invented them out of whole cloth for Nexus profession modifiers. “Highlanders” don’t exist, either as a culture or a subrace, and their only purpose is to let Haense con new players into believing that they hate Oren. 

 

P.P.S. The fact that people have incorporated the nonsense words “heartlander” and “highlander” into their role-play is proof that subrace tags are deeply important for role-play. They are the first thing that players see when they join and are able to Lathe of Heaven political, cultural, and racial conflicts onto the server. You can’t say “nothing changes” while removing the Snow Elf tag and have it be anything more than a smug misdirection.

[Skippy 2466]

So if nothing changes like you seem to like to emphasize, why... change something? All this does is pisses off some people on Minemen. Very disappointing, but not unexpected.

[bickando 3389]

Okay but can I get an answer as to why you guys just deleted the lore instead of making a story around it.

[BonesOfTheEarth 1563]

I’ve played a high elf with silver eyes all these years the LT can finally gas me