squakhawk 7298 Popular Post Share Posted November 5, 2022 Hey everyone o/ It's about time for another Story Team Update. This update will cover current changes we're implementing alongside this post such as Alchemy and soon, the Lore Criteria/Guides rewrite. As well, recent team activity and recruitment! Recruitment We’ll start this one off with a call for new members. We’re recruiting across all sects of the team, though focusing on event team members and builders in specific. Wanting more thorough eventlines, additional actors, and people to work with Antag in the coming months, Event absolutely could use your help. Builders much the same - with events comes build requests, always. If you are a talented builder looking to get paid some mina for your work that players get to see and interact with, the application form is linked below. If you think you’re qualified for either of these positions, please put up an application! You can find the form attached here. Alchemy With that out of the way, we’ll tackle the elephant in the room first, with Alchemy. Alchemy has been a big talking point in all facets of the server. We’ve heard countless calls to action about the state of alchemical abilities, with the overwhelming majority agreeing that it is too strong and too bloated, and needs to be brought down to earth. You can think of this as a mini-overhaul of Alchemy. The changes that have been just implemented are as follows; Across the board, potions now take one extra emote to activate. We have decided to add a ‘priming’ emote for potions, which requires an independent emote to mix the concoction. (Draw → Prime → Throw). After the ‘priming’ emote, the potion in question must be used within two emotes or else it becomes dormant. A dormant potion is not useless – it will only push you back to the second emote in your chain of three, requiring priming once more. Though they affect all combat related potions, these changes were specifically designed with tanglefoot and blasting potions in mind. However, it should be noted that blasting potions cannot fall dormant. If you prime your blasting potion and do not throw it within one emote (rather than the typical two), then your potion will explode. Think of this as pulling the pin off of a grenade, except you can’t hold the lever down and delay its blast. You prime the blasting potion, you best be ready for an explosion. Be sure to check the lore for clarification! We have clarified the “maybes” and “almosts” in description for blasting potion damage. In addition, we have made it more clear as to the effect of glass and shrapnel emitted from our favourite medieval grenades. Tanglefoot has been reduced mildly in its overall effect. Not only will it take time to come into effect – rather than instantly entrapping the victim – it can also be resisted with proper counters and precautions. Be sure to check the lore for clarification! Null Arcana is the last on our list of targeted changes. It will now break anything it is applied to, save lunarite, after a single use, and will only interrupt mages for two emotes. Constructs can expect to be stunned for one emote too. Be sure to check the lore for clarification! Mages are affected by these changes too. Alchemy potions now become inert and unusable until two emotes past the disconnection/cessation of magic from the user. Alchemy bloat is another big topic of contention among the story team. While having more lore is not always a bad thing, it can be rather intimidating and confusing for a budding alchemist to venture into the feat with several duplicate and redundant potions. As such, we are going to be merging some potions in an effort to streamline things. For now, these are what the ST has found to merge: 1. Pain Reducer & Headache Reliever from Medpack 1 & Medpack 3 2. Tranquil Draught, Heart Calming Solution from Medpack 2 & Medpack 3 3. Paco Powder, Contact Purifier, Instant Water from Trade Alchemy, Medpack 1, Lector Alchemy The amount of reagents and herbs can also be confusing, as they aren’t organized too neatly. Alongside our new guides project that you can read about further down the post, we’re going to be creating a botanical compendium as a one-stop shop for all your herb and reagent needs. With the creation of this in mind, we’ll be reducing the amount of open reagents with the release of the next map, and trying to explore more interesting and thematic variants rather than just plants. We're also currently looking at a way to implementing a submission form/type unique to Alchemy which makes it more akin to Short-CD MArts rather than lorepieces. Primarily, this prevents the various theme-packs that come from alchemy and a more character-unique or tailored potion. Not to mention, ability to attribute their creation and association to certain player characters. This would combat bloat and prevent the far-to-wide niche that Alchemy has been overtaking in the last year or so. It had been planned to implement alongside these changes, but given current team reform, it has been decided to put it off for the time being. This will wrap up the alchemy section of our update. Potions with outdated descriptions are still usable as long as you follow the new guidelines. Feel free to contact a story team member and make an sreq to have your descriptions updated if you feel necessary. This is overall to better balance for CRP, as most forms of combat on the server (ranged combat, magics, melee, etc) where falling behind in comparison to the quick action and sheer versatility that came with Alchemy which is an otherwise inconsequential feat. Guides, Lore Criteria, and New Player Lore In their current state, lore guides are in a very odd place. Some pieces have beautiful, in depth guides that help explain the lore, while others simply copy-and-paste the original lore piece and remove some of the fluff of the lore. Most of this can be attributed to the lack of criteria for lore guides. As such, we will be introducing a new set of criteria for guides. This will be more relaxed to help ease the process of creating a guide. Expect to see a format posted with the Lore Criteria update that should be out by the end of the month. Tackling guides is one of the ways we hope to make it easier for new players to join the server. LOTC has over ten years of stories, history, and lore to experience and explore. While this is an amazing feat in and of itself, it can be very intimidating for someone who’s joining in after those ten years! The story team hopes to remedy this fact with the ‘New Player Lore’ project. A comprehensive, surface-level dive into various lore pieces of the server; things that we think all new players should know and be made aware of. We’ve been progressing well with this project which should hopefully be done by the end of the year. We’re curious about the ideas of our new starting location, and may need some help with the older ones. If you’re familiar with Aeldin and want to potentially help out, let us know! There are some people on the project already pretty familiar, but it’s always good to have more assistance in hopes of clearing up the holes and working out the kinks. If this sounds like something you can help with, please reach out to story management or leave a comment on this post. Aengudaemonica To those unfamiliar, Aengudaemonica is a big, fancy word that us lore writers like to use to make us feel intelligent. In general, it refers to the pantheon of LOTC, with the gods, goddesses, and deities that make up our world. In recent times, we’ve implemented an embargo which prevents new deities or deity-adjacent things such as realms or magics. This is because we are undergoing a major shift in direction with our views upon deities, along with re-organizing all our old lore from a decade of mistreatment. Not to mention, all the written, unwritten, shelved, unshelved, and questionably implemented lore around them. Previously, these supposedly omniscient & omnipresent entities have been largely absent in interacting with our world. The being that gives your character their magical abilities or faith should be more than just a passing name in an in-game history book. We’re hoping to shift to a system that fosters curious lore and interactions, which provokes player interaction and roleplay. An enrichment to a world that otherwise mostly lacks this very important part of core fantasy. While we don’t want to set a release date we probably won’t meet, we are doing our best to make sure it comes as soon(™) as possible. Miscellaneous Updates It’s no secret that loremags/amendments (and their updates), and sreqs, have seen a slower turnaround time in recent months. With many of our members focusing on IRL obligations like work and school, we’re unable to pick up and review these things as fast as we have in times past. We are working on mitigating that problem, however – and one of those ways is by recruiting new members. If you glossed over the mention above, we’re recruiting across all sects of the team. If you’d like to help us out on the story team, now is as good a time as ever to submit an application, which you can find here. We’re also reducing frontload with lore and seeing what we can do to make our systems quicker and more expedient so that there is less turnaround. The drop in activity is not only in our lore sect of the team, either. ET and BT have seen reduced activity lately for the aforementioned reasons. Though our map events, and regularly scheduled events in general are still continuing well, we’re always working to improve and do better. Story Team Enforcement has undergone a rework, too. Our last system saw varying degrees of quality in regards to punishments and investigations, so our new and updated system seeks to set a baseline of expectations and more checks/balances to have more consistent action. Lastly, we’ve done some small changes to the lore section on the forums frontpage. Now, you can see all the categories from hotlinks immediately visible. As well, we have made a quick link to the Lore Applications section which is normally buried deeply into the applications section of the forums for quick and easy access. If you have any suggestions on making the lore forums more visible or easy to navigate, please let us know. That’s all we have otherwise, thank you for reading! Please let us know any comments or concerns you might have in the comments below, privately, or in the ST Discord. Thanks! 40 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
BobBox 3200 Share Posted November 5, 2022 Looking forward to event interviews, please apply :) 4 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMW01 208 Share Posted November 5, 2022 nice 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lockages 489 Share Posted November 5, 2022 so what you're saying is if i have a blasting potion in my inventory and emote jumping a few times, i turn into a live bomb? i love this. 11 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
MaltaMoss 1758 Share Posted November 5, 2022 @squakhawkOk so like hypothetically I send you another Pub Gift and you give me greentag so I can shitpost in your chats It's a good offer trust me 4 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord_of_losers 950 Share Posted November 5, 2022 scions stay winning 3 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
_Sheylo_ 979 Share Posted November 5, 2022 sadge 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qizu 4036 Share Posted November 5, 2022 you have 56 team members already. . . o_O ((also me when I've offered to build for the server multiple times now but don't even get an interview LOL)) 3 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
rukio 8909 Share Posted November 5, 2022 Based alchemy nerfs. 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morigung-oog 2281 Share Posted November 5, 2022 THANK GOD. Finally my char can interact with papa Llahir (possibly) 3 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nozgoth 2897 Share Posted November 5, 2022 awesome update, I love the story team! keep up the good work! 1 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
WOWJ 2724 Share Posted November 5, 2022 10 minutes ago, squakhawk said: Though they affect all combat related potions, these changes were specifically designed with tanglefoot and blasting potions in mind. BASED? 3 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
TreeSmoothie 4851 Share Posted November 5, 2022 potions were 2 emotes this whole time!??! I've spent an extra emote for nothing!?! I guess I was ahead of the times 4 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reckless Banzai Screamer 11508 Share Posted November 5, 2022 -1 didn't remove blasting potions 5 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spoopy_Duck 1201 Share Posted November 5, 2022 I am ready for all the friendly fire blasting potion kills 2 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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