Backup Lago

All employment is paying for time. If you want to charge people then charge people, but if you're charging professional fees then people'll expect professional quality (looking at the portfolio you have online you've got that covered) and professional behaviour. And posting block cap forum rants is not professional. If children offer you worthless ingame stuff, politely tell them that you can't eat that. Don't post a rant up at everyone else at the forums because it tears your professional image down like nothing else. It makes you come across as an amateur, a hobbyist, and that makes people less willing to enter a business arrangement with you, which is what this is. You don't have to work for free, but neither to people have to buy from you. Furthermore, how payment is rendered is an agreement you should make before you start. Don't tell people they should pay up front, demand it as part of the initial arrangment. It's no good asking for money after you've given them a goods because unless they signed a contract what legal weight do you have to chase them down? If you're requesting payment for services then this is a transaction and you should treat it as such. What happens if they're unhappy with the finished work? Agree this beforehand. Be clear from the start and nobody will feel cheated. Communicate well, assume nothing. If you want to be treated like a professional, present yourself accordingly.

Pretty much that.

You answer your own question before asking it here. Raptorious and Googlesearch have a strong point on the ET being scared of diminishing the impact of dragons/the admins having such a tight ringfence on them so much that the things pretty much never get used: the all but extinct Dragaar are somehow more common. I think a lot of this confusion stems from dragons being tied up in the dragaar lore: nobody knows what's going on with them, nobody wants to touch them and nobody can because they're ringfenced, and everyone who can touch them goes for the more in-depth Dragaar instead. In fact, for the sake of clarity (as there's a lot of confusion) I'd actually remove the dragons themselves from dragonkin lore, leaving that as just Dragaar, Drakaar and the daemon shenanigans. Then I'd put the feral dragons into this lore as the most powerful species (but still needing approval from the top to use.) ET gets to do dragon attacks and the higher-ups can do their daemon-related magical events with dragaar without treading on each other's toes. tl;dr: Dragonkin isn't using dragons, just dragaar and daemons. Give them to Raptorious or at least take the ring fence off.

As someone who contributed heavily to the dragonkin lore and who came up with the Dragon/Dragaar split in the first place (before that all dragons were dragaar and known as dragons) I can't see where the issue is. The Dragon itself is a wild, non-sentient creature, albeit a highly intelligent one. Dragaar were created from dragons by a certain Daemon and they're the ones that talk, shapeshift and have great magical powers. The dragons themselves have no daemonic origin any more than wild cats originate from Metzli and pretty much no involvement with the Dragaar or the Daemons. It's completely possible for them to have a weaker subspecies, the wyrm. If anything, the only issue is redundancy: the dragon and wyrm serve the same role as flying, firebreathing feral lizard monsters. Even then I can see an argument for wyrms, as having them allows the ready slaying of wyrms while retaining dragons as a very high impact, nigh unkillable threat and keeping dragonslayers rare.

What are they now? Oh, you were talking about the Watyll thing. Not your fault in the slightest, and it was a good event. Viper authorised the event but I'm not sure if he authorised the death.

To be fair this is what the dragons were meant to be (dangerous feral flying lizards), hence the old dragons being reclassified as Dragaar. That being said, wyrms are something you could reasonably kill, whereas we were under strict instructions back in the day to keep the player ability to kill dragons to an absolute minimum (Watyll's dragon being slain by Kais in Anthos wasn't actually authorised), the appearance of which were meant to be a major catastrophe.

Keys. Kind of the point of the thread.

Culture changes. It's not static or singular. "Traditional American culture" is built on the erosion of the views that came before it. Would you attempt to spin the emancipation of women or the abolition of slavery as harmful?

Animals can't consent so it's rape. Incest causes deformed babies and Stannis to invade you.

((Hey guys, can you PM me the details on this rather impressive heist? The reason they had no guards is because it's impossible (now amended to almost impossible) to steal, and I can help you iron out the details before the inevitable attempts to OOC it back. That, and this presents some very interesting opportunities.))

Exists in the original materials lore, just doesn't have a name.

Then I'll put it another way. New races aren't happening outright. However, let's, for the sake of argument, assume one does. If, by some incredibly improbable turn of events, the administration decides to implement a new race, then they will get the Lore Team to make it. They will put the best people LotC has on the job, they'll consult the community and they'll pull out all the stops. They'll make it original, creative, and the best they can possibly do. It doesn't matter if another idea is good, if it's not the best, it's not going to be the one that makes it. Is this that? The very best the combined efforts of LotC can create? Because if it isn't, then even if a new race slot did open up then something else would fill it. As a former Lore Master who was the server's second longest serving LM after the great Rittsy himself, I'm telling you you're wasting your time here, and if you think this is going to make it as a race you're just setting yourself up for disappointment. And if that's not convincing enough, you cannot fight the community on a new race. Rules you can force but lore? Lore can't be forced on the playerbase. Even if, again for the sake of argument, this did get implemented, if the community's against it it'll reject it like a body rejects a foreign organism. An OOCly unwanted race will be turned on, invaded, hunted and belittled in character until it goes extinct, just like the snow elves.

Did they axe the Kha? (I consider the halflings a race)

Wait, VAs are actually back? RIP casual LotCers. Ain't no Lago got time fo' dat. Can't be arsed to write a VA and certainly can't be arsed to play LotC where everyone's got a moral straightjacket on, so I guess I'm done for the meantime. Supremacy's got my Skype if anyone needs me and SirSmithers is in charge of golems. *rides off into the sunset*

There's one thing that always gets forgotten when this comes up. VAs were not removed because the staff suddenly started trusting the playerbase. It wasn't that we didn't need them any more. VAs were removed because they didn't work. Villainy still sucked, except a load of people had to do a load of paperwork. Removing VAs didn't make villainy any worse and restoring VAs won't make it any better. No, you don't. You have no rights whatsoever. There is one person with ultimate power on LotC, and that's the guy who pays the bills and controls the off switch. You don't even have a right to log in, let alone to dictate the pathway of the server. All the bullshit drama that permeates LotC is completely artifical. It's not a country, it's not a company, it's a guy with a server that he's letting you all play on. And it's his server: he makes the rules, and he can turn it off whenever he likes. And before you say "but if you don't do what the players want they'll all leave." So what? LotC's not a company with a vested financial interest in player happiness. With the bullshit that goes on here they've got to put up with, I'm almost surprised the staff haven't just switched the server off and walked away.

Speaking as a former Lore Master I cannot foresee a time, ever, where the server would have enough people for seven races and if it did the policy is as it always has been: expand the existing ones. If anything, we have too many at the moment.

But you'd deny it by slaughtering anyone who sets up there or demanding vassalisation, not by Nexus-Skygod-RegionDeny magics. Likewise, the dwarves can't hoard plots either unless they're actively using them. I believe it's you can't be a citizen of the same region on three alts (so that you count triple to the region's population.)

I've kinda got to back Aislin here. My recollection of the Guides was them throwing their badges around.

They can't.

Asia's good, Second Wave all are good except for Damage Roulette which just lets the AI do stupid, stupid annoying things.

Surely the plugins would encourage you to use less, rather than trying to skill up ten guys?

Lore's handled by the Lore Team as a whole.

There was another event with Void Horrors in Asulon, I'll give you the details if you want to incorporate any of it. Void Horrors leak through where the fabric of the world is thinnest and the fabric is thinned by the use of arcane magic: widespread abuse of magic such as what happened in Skravia usually allows them to break through. Void Horrors don't eat flesh but consume the memories of the individuals they attack (often the memory of the Void Horror). The Void is a world of thought and metaphor and as a result they feed on the immaterial. The brighter Void Horrors are capable of limited illusion to blend in and appear as a normal person from the memories of someone they've attacked. They then use this form to stalk and isolate new victims.