The rationale behind these changes was to begin working toward paring back the impact of edges. As I believe someone else already pointed out, it was never really the design of edges for everyone to have so many. Likewise, edge points have become less of an indicator of real achievement when characters can amass so many of them in short a short amount of time doing the kinds of things that end up being referred to as grinding.

Likewise, we noticed that a lot of people were racking up a significant amount of edge points through role writing, sometimes clearly as an attempt to game the system and other times by coincidence. We want to reward people for writing a quality role and updating it when appropriate, and we still do that. Ultimately, roles are not meant to be a infinite edge point dispenser though, and we've addressed that.

Something to consider. Prior to these changes, OXP/EXP were, from a practical standpoint anyway, the best and certainly most common means by which characters earned edge points. Some quick math would suggest that will remain true going forward.

Example. Let's take Bemused's example of his character Padfeinwen. Padfeinwen was in the top 95th percentile in terms of total edge points acquired. He had the single most expensive edge in the game on top of a number of other edges that are not particularly cheap. And as we learned, he had a modest role and no non-role Imm XP whatsoever. Nor did he participate in cabal wars or even moderately in PK. See the problem here? Now, under the new rules how screwed is Padfeinwen? He's not. In fact, he would still almost make the 90th percentile based on active characters (not apples to apples, I know) and rankings aside, would still have more edge points than the average hero. Now, he's definitely at a disadvantage against to a character who does all that other stuff too, but that's pretty much by design and always has been.

I think these changes go a long way to addressing our concerns about the disparity in the payout of two particular methods of earning edge points, especially relative to their merit in our opinion.

As always, it's difficult to take things away from people. Some of you may feel like edges are a core part of class customization and have the expectation that you should be able to pick some arbitrary number edges because that's how it's always worked in the past or because it's how many you've decided you "need". I'm afraid we just don't share that view.

Lastly, I tend to use pronouns like "we" when talking about these things. Obviously these changes are not unanimously supported by every Immortal. I pitched ideas that did not get implemented as well as ideas that did, as did others and that is typical. There are quite a few of us, after all, and we do our best to balance our likes and dislikes and styles of play with the role of being objective administrators and game designers. If we required a quorum of 100% to make changes to CF we would still be stock ROM. That said, a number of people weighed in on these changes and what you see is our consensus.

I hope that helps. Now I'm going to go back to focusing on Santa Umi and my very busy real life December, so I apologize right now for not engaging every single person who wants to wring my neck over this one. There are warm hugs at the Whiysdan booth for anyone who is interested.