1. Is there any truth to the somewhat commonly held belief that after you die your skill improvement chances increase? I've always noticed anecdotally that during my ghost and early-material hours, I seem to get skill improvements faster than during regular practice.

2. Is there any truth to the belief that practicing a weapon has diminishing returns in real time hours, meaning, you get a bunch of improvements in, say, the first rl hour, but after that it slows down (more than just by dint of you having fewer improvements left)? I vacilate between thinking that when I wield one of the balator practice weapons I will have to wear it a while before it kicks in, really (which seems unlikely, but it's not a rational feeling I admit), and thinking that after a while I'm just not going to get any more improvements in that weapon in this session, so I should change to something else. What's the deal?

3. Do balator practice weapons help improve any skills other than the actual weapon skill itself?

4. When the village was split into the three options, defender, berserker and scout, there as a good bit of time when spellbane seemed to bane everything. Every spell. I was Diarmuid at the time, an invoker, and I used several fights (which I logged and posted if you recall) showing me casting every single spell possible, including faerie fire and magic missile and wall of fire and all the low spells, not just the final path spells against rager berserkers and not a single spell went through. For about two weeks or so (I then deleted so I don't know how much longer it would have lasted). At the time the general statement from the staff was that spellbane hadn't been changed in the village remodeling. Is that really true? I suppose theoretically the RNG was to blame, but we're talking about hundreds of spell castings here, and not one went through. Was spellbane perhaps inadvertently beefed up and then later toned down to its normal efficiency?

5. Finally, and I apologize for the posts on me personally but, well, there's plenty of history here... was there #### done to any/several of my chars that I *don't* already know about? Were any others nerfed in some way? There were a couple that I suspected, but had no real proof or evidence other than my own personal cf knowledge and experience, which while pretty good, is obviously far from complete. I'm ready to call it all water under the bridge now, but I'd like to know for some peace of mind. And by nerfed I don't mean something really obvious or horrible, like that fake history post, I'm talking anything, things just to make the char worse behind the scenes. That would be very nice of y'all to let me know.