My feelings are not so easily hurt...

>Here's the rough history of the practicing thing.

>if you can't
>spam practice on kobolds, then you don't need to spam practice
>to compete, because everyone is on the same footing (nevermind
>our repeated insistence, which has gone mostly ignored by the
>playerbase, that mass-perfected skills aren't as critical as
>everyone thinks).

I find it difficult to believe that you find your methods in this matter to have been effective. From what I've seen, you have 85-90% of people who don't bother anymore to practice their defenses and what not to perfection. The problem is now you've further separated the average joe non-practicer from the bored practicer. What happens is joe practicer comes along and wipes the floor with non-practicer. Non-practicer though doesn't have time or patience to sit and master their skills because its been made a much more tedious project. So what happens? The non-practicer gets tooled repeatedly by the practicer of equal skill level. First you state the playerbase slowly noticed that practicing made you a more efficient killer (pk and ranking). Then you state (which you have repeatedly) that it doesn't matter as much as everyone thinks. If it doesn't matter as much as everyone thinks, then there shouldn't have been any need for change in the first place, because after all as you say it doesn't matter.

>Warrior, Thief, etc paths... Should I just have copies of all
>the "we need a warrior/thief/etc revamp" posts by players in
>the middle of your living room floor? I'm sure it's a full
>forest's worth of paper.

I love the fact that we have such a huge diversity. All I'm saying is that the huge amount of information necessary to be mentally prepared for what people are likely to toss at you is huge. That makes the game more challenging and increases the learning curve for the newbie. Imagine if you implemented all in one day a thousand new classes each with their own unique skills sets. It would be nearly impossible for any player ever to amass enough knowledge to be reasonably affective against 'most' classes. How do you balance that? I dunno. Maybe you make re-gearing a lot easier so when neat trick x doesn't work on some class you come across, you don't have to spend an hour gathering gear. (Yes, its easy to regear, this was just a (bad) example)

>Copper changes... Gee, it couldn't be because of players who
>said "money is worthless, make there be cool stuff we can
>actually buy for a change" now could it?

Money is available, and should I have need for it in reasonably mass quantities, I know where to go get it. What I'm saying is that its a common trend that few people (and I know this is only in my limited experience) know where to find even a normal amount of copper. When one out of atleast 10 or so people I've travelled with in my last character had enough cash to practice and train while we were out learning, that throws up a yellow flag. Again, I don't get to see all, so I'll qualify that by saying its merely what I've experienced. Maybe my groupmates lately have just been unlucky.

>
>Yes, some mobs have spec skills, cast spells, and so on.
>Tougher mobs often have a higher gain in experience than those
>of similar level but who lack special abilities, but I suppose
>you never noticed that before?
>

I've noticed that more and more mobs are getting spec skills than before. I have in fact noticed that those mobs give a little more experience. What does this do? It encourages me to go spam practice my defenses so I can atleast partially parry those flurries and hopefully won't die.

>Yes, we don't lay out the ins and outs of how everything
>works, because if everyone could just number crunch what combo
>was best, where's the fun in it?

Do you really feel that a FAQ on "What is roleplaying" would ruin the fun of CF and turn it into a bunch of number crunching?


>Would you rather it be based on
>player skill and inventiveness, or on sheer time and money
>like in Everquest and such? Or worse yet, just on the sheer
>number of OOC buddies someone has?
>

I'm interested in knowing exactly how you define player skill.