Two things have kept me from doing so:

1) Every time I check here and Dios, I see the same people having the same fights they have had for the 15 years on and off (jesus, yes that long) I have played CF. It is just kind of depressing in an old-man-sitting-on-the-same-bar-stool-he-sat-on-when-you-were-21-and-are-now-30 kind of a way.

I'd agree here. Unfortunately, one way some players and staff handle this is by either withdrawing from the community entirely (your option), or just playing and ignoring the forums (where we lose a reasonable voice, and the problem compounds).

2) The time required to get a character up to speed coupled with the time required to recover from death

To be fair, time-to-hero is lower now than it was earlier in the decade, and the various changes to Outfit, ghost time, XP loss on mob deaths, more prevalent limited gear, etc. likely make recovery from death faster in an absolute sense, at least vs. anything past the first couple years of CF.

I suspect what has changed is that:

A) That time is being drawn from your more demanding schedule. 10 minutes now feels like an hour did some years ago. However, if we tailor the game to your schedule (and I'd argue we have been, to some extent), we run the risk of radically changing the game to other people with more time to play if we aren't careful.

B) Your standards are higher. Most novice players either don't know what the best "stuff" is, or they've just written off ever having it. A novice might feel quite good about covering all their wear slots with non-horrible stuff, keeping up a 1:1 or 1:2 PK ratio, and being a rank-and-file member of cabal X. You've been higher up on the heap, and now that would feel like a failure to you.

Your points are both valid, but I don't think you would say either is trivial to solve.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com