Posted by widowson on December 10, 1999 at 12:48:47:
In a recent presidential election, a reporter asked a candidate the simple question, “How much does a gallon of Milk cost?” The candidate was unable to respond and this was used by his opponent as an example of how this candidate had gotten "Ivory-tower” syndrome, basically how he had lost touch with the common person because he had been in a position of authority for so long. This is an excellent RL analogy to use when debating empowerment. With all due respect, many Immortals have been Immortals for so long that they no longer understand how difficult, time consuming and uncertain empowerment is for normal players. Naturally, empowerment is easy for Immortals because they can see WIZI invisible Imms and, through casual conversations, know what their fellow Immortals like in empowered characters. Simply put, they know when and what to pray when attempting empowerment. Immortals are essentially guaranteed empowerment where as mortals roll the dice every time. Normal mortals don’t know if their god is even on when they pray and, since they have little or no feedback, don’t know if their ideology is correct. Since we don’t have this luxury, this access to OOC knowledge, we fumble around through trial and error wondering, in painful, unresponding ignorance. Wondering if our god is even on, if he's even watching, and weather or not we're wasting our time on a character concept that will never be empowered for some unknown reason. In my own experience, I’ve had characters empowered on the same day I rolled them. Others, a week later. Yet others 2 weeks despite putting near equal effort into each one. There are some who have waited 3 weeks to a month for empowerment which would suggest not that their RP was wrong, since they got it eventually, but the absence of their particular god. It’s not fair to keep players hanging for 3 weeks or more for empowerment. In essence, empowerment seems to be based more on luck and happenstance than anything else. It would be advisable to either eliminate it altogether, automate it somehow, perhaps let tattooed priests empower, or anything to rectify this situation. In all honesty, if empowerment was only RP based and had nothing to do on Immortal availability and individual preference than you could take 2 people, of equal skill, playing empowered characters for the following experiment. One should theoretically have as much success praying to Nepenthe at 8p.m. as the other praying to Vassagon at 8a.m. Empowerment, in its current form, refuses to take real life factors into consideration and is unfairly easier for Immortals or someone with inside information.