Killing a mage
In the old days, this was not too difficult and did effectively weed out players of lower skill. But, even with a large playerbase, the unskilled could still get a mage kill if they were patient enough. I mean, you could sit at an altar and eventually a mage would recall that you could bash. But, it weeded out the unskilled because no one has the patience to do nothing for hours on end waiting for the next step in their char development in a game where entertainment is the goal.
Today, the same process is weeding out very skilled players for the same reason and no longer serves it's purpose. Depending on your playtime, there may not be any opportunities to kill a mage in the lower ranks even if ranking slowly and working on your skills as you go. If there does happen to be a mage or two, the task essentially becomes "find and kill a specific mage who is likely expecting you to". Which is much too high a bar considering how many areas have been added since the old days. When I play a mage, getting killed by a rager wannabe is like a lightning strike and would only happen if they could 1) Be a thief 2) Be logged on without me knowing 3) Attack me while hidden between the time my flight fell and I put it back up 4) Have cheap shot 5) Not miss a single cheap shot.
I know that some people have ranked up a mage using a proxy and killed it with their rager wannabe character to pledge. So now the process effectively weeds out the low skilled and skilled players who don't cheat. But, low skilled and skilled players who cheat are good to go.
Once you have a hut
The main problem here is the recent trend to keep the village true to it's core ideals. Recently a char got dinged by IMMs for having too many non-mage PKs when compared to mage PKs. So, there's a focus on killing mages and not actively hunting others who used to be fair game (Empire, mage allies, potion drinkers, etc). With the low playerbase, this is cabal suicide. That's the only way to say it. I'll never understand how it makes sense with a low PB in CF (which people only play if it's overall entertaining) to actively intervene in ways that give players LESS to do when they log in. We have less time than we used to. There is more competition for our entertainment time. CF is not the social experience it used to be when RL friends played. There are fewer players. It's not rocket science.
The good news is that if you do kill a mage, I don't think you'll have a problem with induction with a decent backstory and maybe a recommendation or two.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/06/2017 12:59AM by saagkri.