I'll make this as succinct as possible, but long story short I think the current state of CF could be drastically improved.
Firstly, there's the cabal situation. I'm not satisfied with the staff's answer of "Well we're at where were at. Nothings changing. But we're talking." What does that mean? Especially when Scarab and Entropy are two cluster####s of cabals.
Entropy has no purpose, I get the ad pitch of 'you can do anything' but that doesn't add to the cabal dynamic in CF. They aren't a reasonable foil to Battle, and I don't think they're substantially different from Outlander. There are not many Entropists who wouldn't equally fit into Outlander. I've played neo-Entropy, and they don't really contribute to cabal wars. I've never had to retrieve from Entropy, and I doubt I ever will. This project, plain and simple, is not working in the current climate of CF.
Scarab is absolutely nonexistent. It's dead. Scion at it's most bereft was better than the current iteration of Scarab. If there's applicants, someone needs to induct them. We shouldn't need to, as players, wait for hundreds of hours for an induction. Especially with today's more casual playerbase.
At the very least, lets throw Arcane sect back into Empire or bring Nexus back and make them more veil-centric (the veil is SUCH a cool mechanic that is being underused)...or...better yet, let's have an ACTUAL magic cabal. You can make it skew evil chaotic (similar to how Scion did.) But lets give badass evil mages a home, and coincidentally an actual ENEMY for Battle to fight. Who the hell does Battle raid nowadays? The nonexistent Entropy and Scarab? Cool.
Final thing about cabals, it seems like we've made cabals more difficult in general. Now its three mage kills before you can become a berserker. Or 100 hours at least before you get Maran. Let's not put such standardization into a freeflowing game. If you're a hotshot badass squire who's kicking ass and taking names...Maran your ass at 50 hours.
Secondly, I feel as if there are a few glaring imbalances in the game. I've been on my soapbox for a while about this, and I understand that there are steps you can take to mitigate the effectiveness, but someone has got to take a serious look at champions, and in particular storm champions.
The trade off to being a paladin is you typically don't really have a reliable source of lag. Plus, two-handers and shield deds are always at extreme risk of being shield cleaved/weapon dropped and getting one rounded (outside of defiance/a couple of high lim shields). The passive ability of bat to block weapon removal skills is NUTS. I think I tried to use a special disarm skill on one of the recent storm paladins 8 times and got through the retaliate aspect of bat to ATTEMPT it precisely once. Not to mention the fact that they outmelee prepped up rangers in their home terrain. Out-tank (and outmelee) almost any warrior without even trying. Oh, AND they have a fairly reliable form of lag. Furthermore, nearly all of their skills lag them for a round or less, so even if they DO get into trouble, it's very hard to punish them for it because they so very rarely lag themselves.
If there IS a change behind the scenes, let's publicize it and voice it instead of just magically shifting something without ever telling the playerbase.
Furthermore, the ranking disparity between good and evil. Holy ####. Ranking as a goodie is GROSSLY easy. Ranking as an evil can be hair-pulling. I can think of 4-5 places where I can (easily) hero goodies. There's ONE (maybe two) really viable places to hero evils. Hell, most of my evils hero on evil mobs just because it's that much better. Not to mention the ability as a goodie to exploit double vulns for ranking, really easily, from lvls 25-51.
Evils have iron and elves, but it's not even close. Seriously, this needs to be looked at. Ranking as an evil should not be that much more difficult than it is as a goodie. This is compounded by the fact that with the closure of hell, I'd argue that most of the high end gear trends toward good and is ultimately unusable by evils.
And from a reward/punishment perspective...I don't know. It feels like Imms are really hands-off nowadays. Titles are a rarity. Tattoos are similar. Getting a last name now seems to be a 'time put in' and it's not uncommon for me to get my last name and then type who and notice 5-6 other characters got theirs at the exact same time, so some imm just decided to mass lastname people. Much like we hit on in Artificial's post below, there are very few 'special' rewards, and it seems like longevity is more important in reaching them than anything else (bleh). Those things add so much to the game, and could really stand to be more common.
On the OTHER hand, at the same time there seems to be very little 'hammer dropping' on ####tily roleplayed characters. I'm looking at you, repeat herald gearlockers and empowerment characters with absolutely no roleplay. I understand that we made empowerment easier, but if you're an empowered character and you show no signs of roleplay to speak of? Unempower them. Straight up. And if you're a herald but are NEVER in the Inn and aren't doing anything remotely herald-y? That's an issue too. Similar to a tribunal who breaks the law, a rager who disgraces the tablet, etc. There needs to be consequences for crappy RP.
More global quests, more unique titles to hint sort of what a character might be about, or interactions (positive and negative) could be really good for the game. And I don't like the idea that longevity is a threshold for that.
I'm not trying to start a mud slinging contest, I'm just trying to draw attention to what I feel are a number of glaring issues in the current state of Carrionfields. I've loved this game and community for 17 years and I think that we could do with some more open discussion and transparency about how to improve things.
-Shamanman
