Q1) How will a character name change interact with thought net ignores or playershop character exclusions? Will this allow a player to (at least temporarily) bypass these or will these systems adjust to the renamed character name automatically?

Q2) Will there be any limits on how frequently these polymorph potions can be used? e.g. No more than 1 use per potion per character each year.

-- Robert

From the pitch of the vibration you determine that the purpose of the shield is as a shield.

<< Race:
Description: a square crystal flacon filled with bubbling vermilion liquid
The character is able to TURN the potion to see different silhouettes of all the available races to select which one they will like to change to. When they drink the potion, they are then changed into the new race and their character statistics are recalculated for the new race. This does not include a FIXSTAT. >>

If you change your race, do you keep your current stats with bonuses adjusted to reflect the applicable racial modifiers, or will stats be recalculated from level 0 based on stat growth rates for the newly chosen race?

While the race, gender, and name can be attributed in-game to a polyjuice potion, how the heck can profession be attributed to the same? So i trained as a sorcerer for the last 20 years and haven't swung a weapon ever. I drink a potion an all of a sudden i can become a warrior and a weapon master with no practice or training. No offense, but that's BS. Completely destroys immersion.

Call it what it is, a cash grab. Staff doesn't care about RP, history, or characters anymore. Is there anything staff won't do for a dollar? I probably don't want to know the answer to that.

This gets a 0 out of 10 from me and is making me rethink if I want to continue paying as I've been for the last 10 years. What an awful decision.

This is a great option with all this rebalancing that's going on lately. If you guys don't like it, here's an idea, don't use it. Simple.

<This is a great option with all this rebalancing that's going on lately. If you guys don't like it, here's an idea, don't use it. Simple.

I'm afraid you are not understanding some of the concerns here. Limitations, even in fantasy worlds/realms, exist for the immersion and benefit of some resemblance of realism. A potion that magically changes what someone has done over the last 20 years, i.e. researching and casting magic, and then inverting it all and allowing them the physical prowess of a warrior as if the past 20 years were the exact opposite, breaks the veil of realism and immersion.

It's not a "don't like it then don't use it" situation when everything around them that they interact with is malleable. The fact that I am now forced to believe that a warrior I know for the past 20 years is now a sorcerer slinging spells as if they have been a sorcerer the entire time doesn't have anything to do with their decision, but affects me in my ability to interact with a world that I thought had stability and limits on some physical things. And while I was typing this, that sorcerer has now become a bard. Nothing is ever "simple".

>Fixprofession is the natural extension of fixstats and fixskills, so I'm glad that one finally happened. The price point seems well considered too so that people don't flip around constantly nor buy on a whim and risk buyer's regret.

I would agree with you if a profession was disconnected from level. If you wish to start a new profession, then start from the ground up in a completely disconnected way from your "adventurer level". You can trade your wizard hat for that of a claid, but you must put the time in to get good at it. The realism of Gemstone is broken when a warrior of 20 years now has the accuracy of slinging bolt spells like that of a 20 year wizard and continuously cuts himself because he fumbles a knife all because he drank something.

I am unsure how I feel about this. The name change in particular seems difficult to handle. I'm not saying changing names shouldn't be an option to deal with specific situations, but in an OOC sense our (the players) only continuality of knowing who is who is based on the character name. In effect changing the name could be used to "create" a new character of any level with no in game past. Putting that level of change behind an incredibly low paywall automated system feels like a recipe for trouble.

Of course, any of these things could be changed for correcting player-related issues or as part of a well RPed journey, but I fear that is not how it will play out in live. Rather, I expect people will just pay the cash as a cheaper way to create a brand new post cap character to suit their current desires without going through any of the time to build them up. It will just be a codified and simu-backed character market. I sort of feel like the examples given with the release (being obviously the most suitable time for this sort of action) are also far less common than the character sale types will be. We are a small enough community that such legitimate situations could be remedied by talking to a GM, if the GMs were allowed to make such changes, while avoiding much of the potential chaos of the polymorph potions.

Sweet is the sound of the pouring rain,
And the stream that falls from the hill to plain.
Better than rain or rippling brook,
Is a mug of beer inside this Took.

Oof, this is pretty good. I like it. It opens up a lot of forgiving avenues for players who have been around since the dark ages.

The prices don't look too shabby either, considering the enormity of the race/profession changeroos. I'm sure one concern is 'levelling up a character to cap as one profession or race then switching over,' but the pricetags make such a thing a very costly option in terms of cheesing the system (with the lack of fixstat thrown in there, so there's the secret tax of either more simubucks or 1m bountybucks to curtail abuse). As well 25k simubucks is aaaaalmost on par with a $250 character restoral.

Honestly, all in all I think it's pretty great work and detracts from my play experience.

-james, bristenn's player

---

You think to yourself, "FFF-"

A giant white bunny hurls a powerful lightning bolt at you!

You evade the bolt by a hair!

doesn't detract from my play experience, rather. Ope.

-james, bristenn's player

---

You think to yourself, "FFF-"

A giant white bunny hurls a powerful lightning bolt at you!

You evade the bolt by a hair!

Honestly I overall Like the idea.

Could we consider granting the top tier a Fix Stat, Fix Skills?

Thanks!

>>I would appreciate it if a profession change required a name change.

All that really does is enforce and extra 1k simucoins to the purchase... They can swap that name right back afterward.

- Andreas

>>All that really does is enforce and extra 1k simucoins to the purchase... They can swap that name right back afterward.

Yes, if that is as far as one carried the solution - and one thought no further - this would be the outcome.

It needn't be though, and can be solved. The request stands.

Doug

Those against the fix profession aren't using their imagination or roleplaying brain very well.

As you go through life you may work at a job but pick up skills along the way. I work in a grocery store but can do some tasks that a mechanic, plumber, carpenter, etc. can perform in their job.

Let's look at sorcerers, sorcerers have access to the spiritual and elemental realms of magic. I do not think it is outside the realm of possibility and imagination that sorcerers dabble in major spiritual, major elemental, and other profession circles. Actually, they do since we have magic items and scrolls that already allow sorcerers to cast spells from other spheres of magic. After a decade I don't think it is far-fetched for sorcerers to have some understanding of the other spheres of magic and begin utilizing them. The GAME categorizes us the players as sorcerers but nothing ever prevented a sorcerer from pretending to be a bit of a hybrid sorcerer/wizard except the difficulty of leveling in that context if the player were to try and hunt while being true to that roleplay. I just used sorcerer as an above example but there is no reason a cleric couldn't shift to being a paladin or a paladin a cleric. A warrior grown weary of inflicting harm on others has chosen to now become an empath and heal others. A rogue weary of a life in the shadows wants to come into the light and entertain others as a bard.

Professions make your character 1 dimensional. No one is ever truly 1 thing for the rest of their life. I already swapped my sorcerer to a wizard, but she is still the same character regardless of her profession. Her identity was not that of being a sorcerer but of being a twin to her sister, being somewhat demured, being rather callous and blunt in her interactions with others, being eccentric in manner and dress. Now I know some players wrap a lot of their identity into their profession and that is fine for them but there are an equal number of players that do not.

For those that roleplayed this change does not impact them at all. The folks that roleplay will figure out a plausible explanation as to why their character is now BLANK. The folks that don't come up with an explanation probably aren't folks you roleplayed with or roleplayed period in the first place because they enjoy the game in a different manner.

Roleplay is all about choices though and now you can choose to continue playing a CHARACTER that you love because you invested 5, 10, 20+ years into them but don't necessarily enjoy the mechanical aspect of the game any longer and would love to see what all the fuss about wizards is or take advantage of the new PSM3. I applaud staff for finally allowing players to continue playing characters they love but are simply bored with combat mechanics of their current profession, want to try something new, etc.

As I gaze over the horizon, the wind tugs at my cloak and whispers, "Adventure" in my ear.

A squeaky halfling nearby asks, "Why you playing with orcs heads and troll rearends?!"

As you go through life you may work at a job but pick up skills along the way. I work in a grocery store but can do some tasks that a mechanic, plumber, carpenter, etc. can perform in their job.

But does the grocery store clerk immediately forget all their clerking skills upon deciding to be a plumber?

>I'm afraid you are not understanding some of the concerns here. Limitations, even in fantasy worlds/realms, exist for the immersion and benefit of some resemblance of realism. A potion that magically changes what someone has done over the last 20 years, i.e. researching and casting magic, and then inverting it all and allowing them the physical prowess of a warrior as if the past 20 years were the exact opposite, breaks the veil of realism and immersion.

But's totally believable when a warrior you've known for the past 20 years suddenly shows up as a novice paladin, because their character decided to reroll with the same name/race/history/etc? That's been a thing since the beginning of the game. It's just as (un)believable.

Ultimately, this is a game, and there will be immersion-breaking aspects to it. If your enjoyment of the game is so fragile that this happening to someone you know ruins the game for you, well, you have a decision to make.

>But's totally believable when a warrior you've known for the past 20 years suddenly shows up as a novice paladin, because their character decided to reroll with the same name/race/history/etc? That's been a thing since the beginning of the game. It's just as (un)believable.

Switching from one profession to another without loss of experience is rather more difficult to explain in IC terms than switching to another and starting over, or losing a great deal. Granted, paladins and warriors share the same sorts of basic martial training - they are both "good with" weapons and armor. Going from wizard to warrior will cause some head-scratching. I think more should be done to discourage casual use of the potions.

Profession changes have technically been a thing for many years already, but only in the context of a newly-released profession. I forget exactly who was allowed to switch to paladin or monk when the professions were released, but in a certain way these were not so very different. Critically, though, there were NO paladins before paladins were released, other than the folks who roleplayed that way. I like having options, but I'm not a real big fan of the general profession and race changes. To me, starting over is the better option. There's no loss of revenue, either way.

Despite all this, the way the change is presented is rooted in magic, so it doesn't really matter what I want to believe. The meta-game nature of polymorph would allow a racial or gender change with no difficulty, and creatures sometimes inherit the base stats of whatever they become. Turning something into a bug so you can squash it is an old D&D trope. Profession change takes a little more imagination, but I guess it works.

The biggest side-effect I see is this change alienates most of the players who have played the game the longest. It trivializes their accomplishments.

>But's totally believable when a warrior you've known for the past 20 years suddenly shows up as a novice paladin, because their character decided to reroll with the same name/race/history/etc? That's been a thing since the beginning of the game. It's just as (un)believable.

It's more believable than drinking a potion and go from swinging like Roblar to slinging spells like Methais. The connection between profession and level is the problem here with this. Anyone with money can switch between professions and profession-only skills, like ensorcell, tats, ranger resist (had to throw shade at this), etc... and level gear (hell I will probably do this) and they have the millions of experience immediately to allocate towards profession-only skills like they spent years mastering it. All because they drank a paywall.. err polymorph potion. This is about money, not options or limiting the use with high cost because there are other options to limit use.

>Ultimately, this is a game, and there will be immersion-breaking aspects to it. If your enjoyment of the game is so fragile that this happening to someone you know ruins the game for you, well, you have a decision to make.

I never said there isn't immersion-breaking aspects. I said even in fantasy worlds there are limitations and barriers that allow for a believable atmosphere so not everything is Godly. When everything is malleable, there is nothing about the game that is believable because it is changing constantly. There's no limit on anything which opens the door to 1 million experience potions for 25,000 simucoins because... well... potions. That's my point. Limitations on what you can do is a part of the realism in any fantasy world that helps sustain the environment, good or bad.

My enjoyment of the game doesn't hairpin on this and to suggest as such lends credibility to your own fragility, but you are right, we all have decisions to make. Do I think that my viewpoint being expressed here will change the decision, no. Do I think that it might make someone wake up and realize maybe they need to adjust this a little so it isn't abused all to hell, which it will be I assure you, possibly. Limiting this option through a paywall isn't enough.

"Anyone with money can switch between professions and profession-only skills, like ensorcell, tats, ranger resist (had to throw shade at this), etc... and level gear (hell I will probably do this) and they have the millions of experience immediately to allocate towards profession-only skills like they spent years mastering it." -- NormanT

And then they HAVE TO play that new profession for the X# months it takes to build up the "Resource" Flavor of the Month.

I can see the attraction in someone using "only MY [one]guy!" to make, Enchant, Ensorcell, Bless, Luckify, and WPS-Grit his own weapon (armor, shield) wearing his own T5 tattoo...
...but honestly? So what?

Word of warning: If you enter the rename pavillion with a specific name in mind, and it's not available, you're left in a pretty bad spot. You can't choose you old name, and you can't simply exit.

So I'm just hanging out in the pavillion (after reporting and assist requesting), hoping someone will release me.