Legacy Characters And Server

[*MimiFearthegn]

We do disallow some legacy things. BUT! This is largely in cases where we know it won't go away otherwise. Legacy races phase out on their own, whereas items tend to get passed around more readily.

After a while, very old characters either -
1) Become used for RP only
2) Stop being played
3) Get rebuilt to take advantage of features that have come out since they were originally made

So while you'll see the last wave of legacy half-outsiders still, due to the -relative- recentness in which the new half outsider race/class came out, they'll eventually dwindle to obscurity without forcing anyone to rebuild immediately.

[*zielakxar]

Hello - fairly new player here.
Just wanted to say it's quite nice server you're having here. Interesting mechanics, well designed maps, rich world, friendly community - but there is a thing that bothers me.

Yesterday I had a conversation with certain other player that explained some very disturbing things about your server and I wanted to ask how it actually really is.
Lets start discussion about Legacy characters. The way it was explained to me those are old characters created before racial PrC-s existed. Such characters have very high stats - like way better than what new players can create using available PrC-s and are pretty much unkillable with 100+AB/AC.
When I asked why such characters where not rebuilt to updated more balanced currently existing classes it was explained to me that there was an outcry on the forums and administration decided to let them be. Going further into discussion it was explained to me that old players are majority here and that is why they can force such decisions. By looking at the topic about OOC room I believe it looks quite true.

Summarising - such practice seemed quite disgusting to me cause it negates everything I mentioned in first paragraph of this post and crosses like very basic thing that I would expect form any game server - witch is same rules to apply both for old and new players. I don't think I would even start playing here if I'd knew this. So how exactly it works? Is it something like secret to new players so they wouldn't quit right away? Would you say its true and new players that are concerned with things like that have nothing to do here? Are there more things like that ? Like overpowered items/feats/whatever not available to new players but not taken away from old characters?

I understand it is rather sensitive topic so keep discussion on a high level. Post is to be treated as a simple honest question - not invitation to flame.

[*edmaster44]

Quite Frankly, from my own point of view, the new Prc's for some templates are just not that good. Case in point, Half-Fiends, Half-Celestials. My main is a Half-Fiend, a mere Rogue with Shadow Dancer nothing special and no 100 ac/ab that this player told me. That's sort of a little joke that we circulate about the old 100ac Nymph. It has always been proven and shown that a 0 Ecl race will always be a better choice. Some one did the math here, so i won't post it. For me, my personal view, it comes down to freedom and not forced to take a prc, waste a few levels and a class slot so i can get some sub par stats that wouldn't fit too well with my Main. Some Legacy Races were really over powered and down right broken. But the majority of people have remade them into the newer templates because they got more to gain, ala Vampire, undead or Fiends. Some of those races had really high ECL like 8. So they weren't at all very powerful, and in many cases where subpar. My two cents. Won't add anything else here.

[*Mr_Otyugh]

Whomever you talked with was exaggerating a lot, and deserves a slap for being a drama llama. :P And no, they don't have 100 ABs or ACs, if they unanimously only had that, then they'd have been deleted a long time ago, that seems one of the laziest attempts to turn public opinion I've seen. Also there has never been a public outcry about removing them, the races were grandfathered to remove any purpose of it.

The older special races and newer ones are a tradeoff. The older ones were (in some cases) better at melee, but almost always worse in casting since they had in majority of cases much higher level adjustments that denied more epic feats, and general class progression. They had much higher ability adjustments that could give them an edge in some specific builds. And there were a few races which were plain silly and poorly designed. At the time there were a lot of discussion about underpowered and other balance related things in regards of Special Races, which sparked making a new version and leaving the old ones be. The new races are more well rounded, but still have their own issues, in some scenarios they are worse, in some they are better. Super ultra min/max builds will always be better than those that aren't, that was the case back then and that is the case currently, nothing really has changed in that regard.

Template PrCs, such as vampires, were bugged, and currently fixed(?) and not intended at all to be able to be picked by quite a few things, so it wasn't legacy race specific (also technically it's template PrC). Racial PrCs are tied to their specific races which are different from the original ones as far as I know.

[*zielakxar]

The way edmaster44 explains it:

it comes down to freedom and not forced to take a prc, waste a few levels and a class slot so i can get some sub par stats that wouldn't fit too well with my Main

Way I see it old players are offered "freedom of choice" to play char with better stats while new players are free to play sub-par classes only to have freedom to quit server when they get to know about this situation :)

[*Mr_Otyugh]

Grass is always greener on the other side. People whined about special races being subpar back then, they do it today too. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

[*zielakxar]

Well either offer "Legacy" version of races to everyone or force old chars to rebuild to a new format - maybe after fixing their ECL to a more reasonable values?

Am I the only one who sees a problem in current approach to this situation?

[*Mr_Otyugh]

The ones that have been bugged in exploitative fashion, have been forced to rebuild. Those that function don't really matter much. Because if the problem is about people having things you don't... well that's going to be the reality regardless. So not much will change, other than possibly driving some people away for principle alone... you could argue about equality, but that falls flat since you could just make just as potent powerbuilds, if not more potent.

[*Itikar]

Way I see it old players are offered "freedom of choice" to play char with better stats while new players are free to play sub-par classes only to have freedom to quit server when they get to know about this situation :)

You are using a strawman argument.

Ed said quite a different thing, that the legacy races, by not needing a prestige class, had more build freedom, since, it's a no brainer, they had an extra class slot.

Also, since racial prestige classes are oriented toward certain builds and not others, it's again a no brainer that they restrict freedom of build to an extent.

Last but not least who has a legacy race can only use it for the characters they already have, i.e. they cannot create any new characters of that legacy race. They can only delevel the character they already have and they cannot modify what they chose at level 1. Hard to call that freedom.

[*edmaster44]

The ones that have been bugged in exploitative fashion, have been forced to rebuild. Those that function don't really matter much. Because if the problem is about people having things you don't... well that's going to be the reality regardless. So not much will change, other than possibly driving some people away for principle alone... you could argue about equality, but that falls flat since you could just make just as potent powerbuilds, if not more potent.

This too. Some people have been force to rebuild cause of some really disgusting exploits or bugs. This isn't a big issue to be honest and there are things in the world like have and have-nots. The Majority of the Prc's are freaking Amazing with maybe one i would like to see re visited and the bugs ironed out, then i will rebuild into the new Prc, unfortunately, it's a tad buggy at the moment and wouldn't make my Half-Fiend look too Half-Fiendish, cosmetic reasons is a factor here. I don't Pvp, nor do i grind much, this, after all is a Role Playing Server, and thus i act accordingly, if you're going to quit the server over this non-issue, i implore you to rethink it again, this is a great server with a cool lore and setting.