Hello, all. Sian/pawstepsinthesnow here.

 

From today forward, we're making several major changes to the mechanics of lineage skills.

 

To be fairly frank about the reasoning for this change: the way lineage skills have been recieved by the community are not in line with how we want them to function. While lineage skills are intended to be a fun thing for the community to share, they have been treated with a sense of exclusivity and ownership that has resulted in harassment and toxic behavior, particuarly aimed at the admin team.

 

Our perception of creating starters to share lineage skills was intended to be a lightening of responsibility: no longer would players have to struggle to get their ketucari breedable and ensure slots were circulated for people to be able to share in the lineage skill. 

 

However, it's become clear that people instead percieve the lineage skill as something exclusive only to them, and that any attempt to further distrubute it will be percieved as a loss of value, even an attack; and have lashed out at us as a result. While we recognize the pain, this behavior is not acceptable. This situation is corrosive to the health and growth of our community, and directly interfering with our ability to continute to administrate this group.

 

Therefore, although we recognize that this step will be recieved with mixed feelings, we think it is for the best for the future of the group.

 

So, how will things look going forward?

Future lineage skills may debut on a starter instead of a player-owned ketucari, and any lineage skill that debuts on a raffled ketucari will have a starter made for it and slots raffled six months later. This will grant the winner a period of exclusivity to distrubute slots before the lineage skill is given wider release. Additionally, we will be creating and releasing starters for the remaining lineage skills already in existence, so that all lineage skills are treated equally regardless of the owner of their founder or date of debut.

 

Additionally, there is now a quest live to add a lineage skill to any elder Ketucari-- check out Elder Isle for the details. (Thank you Unarla/Pav for the suggestion!) We're hoping that this futher tamps down on toxicity surrounding lineage skills, by allowing players to create their own. These skills will not be shared with starters, but we aren't restricting people from creating multiple mechanically-similar skills to compensate. Relatedly, we've revamped the requirements for descendants to learn their bloodline's lineage skills. The requirement has been lowered to Renowned instead of Elder, and the requirements standardized to match non-lineage skill unlocks.

 

Raffle-origin skills will still have a couple unique factors-- their effects may be a bit more unique, and we'll be writing and debuting exclusive quests that can only be undertaken by Ketucari who have learned raffle-origin lineage skills. (At the moment, only Winter's Breath has a quest, as it was written before the shift to skill unlocks, but we'll be filling in the others as time goes on.)

 

To extend a compensation to current holders of lineage-founders for these changes, we've created an item, the Mythic Simulator, that allows both the Elder requirement and the quest to be bypassed to create a lineage skill. These will be craftable as an Engineering legendary item in the future, but we are distributing one to every current owner of a lineage founder-- this will let you be among the first to create new lineage skills if you so choose. 

 

We're hoping that this combination of moves will reduce the sense of scarcity and elitism around lineage skills.

 

As a reminder, admins enforcing a ruling should not be taken as a personal attack, and it is not acceptable to respond to us doing so with hostility. We endeavor to work with players whenever possible, but that should not be taken as a license to harass us for decisions that you do not agree with. 

 

We're hoping to be able to bring you some more positive news later on, and want to sincerely thank everyone who has stuck with us through this time. <3