As one who didn't start until a few months after Merge, I have to agree that there are a lot of remnants from a bygone era. It's time for q200/250 cats to go! I can't speak to much about pre-merge except to say that, by all accounts I've heard, it was a quite different place than the Ryzom I started playing.
Of the three things that are at least marginally useful to non-masters (potatoes, cats, and crystals), all of them require a bit of Ryzom-fu to use properly; something a large segment of the player base lacks. Sure, everyone here in this thread may know all about enchants and overseer missions, but we're also a bit more experienced than the average as well. Experienced enough that the crafting missions we do would require potatoes that take longer to earn the points to buy in bulk than it would to just dig the craft mats yourself, and cats are useless except for inflating our alts.
If it weren't for the q250 Faction pick, I myself wouldn't be doing NH turnins more than a couple times a month just to top off my crystal supply. With +50 fame in all four civilizations and more than sufficient dappers from craft missions, the only thing NH really offers me these days is replacement q250 picks. Non-masters cannot get usable picks, and crystals and low-q potatoes are cheap, so low-level players don't really have much more use for nation points than I do. THose who don't know about the usefulness of potatoes of the joy of enchants have no use at all for those points.
I never used Faction Picks until I mastered Lakes digging though. Between my choice of dig spots (after Silan, I went to Fount until I hit 140 then went straight to Loria) and careplanning for master diggers before I became one myself, I pretty much needed q250 picks exclusively ever since the first day I left Silan. The other 4 faction picks would've been of only limited (if any) use to me at any time even if their level requirements were dropped by 50.
So I'm not sure that lowering the level requirements on faction picks would really help all that much. Maybe using the q250 pick when one hits 200 might help those that don't skip regions like I did, but even then it's dubious unless Digging is your highest skill. By the time I moved my digging from Fount to Loria, I was already wearing q250 dig gear which made the minor boosts of the picks too low-q to use in Loria too trivial to be worth buying even if I could've.
Of the three things that are at least marginally useful to non-masters (potatoes, cats, and crystals), all of them require a bit of Ryzom-fu to use properly; something a large segment of the player base lacks. Sure, everyone here in this thread may know all about enchants and overseer missions, but we're also a bit more experienced than the average as well. Experienced enough that the crafting missions we do would require potatoes that take longer to earn the points to buy in bulk than it would to just dig the craft mats yourself, and cats are useless except for inflating our alts.
If it weren't for the q250 Faction pick, I myself wouldn't be doing NH turnins more than a couple times a month just to top off my crystal supply. With +50 fame in all four civilizations and more than sufficient dappers from craft missions, the only thing NH really offers me these days is replacement q250 picks. Non-masters cannot get usable picks, and crystals and low-q potatoes are cheap, so low-level players don't really have much more use for nation points than I do. THose who don't know about the usefulness of potatoes of the joy of enchants have no use at all for those points.
I never used Faction Picks until I mastered Lakes digging though. Between my choice of dig spots (after Silan, I went to Fount until I hit 140 then went straight to Loria) and careplanning for master diggers before I became one myself, I pretty much needed q250 picks exclusively ever since the first day I left Silan. The other 4 faction picks would've been of only limited (if any) use to me at any time even if their level requirements were dropped by 50.
So I'm not sure that lowering the level requirements on faction picks would really help all that much. Maybe using the q250 pick when one hits 200 might help those that don't skip regions like I did, but even then it's dubious unless Digging is your highest skill. By the time I moved my digging from Fount to Loria, I was already wearing q250 dig gear which made the minor boosts of the picks too low-q to use in Loria too trivial to be worth buying even if I could've.
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Do not assume that you speak for all just because you are the loudest voice; there are many who disagree that simply have no desire to waste words on you.