Can we please stop trying to change systems?

Ever since the site move, I have noticed that there has been a large push to alter a lot of systems on the forum. Frankly, I feel as though a lot of these systems are being pushed without actually considering the ramifications they would have on site balance. While some of these system ideas are still in the works, I'm concerned that when they do finally get pushed out, they will irrevocably ruin the already delicate system balance of the forum. The only system changes that I believe were needed were the hit call rules, and for perception/subtle genjutsu to no longer require countdowns to work. The poison buff was fine as well.

From what I have heard, there is a genjutsu system change in the works that would involve being able to hit someone with nightmare genjutsu damage solely off a stat check between the target's intelligence and the user's intelligence + the rank of genjutsu. I honestly can't imagine why anyone would think that any form of autohitting via stat checks would be balanced or well received. Now mind you, I have not read the proposed system for this change, nor do I know the exact wording or extent of what this system would entail, but from a conceptual perspective, I cannot comprehend how this would possibly be balanced. Getting instantly knocked out because you decided to go a taijutsu build and just happened to look at a sealless genjutsu user's finger does not sound like good balance to me.



I've also heard of an even more disruptive system in the works, but I'll refrain from discussing that one until it's actually pushed through or completed.

In regards to something like the taijutsu buffs, I'm still confused as to why people think it's needed. It's like the people wanting to buff taijutsu are making the same arguments as the people who wanted to buff kyujutsu. They keep saying that taijutsu is weaker than the other physical skills because it requires a heavier stat investment. The funny thing is that at end game, both kyujutsu and taijutsu are stronger than bukijutsu or kenjutsu, as most entity limited folks are going to have piercing/slashing immunity on their cloaks. The only way you're going to be hurting those people is with insane blunt force damage or chakra explosions. Bolstering the sharpness of your weapon isn't going to do shit. If you think genin having S rank weapons and just dumping all their exp in coordination is OP then you you can laugh when they get dunked by genjutsu users or random people flicking their wrists to hit them with A rank speed and S rank damage earth spikes.

But enough about specific systems. The main point of this suggestion is to ask staff to reconsider trying to push for a bunch of different system changes just because the site has moved over. The current systems are very well balanced, outside of a few things that need to be updated to follow the current rules. Altering even one system heavily will have a ripple effect on many different aspects of the forum, from canon library techs and custom techs to UAs and clans. All this does is lead to confusion over system balance and create massive amounts of extra work for staff who need to balance every little edge case that a change creates.

All staff should do is alter the genjutsu rules to remove countdowns on perception/subtle genjutsu and update canon library techniques so they properly follow the site balance rules and provide examples for what sort of things are allowed for customs. Any other system changes or suggestions should be heavily scrutinized and the potential ramifications of them discussed among the members of staff and among members of the site.

Please let me know what the rest of you think about this.

As with most things I do involving Brian, I came in here originally to act contrarian to him and meme around but having read all this I cannot.

I simply agree with him too much to even ironically disagree with this, it's also grinding to a halt some IC stuff and I know you admins would rather be able to RP than to try and rework the entire site as it SEEMS is now happening. Tiny things are fine to tweak, they're needed, now while I disagree and think Tai should be buffed, it may have to do with the fact that I plan on taking Tai AND Buki on a character and enjoy having builds that are hyper efficient in one area, plus it's kinda what I'm forced into simply by virtue of Uzumaki chains and how they are Typed here so for ME it would be nice, I can imagine this would help others with more effective builds than honestly a meme that I've always wanted to do since the beginning of my rp career. So I probably shouldn't disagree with Brian there either.

Sealless Genjutsu of any type autohitting seems really wacky to me, but hey I got a genjutsu user. Go for it. See what happens when everyone's just getting hit with X rank psych damage automatically, it'll be a goof troop of a time. Honestly for the most part all Genjutsu needs is, I agree, just a re-balance of perceptive Genjutsu. ANY GENJUTSU THAT PARALYZES OR INFLICTS PSYCH DAMAGE NEEDS A CHARGE AND HANDSIGNS IMO. Course again like Brian said earlier, this is all heresay but in my month here I've got 130 posts across the two sites so I THINK I know the balance now? I dunno tbh but for what it's worth;

Gambit is correct. A lot of these changes are unnecessary and in some cases had already been passed on by staff with good reason. The Tai buffs that were proposed would lead to S-Rank Styles giving +2 Tier buffs for 5 CP a post. I can't even begin to imagine the wanton abuse that would encourage.

Likewise many of the other proposed changes will only: consume staff time, add needless complexity which invites abuse that staff will in turn need to correct and deal with, this is especially true if such abuses are found in the middle of serious fights.

I think for the most part people are happy with the systems on Gladius. I know it can be tempting to tweak and change the game to achieve perfection but sometimes that's just not necessary. All it does is burn out staff and detract away from more important things. It also detracts from staff being able to RP more often which is the lifeblood of the site.

I'm not generally one for long responses so forgive me if my post isn't anywhere near as long as Brian's or Jess'. Frankly though, I think Brian is dead on here. This system change is neither necessary or, and this is going by what I saw from discord the other night, particularly wanted.

Also, and I cannot underscore enough how much I am not trying to be rude, but I cannot seem to find wording that doesn't make this sound that way. So please, forgive me for it.

It feels like some of these changes are in response to the previous admin/site owner Nyg no longer being on the team. Now obviously I can't prove or disprove this, but I find the timing of all of these changes to be oddly coincidental with that event.

So are some of these system changes in response to that event because in those specific cases the individual who would probably be most against such things is no longer there to go

Spoiler:

?

It seems that every time someone tries to propose a buff or a change to a clan that needs it, Chigetsu says 'staff is really busy atm, but we'll try to get to it later.' Which is a fair response. Now however, I worry about what staff is busy doing. Ramping through a million system changes just because the site changed hands is not the recipe of keeping it healthy and active. Sudden and substantial change like this are what pushes the fan base you already have away.

When the site changed hands, and almost everyone transferred over, I was ecstatic, because it looked like the community as a whole was reacting to what was happening with a flexibility of mind that surprised. Frankly, this is has been one of the smoothest site transfer I've ever seen and it's been fucking well done on staffs part to get everyone over quickly and efficiently.

Now though it feels to me as if there's danger of pushing people away because of rapid system changes. Guys, it hasn't even been 2 weeks and you're already changing so much shit, some of it was good. This? Not so much.

Genjutsu is frankly, impossible to balance perfectly. No matter how you slice it. Due to it's auto-hit nature. Most sites go for a build that effectively just makes it a complicated chakra drain build. This site is the only one I'd seen that actually does a fairly good job of getting it as close to the line as possible. Yet now someone wants to change that?

Why?

Are countdowns painful? Sure, but is autohitting with no real way to avoid it. It's probably one of the better mechanics to balancing the idea of genjutsu I've seen in a very long time. Hell, I can't think of another one atm. Now though, you want to make it autohit and doing automatic psych damage?

The way it seems like it'd work to me, based on that discord conversation is this.

Person A is doing a full on strength, speed, coor, D tier int build.

Person B is doing a full on int, coor, speed, D tier strength build.

Person A has to manage to hit someone, that is, physically touch someone in order to get their damage off. Most people are awfully prone to wanting this to not happen.

Person B just has to cast a genjutsu that auto turns person A into a drooling vegetable. Because they can't avoid every single genjutsu while person A, could feasibly avoid every single physical blow, or simply tank it.

The stat investment is too deep on physical style builds to also take enough int to defend and even then you aren't going to build enough to stop someone with something like S rank int. Which I get it, 'It's S rank hurrr, you're not supposed to be able to fight it off without something comparable.' But that argument flies out the window when the main thing to fight it off is in fact, the int stat itself. Or getting to S class, when everything else can be fought off with the right perc/coordination and jutsu.

Don't we have enough of an int meta without exacerbating the issue? Hell I think int should be nerfed, not buffed. I believe I'm in the minority there however so I'll refrain from going into that discussion.

Tl;dr:

I agree with Brian whole hardheartedly here.
Too many system changes too fast
Good job on the site transfer
Slow it down folks, we see you're doing things, you don't have to ramp out a system change or two every week in order to make us believe it.

With that in mind, overall everything ya'll been doing has been good. I don't think Taijutsu needs a buff, but eh, I'm ambivalent about such things since one can still theoretically avoid those hits.

I've said it once to a specific point, but I will state it again broadly. Nothing I said above is meant to offend in anyway. If I offended you, I apologize.

Aight, I wanted to have made a post here sooner but I couldn't get to it up until now.

First of all, I would like to make it perfectly clear that we are not changing systems to make you "believe us" or anything of the sort. We already know the value of this community and how it stands for what what Gladius is. That was made well and perfectly clear when pretty much everyone aside from a few exceptions agreed to move to an entire new site and even help us when we needed. We're perfectly aware that this community is there when we need it, both to support our work as well as call us out when needed.

Andalusa wrote:It feels like some of these changes are in response to the previous admin/site owner Nyg no longer being on the team. Now obviously I can't prove or disprove this, but I find the timing of all of these changes to be oddly coincidental with that event.

Guys, we have 2 new admins on a team of 5, as well as 2 new registration mods who were granted access to staff chat and its discussions. So we have 4 new people with new ideas and thoughts they want to share with us. That is naturally accompanied by proposed changes, both in staff dynamics as well as maybe in systems. We also dropped an administrator, so of course the timing coincided with Nyg's departure from the staff team. It's not odd at all, it's only natural.

That being said, I know it may sound scary. We're very used to our systems and ways, and change is always scary for people who have builds and ideas invested into their characters. But I also want to make this perfectly clear: "Your input is valued." We got very valuable input from the Taijutsu suggestion thread. Note how it wasn't an announcement, but a place where we asked for your input.

Now, obviously this won't always be the case. We'd never get anything done if we needed to go through a suggestion thread every time we wanted to make a change but...

I don't want any of you to panic, thinking we're going to change a ton of stuff without listening to you guys. Sure, the staff discussions and proposed systems are (and should remain) private until the moment we believe they're solid enough to introduce to the community, but we're also perfectly aware that Gladius is nothing without its members.

Andalusa wrote:It seems that every time someone tries to propose a buff or a change to a clan that needs it, Chigetsu says 'staff is really busy atm, but we'll try to get to it later.' Which is a fair response. Now however, I worry about what staff is busy doing. Ramping through a million system changes just because the site changed hands is not the recipe of keeping it healthy and active.

Frankly I feel this is a little bit unfair. Yes, we are busy. Staff chat has been more busy in the past couple of weeks than in the two months before those weeks. But that's natural. Our dynamics changed a little and we have clans to review, Nyg's restricteds to review and balance, and that all is a lot of work in addition to keeping up with registrations...plus, we also like to role-play here sometimes, you know? We didn't change any system, and you're all jumping the gun here. Of course there were proposed changes, we have 4 new people. But you didn't see us changing Taijutsu without consulting you. In fact, you didn't see us effectively change Taijutsu at all.

Your worries are not being ignored. They're not falling on deaf ears.

I will not discuss anything related to Genjutsu on this thread, because you're all worried about something that is little more than a rough draft proposal and frankly something we've had very little time to work on with all else that's going on. I personally haven't even said anything at all about that system, nor considered its implications yet. Guys, stop worrying about hear-says.

The one system I can and will discuss is the Taijutsu one. I fundamentally agree that Taijutsu doesn't need any buffs, but the change was proposed and because we were very divided and this was a fundamental system change, we decided to ask for your input.

Brian wrote:I'm concerned that when they do finally get pushed out, they will irrevocably ruin the already delicate system balance of the forum. The only system changes that I believe were needed were the hit call rules, and for perception/subtle genjutsu to no longer require countdowns to work. The poison buff was fine as well.

Brian I want to let you know that I fully understand your concerns, and that we do consider the delicate balance system of the forum before we push anything out. And if there're significant doubts about a change, we tend to consult the community. In fact I can let you know that the result of the Taijutsu suggestion thread heavily influenced the direction in which that discussion was going. As it should have.

I know a lot of proposed changes sound scary, but these proposals are natural given the new blood on the team. It doesn't mean they'll all pass, or even be considered. I can only ask that you give us some credit and trust us a little.

And if by any chance you feel we *did* fuck up somehow, somewhere... the Suggestions board is always open, and your inputs are always read, and discussed. Even if some are procrastinators like me and delay posting there for days...or indefinitely e.e

Anyway, that was all. Cheers~

Edit:

Akihiro wrote:We didn't change any system

I lied. We buffed poisons. But eeeh, I think you get what I'm trying to say.

Akihiro wrote:
Edit:

Akihiro wrote:We didn't change any system

I lied. We buffed poisons. But eeeh, I think you get what I'm trying to say.

Insert pseudo sad cat here