Best Of

I am also confused by removing gold drops as a source of income. Did the admin just look at the amount of gold in the game and decided it was too much? Because, again, it's not evenly distributed by far. 

I want to point out that I see my name used here and I did make a reply in the discussion:

I don't think we can unring the bell on new guilds without doing more harm than good. Rather than wanting to delete and remake a new system, should focus on how to make them more interesting and enliven them.

It does sometime feels like a lot of the flavor and development of the old guilds was lost, but I also don't think there's anyway to go back either. There's a lot of potential that guilds can do without having to be tied to a particular class.

As Jatius pointed out, mechanics that punish inactive guilds (new currency why?) or rely on consistent patron requests aren't a good way to go. Moving shrines to guilds from orders doesn't even particularly make sense.

I will also say Magnagora has done a pretty good job at making sure people join guilds. Without the burden of trying to allow freedom, we have pretty much everybody guilded. I do think the guilds could use work - but also scrapping them would be a huge step backwards.

I have not found any support for the majority of these changes outside of the rebuttals posted here. I see discord servers flowing with opposition to these changes on a whole. That worries me. 

I come away asking myself: Why are we taking lessons out of an IRE system? Lessons have been a fundamental currency across all the games that meant permanency and a sense of achievement and completion. 

I echo the "Who asked for these changes?"
I echo "Most of these changes do not support the community, and do not encourage new players or content-creating alt characters."

As a new player just shy of a year, I can't say any of this encourages me. I am often away for travel and do not log in every day. Sometimes I go 10 days without being able to sit down to play because work, holiday, or my family are foremost. Yet, I invested in a yearly subscription upfront in order to learn 5 trades and a second class to facilitate my RP prop creation. Tradeskill designing is content creation and a means of meaningful interaction with characters. (Like coming together to source rare comms!) Being told that I -must- make time or else, does not encourage me to invest myself more.

As someone who both doesn't have the time and mental energy to play due to life, I don't like anything about this proposal except for decoupling tradeskills and professions. It seems like when I'm finally able to play again I'll come back to being stripped of all but two tradeskills that I need to ensure I've ground something out for the year, which isn't appealing to me at all.

I learned the tradeskills I have to be able to craft for myself and friends. If I make X friend a gift I like being able to make it and give it to them without trying to find third party people to craft the silly thing. Stocking shops will now become even more tedious. I've had 0 exciting or interesting interactions in 12+ years of IRE when asking someone to restock something for me. It's exhausting and frankly puts me off of the whole system.  

I would rather commodities just be deleted from the game and gold costs assigned to each design pattern than a prospecting skillset.