People play games to have fun. If they have fun with particular people more often, they'll actively seek those people out for more fun. If those people lead to more people who give an equal amount of engagement and entertainment on the regular, that ends up forming a clique when all those people start actively seeking out those same people for more fun. It is not at all uncommon for cliques to form around- and almost exclusively revolve around one singular individual who's particularly outgoing, creative, or even just charismatic. If people find you pleasant to be around, that can happen even outside of communities like this one. It's how popular kids become popular kids these days, as I understand it. By being the most entertaining and charming.

Cliques fall apart and devolve into personal drama when a bunch of people all get together just to be near that one particularly fun person, and they start fighting for their time and attention, or for relevence in that person's narrative. Or that person suddenly finds themselves suffering from burn-out, smothered from all sides by people wanting their attention and entertainment all the time, to the point that the game stops being relaxing and fun for them and becomes a second job. Without that shining star serving as the heart of the group, it implodes in on itself before too long.

People bring up cliques a lot as a bad thing, but be honest, if you found yourself reliably having fun with one particular person or group- and otherwise being bored and ignored- you'd probably actively sign on for cliques too. If you find yourself bored and alone, you could try being more outgoing and entertaining, producing fun and entertainment rather than consuming it, but hooonestly.. It's exhausting, don't you think?

I don't know, maybe this is common knowledge, and people just like to have the comfortable gripe to fall back on, "Those damn cliques, back in my day-"
If that's the case, my mistake, I'm maybe a little drunk and felt a need to lecture about something unimportant. I get the frustration, people get rooted in with their cliques, and can't be bothered to try meeting new people or giving anyone else a shot to impress them. Too satisfied with what they have to bother seeking out anything more. Some times, it really does just boils down to how fun you are to be around, though. Though you can't please everyone, some folks come into the game looking for one particular kind of experience. The PVP, prosy high-brow RP, power fantasies, if what you're looking for doesn't gel with what they're looking for, you might not have much fun together anyhow. Pushing yourself to be entertaining is exhausting, too. Not much fun for you to constantly be working hard to ensure everyone else has fun. Plus, the more charming you are, the more people crowd around you. You can end up drowning in attention and expectations before too long. Whole different issue, maybe..?

This is one of those issues of being unable to understand each other's hearts at the end of the day, or some kind of romanticism like that. Everyone's just chasing after their idea of fun. Cliques are inevitable so long as some people are consistently fun. If you don't want to form a clique, stop being fun. If you don't want to get stuck in a clique, branch out and give other people a chance to impress you. If you don't like seeing other people in cliques, ahhh.. Well, sabotaging that is kind of- just be fun, alright? Everyone have fun. Spare that extra minute to think about how what you're doing or what you're planning might look or feel from other people's perspectives, spare a care for the extras on your stage, oh star, or you may find yourself alone on it before long.

I love all of you goofballs. So have fun.

The ability to X / Y adjust clothing icons per direction. I'm sure I'm not the only one who wanted to adjust something's position closer to the body, only for it to grow further away in the opposite direction...

Either that or for East / West states to 'Mirror' each other. Would allow for a lot more icon black magic fuckery.

Due to the nature of Stat Points determining about 95% of your character's power, I would like to propose that the level shown on your character's battle-status is equal to an amount proportionate to the amount of stat points you have spent. 

In actuality this would not change the actual statistic, and you would still obtain up to 60 levels as per normal, but the displayed level in battle would be equal to the character's invested stat points/4 (Min = 1), this would mean characters with all stat points assigned appear to be level 60, and characters with no stat points assigned appear to be level 1.

Does this do anything functional or give any real texture to the level system? Not really, but it does allow one to potentially keep a character at a desired level in the case of say a non combatant, or a child character appearing as if they're level 1.

And why is it a bard?

I'm honestly pretty hype to finally get off my ass to play a Theno, but if there's another new race that comes out with Korvara then that might change. Honestly just kinda curious what other people are vibing with and if anyone has an immediate draw to any of the factions or if everyone is going with distant loner who does their own thing.

Got this error message earlier today.
I believe the boss broke one of my super runes that was under him before I used focus tuning the next round.

Was playing Rune/VA with an unupgraded sea tome.

A quality changing tool made with various flowers, once applied to a tome it would add a special quality that changes the color of all runes created by the user to the ink's color. The color of the ink would depend on the recipe selected.

High level, or just runes in general tend to look like a mess with all those colors clashing, this would help remedy that a little bit and make em' look nicer overall.

I'm sorry if something like that already exists and I just haven't seen it.

Change crit damage modifiers on weapons to be a range, not a flat amount. For example, if a sword has a range of 1-100, it has 1% chance of multiplying your damage by 1.01, 1% chance of multiplying your damage by 2, and 1% of multiplying your damage by any result between those two (as there are 100 different possible results).

Some weapon type examples:

Axes: 0-30
Spears: 5-25
Swords: 10-20
Bows: 5-25
Guns: They can no longer crit.
Fists: They only crit when a gun’s crit would have activated.
Tomes: 60-61


Each point of scaled strength would increase the crit maximum range by 1. For example, having 50 scaled strength would result in an axe range of 0-80.

Each point of scaled guile would increase the crit minimum range. If this pushes the minimum past the maximum, they both increase. For example, having 50 scaled guile would result in a sword range of 60-60.

Each point of scaled defense would decrease the scaled maximum by 1 (defensively). For example, against an opponent with no strength or guile, having 5 scaled defense would result in an axe range of 0-25 against you.

Each point of scaled celerity would decrease the scaled minimum by 1 (defensively). For example, against an opponent with no strength or guile, having 5 scaled celerity would result in a sword range of 5-20 against you.

The scale cannot go below 0.

Liches no longer have immunity to crits; instead, instead of defense and celerity, their defensive crit stats are resistance and sanctity, respectively.

Give black knights (or perhaps just soldiers) a skill that lets them use vitality instead of celerity for the range calculations. The same with rogues with luck (replacing defense) and curates with faith (replacing whichever of the two that their god feels more like picking on that specific day).

Make adaptability ignore this system, provided you have more than 5 unscaled adaptability over your opponent.

Remove nelten.

When testing a new build, there was something odd I spotted in regards to a Dullahan taking more damage than anticipated. The Dullahan passive regards it as always wearing Heavy Armor no matter what torso it's wearing is. In summary, after learning that Indomitable does not take effect for a Dullahan, I took to the live server and discovered the same thing applies there, as well.

Here are the debug logs I've pulled from the testing server, first. The torso the Dullahan is wearing is an Adversity Tunic:

For the sake of damage calculations, it doesn't appear that the reduction from Indomitable shows, but is still calculated before every other damage reduction. For here, what should be 10% physical damage being reduced due to Dullahan always being considered wearing Heavy Armor doesn't seem to be calculated.

The physical defense% of the character was 21.6, so the reduc_multi ends at 78.4 at this stage since it's 100% damage - 21.6.

Pictured above is with the same torso item, but mutated into heavy armor. The difference in the same location is clear, as Indomitable is calculated before everything else in this stage.
100 - 10% - 21.6% = 70.56 reduc_multi.

After seeing this in the test server, I got on my Dullahan character in the live server and swapped around his Mayelia (light armor) with his Haunted Armor (heavy). The numbers are a bit different, but following the same formula, you can see that the calculation with the Mayelia does NOT include the Indomitable damage reduction, whereas the Haunted Armor calc does. This includes a 3% reduction from the 97 REDUC, but is irrelevant to the report.
Mayelia:

100% - 44.1% - 3% = 54.223


Haunted Armor:

100% - 10% - 45.81% - 3% = 47.3079

As of now I haven't tested any other armor type-based class effects, just the interaction with Indomitable, but is still worth testing.

Alright, I don't make these too often, but something that's been bugging me for a bit is that range attacks don't benefit from flank/smite whatsoever outside of melee range. I'm almost certain this wasn't the case in the past, and personally, I think it kind of removes a large selling point of gui for primarily range attackers. To give some screenshots of what I mean (In order of rear attack at range, side attack from range, rear attack + ally at range, and finally rear attack + ally at melee):