Presence

[radioactivejesus]

It's still totally worthless. Now you can just see exactly how many stat points you have wasted on it.

yep. Not even allowed to downgrade it according to staff. "Presence/aura is one thing that's inherent and not something you can easily gain or lose". So we're all stuck with a useless stat that isn't likely to be improved upon in any meaningful way for a fairly long time

[Justanothacivy]

So... why worry about it if it doesn't effect anything?

It's just there, could be used in the future. What's the fuss?

[Matt]

The fuss is they have a stat which can potentially cripple their PC because it does absolutely nothing. There's also a pretty large chance it won't do anything for a very long time.

[radioactivejesus]

So... why worry about it if it doesn't effect anything?

It's just there, could be used in the future. What's the fuss?

pc's have a fixed amount of points to distribute to their stats. Having high presence means they in turn have low levels in other more important things

[Justanothacivy]

So this is sort of a min/max thing?

I'm sorry, I haven't really seen much fret about having low stats anywhere beside here.

[Matt]

No it's sort of a 'my character who I wrote and really enjoy is crippled because he has peak presence and avg everything else'. When you spend a lot of time on a PC that can really put a damper on a lot of things. It's like making someone take farming/music and being like 'one day it'll be for something!' Until then just suck balls and talk about how awesome of a musical farmer you are.

[likui]

It's like making someone take farming/music and being like 'one day it'll be for something!' Until then just suck balls and talk about how awesome of a musical farmer you are.

And when it's finally implemented, you're an incompetent newb musical farmer despite being in the game three years and have to kowtow and pretend to learn from "more experienced" rpp-role musical farmers who just commenced an hour ago.

[Songweaver]

Presence, like aura before it, is an esoteric concept. Strength, constitution, willpower, intelligence, dexterity, agility -- we get these things. These things can be quantified with (relatively) easy understanding. Presence not only serves next to no function IG, but presence should serve no function in-game. Let skills and roleplay determine presence; I don't need to have a stat to tell people how well my character speaks, or leads, or socializes. That's roleplay. What's more is that my character could be a great leader, ugly as sin, awkward in social situations, and barely literate. Tying all of these esoteric abilities into one stat is inane.

I need stats to tell the code that already exists how my character functions in a wide variety of crafting and combat-based areas that demand code. That's their function.

With aura, you could dump points into it on the hopes that the promise of receiving more admin attention would come true. I didn't like this idea, but even it was a better stat than presence.

Again, I vote to just remove presence entirely. There are plenty of stats to worry about when you're building a character; they all mean more in this engine than they did in old SOI. That doesn't need to be further confused and confounded with Presence.

[krelm]

Also, with high aura there was always the small chance you could roll with some psionics.

You don't get that with high presence. Or anything else.

[Sabrelon]

Generally I have no problem with rolling with the idea that we just need to wait to have the issue at hand resolved/made better in the future, but I find I'm pretty much in the same camp as a lot of the others in the thread.

The concepts that Presence governs are things that should be dictated by IC action and Roleplay. If I have a high presence in game, my character is supposed to be suave and convincing, and I play him in a manner that doesn't support that, Presence is worthless.

A PC can be warned if they roleplay like they have superhuman strength and only have average. If can say for sure that if my PC has poor Presence, but he's written as not being totally incoherent and awkward, I'm going to play him as he's written.

Like what has been said before, I'd much rather have it removed and left abstract (or set to a static number so that it's arbitrary) than have to worry about what is basically a coded RP-Police.

[krelm]

And bump. Presence still doesn't do anything.

[Fulgrim]

I mean, don't expect it to. We're trying to work around it, but it's just not high up on the list of priorities.

At the least, we might try to get it target-able by Upgrade.

[teepu]

Can we atleast chunk out points from presence into other attributes with the upgrade command?

[Droll]

While we are on the subject....one month upgrade timers would be an excellent temporary solution for those who put too many points into presence. They could easily move the points into more useful stats and, when and if presence becomes relevant, they'd be able to move the points right back in a reasonable amount of time.

[Fulgrim]

At the least, we might try to get it target-able by Upgrade.

ETA:

As to changing the timer on the upgrade command...I don't know.

It's been brought up before up top and there's been no definite answer/anything done on the backend about it, even if it'd take a couple minutes to change.

I get that doesn't mean you'll stop asking for it, I'm just saying. If you contact me about an upgrade (dumping one point of whatever into another point of whatever) I can arrange a manual changing of points after the upgrade goes through, but that's about it. Mind you, you have to use the upgrade command first, or I can't do anything.

ETA2:

Let me make sure everyone understands what I'm saying here.

If you have Int, and you like where your Int is, but you use upgrade on it and put a point of Int into Str.

And then it goes through. And you contact me about the upgrade so that I am aware of it. I will switch a point of Presence (until it hits 9, where it can go no further) back into Int.

That's just an example.

[Holmes]

It should be a trivial code change if you want Presence to be usable in Upgrade.

Even more trivial to make upgrade 30 days.

Please confirm that Staff want these two and I'll gladly take the two seconds to fix the code, if no one else is going to.

[radioactivejesus]

It should be a trivial code change if you want Presence to be usable in Upgrade.

Even more trivial to make upgrade 30 days.

yes please!

[Taurgalas]

This is being discussed among staff. We'll let you know if this is something we want to do and/or if there are other restrictions that ought to come in.

[Frigga]

In the mean time, if you want to submit that code update and have it ready to approved for a push, I wouldn't be opposed to it, Holmes, and that would be a very kind gesture.

[Patty]

Any update on this?

[Alcarin]

Most of us seem to be in agreement upstairs.

If anyone wants to submit that code update mentioned above, it might just happen. Maybe. But I make you no promises that are above my rank to make.

[radioactivejesus]

I think the majority of the playerbase are in favor of presence being targetable in upgrade and the upgrade timer being made 1 month rather than 3. Wish I had the authorization to do the work and set it up

[Holmes]

Submitted the code for this.

[Patty]

Thank you!

[Holmes]

I think this is live, or will be in the near future.