Arelith

It does not make much sense that players can make significant changes to their characters at any time and at absolutely no cost. I’m referring to the adjustment of dozens of feats and hundreds of skill points by thousands of players, which forces the DM team to monitor these changes and manage a lot of potential abuse cases.

I suspect that many abuse cases remain undiscovered due to the unclear reasons why people relevel their characters. While some reasons are obvious abuses, others, such as adding or changing two classes, resulting in up to 27 completely new levels, fall into a gray area.

Currently, changing only one out of three possible classes or modifying a few basic feats or stat point distributions requires players to essentially create new characters via -remake. This process punishes consistent players who have earned their items and allows everyone to essentially game the anti-muling system: Anyone can simply transfer their items to the less deserving characters in exchange for future financial aid or justify charitable donations from other characters based on shared memories and history.

While releveling should be made harder or even impossible, remaking should generally come at a lower cost - losing only quarters, shops, and maybe some coins. However, items should not be lost or disposed of in a forceful manner unless they will no longer be needed by the characters after their retraining. Players should have control over their characters and their own earned items.

Players should still require the awards they initially used to prevent them from remaking their characters endlessly. Those who did not require an award initially should also need a minor or normal award, which are fairly easy to obtain, just to level the playing field a bit and prevent them from remaking their characters multiple times at no cost whenever their factions could benefit from a different build, an occurrence that is often the case, or for other reasons.

I understand that these are significant changes I am suggesting, and implementing them would require careful consideration and some coding. However, I believe, besides addressing the issues above, these changes would also:

- Encourage players to consider their builds and training paths more carefully without making them suffer from a few irreversible mistakes.
- Slow down power leveling by preventing players from reaching level 30 in one week via one path and then releveling to the build they had initially planned.
- Foster role-playing interactions between newer and older characters who might otherwise have no reason to interact.
- Create a fairer system regarding item retention for characters who experience stagnation and are unable to remake under the current system.
- Allow players whose characters were irreversibly affected by updates in a negative way to make adjustments.
- Justify character changes through actual retraining, which should always come at a cost and leave the affected characters vulnerable for some time.

Summary: -relevel is too easy, while -remake is too costly. Both result in abusive behaviors that must be monitored by the DM team and lead to players gaming the system. Therefore, some adjustments are probably required.