Current plans, unsure. I like(d) King a lot. As a T2, I thought I had a loooot more time before getting faenapped. My previous T3-1 character had 11 months before doom to even be a consideration. And my T1 had like 2.5 years before. So the time line kinda threw me. 7 months is really not enough time for T3-1. Especially if they’re gonna get caught again on every Hunt. If there was a guaranteed skip if you got caught by the last one, I might feel better about doing something… As it is… and speculating that I will absolutely get nabbed at the NEXT Hunt… I find myself reluctant to invest any in him. Which is sad, because I kinda think he is mostly well-liked, if not taken all that seriously.

I have basically three options for him, and I am currently unsure which way to go.
Delete. Let’s face it, this is the entire purpose of Doom/Hunt mechanics, to produce Character Churn. I don’t like it, but it is what it is. No idea what I would play if I did, but I do have enough personal karma to tier up an alt. If I did delete, I would probably try to get a Plot on an Alt then make an actual T3 and hope the next Hunt misses me.

Escape as soon as possible, likely in an unethical fashion, to help sully his reputation even more. Spend the month at T1 working on a couple of plots, then hopefully try to bounce up to T3 eventually before the next Hunt.

The current semi-front runner is … Camp for 10 weeks. Then clear Werewolf and see what kinda shenanigans Merman King can get up to. Probably ditch the accountant/Elvis thing and go shift gears into something a lot more sinister. Tier up as high as I can manage, then proceed to terrorize the grid, muwahahaha.

I cannot really comment or speculate on the OOC angle of things while waiting for how the future will go. Worst case scenario, there’s always Duskholm.

I want to say, I don’t think this is meant to hit you every 3 months, it’s supposed to hit you the doom timer, which to newer players, is just a mechanic from H6… Essentially, T3 archetypes would have something like 6 months before elective, T2 archetypes something like 9-11… So on for different groups. This one I’m pretty sure is bugged in terms of who it picked, but having gotten that out of the way, and warning that I might derail a little bit…

I’m personally also not a fan of how this has played out, even if likely a ton of the system is just not working as intended. Even assuming everything was properly working, it’s not a great perspective, as someone who has been trying to play a consistent antag character, to be told that the game is going to try and make my life harder to get to the antag tools every single time I try.

I’ve had T3 on my character for exactly 1 month before the hunt arrived. Now I am down 25k karma on that character (because, yes, while only 20k is removed from my spent, meaning upon reroll I will have only lost 20k, the character has now 5k spent towards nothing, meaning I need to get another 25k anyways). The stats I had spent more than 300k rpxp on getting in this past month, and for which I had been saving for a while, have been negtrained returning a around 200k, meaning having to wait longer to return to the state I was in.

I intended to at some point go T4 to really commit to the antag, and until then have a T3 (which has taken longer than expected, but I like to prioritize it fitting the events than just rushing it mechanically), and now I’m faced with the reality of. Your archetype determines that every 4 months you’re going to be gotten, and lose a modifier worth 50k karma. I am going to spend at least a third of the time between hunts as a tier lower (Because even if you go immoral the second time, 2 months cd until you can tier up again), and all the while praying that I will get the enough karma to sustain a system in which I have to be more focused on making up for lost resources than really progressing other narratives, because surprise, sometimes stats actually matter when we try and build these stories.

In this month before the hunt, I had already started throwing cues and building some stories based on these things. Things like branding or high tier hypnotism ever since I went T3. It’s things that actually impact stories, that can either make someone fall in line or decide to turn on you, that can make it so that other characters have to be more or less cautious. They are tools that help you antag, and that’s why they were locked by tier, because they are meant for the antag characters. All this to say I don’t agree with the idea that we need to rush things and characters need to flow in and out of the grid, and that they should be punished for existing longer. Like Yourstruly said, I do also like character arcs, I don’t want antagonists to be something that victims will go “Well, just ignore it for a couple months, it’ll be gone then”.

Some people have said that they enjoy that the Hunt has brought them all to one small grid to play with each other and break free of people playing house or ERPing… And I couldn’t really disagree more? For someone that has been actively roleplaying and participating in the game, that has been out there and trying to craft stories with other characters, this Wild Hunt is like a prison. I don’t know if half of this will be relevant or retconned, so I have no incentive to do anything high risk or high stakes; We are in such small space and without any protection that actually antagging with my character could be fatal because there’s no saving someone if they want them dead here, nor any privacy to actually distress or torture a character without appearing in someone’s periphery that has different content warnings. The contributions, borough control, favor… All of those systems that people have been working towards for so long? Well, not only we cannot do anything about that here, we also will be likely penalized for being locked out for however long it takes to get out.

I don’t really know what I’ll do with my character, as I see it right now I have two options: Stasis it and bring it back whenever I have the resources to properly face the Wild Hunt (aka, a bunch of karma and rpxp piled up), and in the process leaving hanging everyone I’ve started a story with. Or to just keep playing right now taking the hit and keep working towards the goal I had in mind, even if the character will be way too old by the time I reach it, and likely uninteresting anymore due to everyone having seen enough of it. None of them is a good option, I don’t like any of them. If I have to choose, I will likely go towards the second, but I really wish it had not come to this. That the game wasn’t out to punish the players for investing their time and effort into their characters, and instead tried to encourage different behaviours in ways that didn’t depend on “You will abandon this because you have no better choice or because I ruined it for you”

My view is that the karma cost should be shifted by one tier: T5 losing 30k, T4 20k, T3 10k, T2 5k, and T1 none. Refunds inside the Wild Hunt rooms should be 100% rather than approximately 66%. This would soften the emotional impact with plot karma gain averages closer to around 7.5k for a one-parter and 15k for a three-parter. I am confident that the number of players taken is unintended. I anticipated it, so it does not concern me overly much.

The more significant issue is that the current setup actively incentivizes tiering down to avoid costs and minimize karma loss before being taken. From T3 upward, it becomes optimal to drop as low as possible, since archetypes cannot be changed anyway, and banking karma is better than having it deleted.

Just to add some info, it didn’t take everyone’s primary character. I only have the two — Chance and Darrow with Chance having been made at the beginning of September. So it’s only been a little over 3 months for me.

Yeah, just figured I’d throw that data out there for whatever it might be worth.