[dentin]

MudMann,

Thanks for the kind words. I've tried to collect and archive historical information in addition to current guides and howtos on the Alter Aeon web site, and it's good to see that at least someone finds them useful and interesting. The historical archives and articles contain more than a few pieces of mudding history which might be of general interest in the future, even if a lot of it is AA specific right now.

Regarding your concerns about practices, I wanted to give you a bit of background.

For years, since about 1997, players have had the ability to buy strings and decorative things, as well as items called 'weightless containers'. These let you carry some amount of stuff around in a pocket dimension, regardless of weight. There is a limited analog of a weightless container in the 'floating disk' spell, but those are smaller and vanish over time. Later on, we also added storage lockers, again for holding equipment.

While weightless containers aren't a direct purchase of power for a character, they're pretty close. There's an active market/trade of weightless containers in the game, and new ones get purchased fairly regularly. Most really high level players consider them critical items, though I'm not entirely clear on why (I've become a minimalist, small-set player over the years.) Because of the amount of stuff you can keep in them, we've had to make changes over the years to keep things sane.

When weighed against this, practices really didn't seem like a very big concern. Players get practices with every level and can buy them directly with experience; the vast majority of practices in the system come from these in-game options. It also takes a lot of practices - make that a bloody huge number of practices - to completely max out your character. At total 100, you'll have acquired about 500 practices out of the 1500+ total that you'll need to raise all your stats and learn all skills.

With the understanding that it would take a thousand or so extra practices to completely deck out a character, we intentionally set the practice price high enough that it would be unreasonable to buy that many. All the purchased practices so far don't even remotely add up to that. And as a result, it's turned out to be less of a game impact than weightless containers have been.

I doubt you'll agree with this conclusion, but perhaps you can understand where we were coming from with it. The final decision was mine, and it took me 10+ years to convince myself it could be done without screwing up the game.

-dentin