[MelancholyFae]

November will mark out eight years in Ravenna. This, in itself, is pretty amazing in many ways. But we, as staff and as fellow players, some of us are realizing, that time is slipping past us way too fast.

Due to many outside reasons such as school life, work, and other things that like to get in the way of our roleplay, getting things accomplished in-game can be difficult, especially when it involves more than a few people, and even more so when these people are in different timezones. Realistically, our characters would be able to get things done more quickly than we currently are able to roleplay them. (Things such as meetings and relatively monthly activities that our characters would be able to do, but that we are unable to achieve.)

Some of us have come to the conclusion that due to real life, perhaps we need to slow down time in Mesalia as well, so we as players can get more of a proud sense of accomplishment for our characters while we play them.
So here are our suggestions, and we ask that you help us with your input as we value you as fellow players in our on-going story.

The main idea is to slow time down.
Currently, time passage is from 1 IRL month = 1 IG year.
We would double this to 2 IRL month = 1 IG year.

1. One variation would have the seasons the same (one month per) and just extend the actual year to account for two seasons at a time. This would have the benefit of being the closest to what we currently have.

2. A second variation would extend the seasons to two months each. This would double the amount of time for each season, but also give more time perhaps for seasonally-affected roleplay (festivals, planting, hunting, and other things).

Once we decide -how- to change it, the next step is to find out when to make this change.

A. One variation would start this month, in November.

1. If we keep to choice one, December will still be autumn, but it will be considered just the second half of the year.
   
2. If we extend the seasons to two months, then December will be the second half of summer as well as the second half of the year.
   

B. A second variation would have us retroactive this time passage to when we arrived in Ravenna. While this can complicate things in the short run, this gives us much more of an opportunity to have a more realistic approach to everything we have done so far - the houses would have been done in four years instead of eight, for example. Of course, this will not fix -everything- but this could help some.

What will this change, exactly, for players, and what will stay the same?

Aging:
Aging will match the time passage. If we go with variation #2, we will be able to take away 4 years from all adults (the children will stay the same age as they are currently) to match the 4-instead-of-8 years of living in Ravenna.

Pregnancy rules:
Pregnancy will be played out in 6 weeks instead of the 3 to match the changed time passage. This can give people more time to roleplay symptoms and perhaps feel less of a rush.

NPC babies:
We allow immediate jumps to 15 years of age, there’d so be no changes here.

Building rules:
Here things get both tricky and better. There’d be more time for a player to build and wouldn’t take years and years but we’d still have things finished at same times.

Almost all 3-week-rules:
There’d be no change, these are more IRL related than IC related. If anything this timepassage change can make it easier to explain a 6 month absence over a whole years absence, etc.

Other changes are more on the administration end, such as the blog, lore, and application reviews.

We know this may sound confusing, but we believe that these changes, when implemented, will create less stress on getting things done, and reduce the feeling of time rushing by too quickly.


A breakdown of the poll is also listed below as well to help with understanding.

[Rokku_Ryu]

I have always thought that the way time is handled in the setting has been a bit wonky. There are a lot of things that make it really off.. Like 1 day being 12 days. That a new character, on its second day, has been there almost a month.

I think that 2 IRL months = 1 year is good, but I think the seasons should pass the same as they always have. No civilization survives an entire YEAR of winter, unless that's all there is for a decade. At least this way, it would only be half a year with ice and snow.

[cerberus23]

As someone who had, up until this point been only part of servers that had /no/ set IC time system, and just allowed players to do as they wish. Personally up until joining Mesalia, I was dead against the idea of actual realistic time systems, especially in relation to ageing, I found its restriction on the player to be unwieldy and in some ways unfair.

However since then I've gotten used to the current way time works and revolves in the setting, and I feel that it works. Time affects only a small handful of actual things within the setting, building, farming, characters ages and so on. Other than that, it has no real effect, unless you look at it and go "Wow hasn't time rushed by."

The thing is, even if you technically reduce the speed at which time goes passed, RP will continue to happen at the exact same speed, things will rapidly occur and people will miss them, that is just the way RP /is/, slowing IC time down won't change that, it'll just make things like building, farming and trade skills take even longer, which, if anything at all, would make things less..enjoyable, at least in my eyes.

Mesalia is a slow RP server, when compared with many others, very little /actually/ occurs on a day to day schedule, so when you take someone who plays a builder, or a farmer, or a tailor, and make them slow their work down even more, so they can't do things for an even longer period of time, that reduces the amount of RP or work they actually get to do per day.

Look at it another way, those who get hurt will have their characters stuck in the healing house for even longer. Some might say that isn't that a good thing? That I get more time to RP with people? Well, yes it is, but then again, it isn't. There is after all, only so much RP I can do before I'm pretty much repeating myself, and I don't enjoy seeing characters incapacitated and therefore restricting their players. (I might as well just rename one Ward the Zarkaylia Ward)

Personally, I feel that things haven't gone by too fast at all, they've gone by at a realistic speed, people have come and gone, the city has slowly changed from being completely abandoned and ruined to..less abandoned, and mostly not ruined.

And as a last note, I object to the idea of accelerated growth to 15 years instantly, that would confuse the hell out of the current children's ages and so on. If you're going to double the time it takes for a year to pass, then just double the currently doubled ageing of children. Completely removing the child phase removes an enjoyable and often important stage of RP anyway.

[LuckyLeaf]

Personally, I had no problems with this when I had more time for RP, but now that I have tons of stuff that demand my attention IRL and find myself being unable to get on servers on the right times, (time differences, mental) I found myself in a situation where my characters are getting old pretty quickly without accomplishing much.

We do RP in such a way that we sort of disregard time, but that only kind of works if the lapses between RP's are relatively short. Take for example, someone recovering in the healing house; if other characters that hold that hurt character dear can't be present for IRL reasons for the entire duration while the character is being healed, then they miss out on possibly personal and interesting RP. I mean, Jesus Christ, I've been trying to get Mitty married for something like 4 months now, and the event is still in planning stages because I've been so damn busy, and that's 4 years of commitment without progress. (poor Alex)

But besides that point, the only other thing that would be affected once the time changes would be the technical aspects of realism, like the recovery times, like cerb mentioned, and the professional output of characters, and I don't think that's really a bad thing. If our characters take longer to produce what they had been producing twice as fast, then I think we ourselves have time to polish on what they're producing. For example, I could do some more research on medieval weapons and armory so that the producing process and the quality of the stuff that Mitty forges matches properly, and others could find more about the professions of their characters and the needs of it which could develop into more RP, such as tailors going through the process of actually making their dye.

TL;DR:

Basically I think the lengthened time could be used for improving the quality of RP, but as Cerb mentioned, all this may turn repetitive; I guess that's where the challenge to our creativity kicks in. I'm all for slowing down time, as for seasons, I'm not as certain. I suppose we could have more events relevant to the seasons if they were longer, but I think I'll keep my opinion on that for the moment.

[Zarkaylia]

I'll clear some misunderstandings up.

Look at it another way, those who get hurt will have their characters stuck in the healing house for even longer. Some might say that isn't that a good thing? That I get more time to RP with people? Well, yes it is, but then again, it isn't. There is after all, only so much RP I can do before I'm pretty much repeating myself, and I don't enjoy seeing characters incapacitated and therefore restricting their players. (I might as well just rename one Ward the Zarkaylia Ward)

Anything IRL related won't be changed. Healing pace, building pace, creating pace etc is already slow as is. It will remain at same pace, you don't have to delay anything. It already takes months to heal a small cut? No worries to half that time when we double the passing of time anyway.

And as a last note, I object to the idea of accelerated growth to 15 years instantly, that would confuse the hell out of the current children's ages and so on. If you're going to double the time it takes for a year to pass, then just double the currently doubled ageing of children. Completely removing the child phase removes an enjoyable and often important stage of RP anyway.

I will clarify as this is a massive misunderstanding. This is not even a change. I'll quote the rules:

"Rules regarding IC pregnancy
IC pregnancy lasts for about 3 IRL weeks, +/- 1-2 days.
The pregnancy has to be played out within reason.
If needed, the aging of the child can be sped to up to 15 years of age to let someone play the child as a character immediately.
If there's no one to play the child available at it's birth, it may remain an NPC for 3 IRL months and have to be taken care of ICly during that time.
If no one's available to play the child after 3 IRL months, the child has to die.
You need approval from an admin!
One may ask staff to add the child to the "Needed Characters"-list."

The only thing this rule means is that you're allowed to basically choose w.e way you like for the aging of your NPC babies, but the limit age to speed the aging to is 15 years old. Beyond that the character must age at normal speed.

What we're saying is that there'll be no change on this. If you want to keep aging your NPC kids the exact same way as before, most use 1 month = 2 IC years, no problem.