Asherons Call: Respec Timer Redesign

Asheron's Call has gone through several phases of history in its long lifespan. At times, various different templates have been favored either by design or unintentionally. It was for this reason that the Temples of Enlightenment and Forgetfulness were initially introduced - to allow players to change their character into a more enjoyable template.

However, various unintended and less desirable consequences arose from this decision. First with Gromnie Teeth, and then with Tesserae, people would utilize the ability to untrain and retain skills as a means to fast experience. Very little respect for the original template choices a player might make remained.

The intention of our changes to the Temples are to hopefully satisfy the former crowd - those who have templates which are just no fun - while at the same time hindering the latter crowd - those who utilize retraining as an experience point system or who retrain lockpick every other week in order to benefit from that content which was developed for dedicated lockpickers in mind. We want templates to matter, but we don't want them to be a death sentence should you have chosen poorly and realized your mistake at level 40.

Therefore, we will be introducing a scaling timer on all skill and attribute gems. At first, you can get your gems instantaneously, but the timer will increase the more gems of a certain type you get. In order to acquire the gems, you will need to hand a token (which will generate on a 1 minute timer in the Temples) to a statue. The statue will analyze how many times you have received a gem of that type, and if the appropriate amount of time has expired, it will give you a gem. Otherwise, it asks you to come back later, and specifies the total amount of time you must wait. There will be books in the Temples explaining the new timers as well.

The timers will be set as follows

Untrain
1st-4th gems: Instant
5th-8th gems: 1 week timer
9th-12th gems: 2 week timer
13th and above: 4 week timer

Specialization
1st-2nd gems: Instant
3rd-4th gems: 1 week timer
5th-6th gems: 2 week timer
7th and above: 4 week timer

Attribute
1st-18th: Instant
19th-36th gems: 1 week timer
37th and above: 4 week timer

To accompany these changes, we have also found it necessary to amend the way Tesserae work slightly. If you receive an untrain skill gem, you will be barred from handing in a Tessera of that skill for 3 months. Also, there will now be a 2 week hand-in timer on Tesserae in general, to prevent people from picking up all their gems at once, waiting for the timer to expire, and then alternating between turning in Tesserae and untraining the skill.

We hope that these changes will add to the game, and we welcome any feedback that you, the players, have on this issue - it is, obviously, a very touchy issue, and we are open to the concept of tweaking this idea in response to feedback from the players. Still, we believe that in this system we have achieved a balance between what the two opposing camps of player thought desire on this issue.