"Being part of "Life" meant leveling lifeskills on alt characters to earn guild life points for the leaderboard and competing amongst ourselves through life fame."

Currently your "challenge" with clarity boils down to raising as many alts as possible to the professional level..

Respect yourself a little, you know very well that guru and + bring nothing to the guild so you spam low lvl alts in lifeskill for these points

And now you're crying because you're going to lose this advantage?

This is beginning to sound like the PvE vs. PvP discussions.  Which makes sense, because it's a change targeted for much the same purpose - making the game more amenable to newcomers.  Unfortunately, the tone is also similar.  And I wonder if the ultimate result will be the same, intentionally or not: marginalizing a game activity that's not PvE.

It's happening to PvE too, by the way. Open world is giving way to instances and set piece fights.  Judging by what they are doing to mobs, stats are being simplified as well.  There are other signs.  Hard to see at this stage, though.  

Whatever is going on, one thing's for sure: it's a very different game.  I hope they are making the right choices for the right reasons.  I do wish they would let us in on what those are, exactly.  The ball started with a surprisingly long preface about bracing for change, but they didn't say why the change was happening.  "Reducing complexity" is a reponse to whatever that is, not the reason itself.

I know we have our guesses about that (new players), and are probably right, but I'd really like to hear PA present it, they can probably add some insights that we could not have.  They missed the chance they had at this last "ball" (it's really not a ball anymore, is it).  There will be others.

Lifeskill competition sounds dumb imo because you can easily p2w.

"keep lifeskills to be per character because it gives more guild points" is not as good of a reason you might think it is lol

It's more about your characters having an identity.  The more they simplfy and dumb things down and consolidate and make things "easier", what is the point of playing?  They might as well have one character, the gender of which, appearance of which, skillsets, weapons can be changed at will by buying a "pass" or something crazy.  If everything is family-wide, what's the point of different characters?  If we cna't have a variety, why not have one amphorus character that can do and be everything in the name of simplicity?

Variety is the spice of life.

The more you remove from anything, the less spectacular it is.

Agreed. I have many lifeskill characters with diversified lifeskill levels, but only because not having them was pure annoyance. I started the game with one primary lifeskill character and was later greatly surprised with the annoyance it created when I got deeper into lifeskilling. Leveling different lifeskillers is something I can live without at any time. (Even if I lost experience in the merge!)

I understand that for people who see value in increasing lifeskill fame, this change is shocking. I would vouch for them to be compensated, but overall, I am thrilled about making lifeskills family-wide. There are so many benefits I could list across all lifeskills, but only a single downside - and that is losing lifeskill fame and time invested for some players. (Anyways, the limit of 901 points for lifeskill fame benefits already hints that going higher may not be very meaningful in the long term. The fact that some people made increasing these points their goal should not make other players their hostages.)

My lifeskill characters will still retain their identity, I do not see any problem with this. My farmer is still going to farm, my sailors will sail, my trainer will ride, etc. But I will not be annoyed every time when one of my specialized lifeskillers is busy/misplaced, when one of them gets exp that belongs to other one by accident, when I want to switch a lifeskiller, etc. So many benefits.

Reading your post and seeing the numbers pushes me much further to the view that lifeskill levels should have never been character-specific. Games should not do this to people - this is exactly what is wrong with some games and why they have the potential to damage people's lives. I am strongly convinced that players like you should be compensated for the merge. At the same time, taking away the game's option to do this with someone's time is collosally beneficial. This might seem judgemental - everyone decides what they do with their lives of course - but taken from the wider perspective, this change is healthy.

The game didn't DO this TO me.   Like many, I CHOSE to do it because it was different, a way to stand out a bit and a little more difficult then normal.  I could have just as easily raised lifeskills on a single character as 'normal' but that's boring and commonplace to me.

Some people are mad because family fame has been a core account stat and way to rank yourself against other players (a fundamental point in games like this) for YEARS and now potentially they are just going to *poof* all your hard work and progress.   It's not even a straight case like where they make certain lifeskills easier to level, and ''devalue'' the effort it previously took to make it easier for new people to keep up. (Which is totally fine and required in a MMORPG).  Depending how they do it, it could just straight up be a deletion of years of work for some people.

The thing is there has been virtually no communication on HOW they are going to go about such a major change like making lifeskill levels family wide beyond "We hope to do it sometime in the next 6 months".   So naturally some people are anxious and upset with potential changes and how that effects them.  All of that could have been avoid with a bit more information from PAs end about their ideas an intentions.

true but also people could just wait and seee when more information comes instead of freaking out before actually knowing   worry  sure   be aprehensive  of course  but freak out and rage without knowing all the info? nah  just makes players look like goobers since we aint got all the info yet