Announcements & News

[quote name="Laluzi" date="2022-12-14 12:31:37" ] Am I the only person who's baffled that they finally addressed this serious issue in lore (which is good - overdue, but good)... and then went and stocked four new humanoid familiars in the treasure marketplace, which was a previously addressed issue to remove any implications of trafficking and slave labor? Because it's kinda whack to me that this happened specifically in an update meant to address sensitivity. [/quote] It was a way for us to make the familiars widely available through a means that is not the coliseum, an ancient dig site, or an alchemical brew. The marketplace is a game mechanic that allows items to be widely distributed. Some things in our game are mechanics to facilitate the play experience, and are independent of lore. In this same way the auction house and crossroads and message center are not indicative of trading a sapient being (such as your dragons) for currency, even though that is what the mechanic allows. If a player wants to create lore for this, they're welcome to, so long as it stays within our existing content guidelines. I do want to acknowledge your point that in the past we did avoid putting Beastclans in the Marketplace because of our outstanding lore that at that point had already been called out for having harmful real world implications. With today's update, we would like to let the Marketplace exist strictly as a mechanic for distribution and not an implication of an in-lore transaction.

[quote name="FleetingFancy" date="2022-12-14 13:45:06" ] There is a difference between fiction that mirrors reality in an actually harmful way (like glorifying abuse, normalizing toxic relationships, just to name a few smaller ones), and fiction that mirrors real life for a point. Both can still hurt you, but one should not, in my opinion, be changed. If we cannot have dark themes in our stories in case it hurts someone because it mirrors real life, how will any stories ever be told? There's a line to be drawn, yes - again, some media do take bad/toxic/horrible situations and portray them terribly - but by retconning the story here entirely, it feels like the message being told is that fiction CAN NEVER mirror real life, because if it hurts then it HAS to be bad. [/quote] We did not feel that the genocide, cultural erasure (in the original harpy articles the war was causing them to lose their culture), and loss of territory to an overwhelming force were something we wanted in a game when the creatures this was happening to looked so much like humans. This does not mean that harpies and dragons are always buddies. Though the harpies have a close alliance with the majority of wind clans, other flights treat them with a more cautious approach and may have their own alliances with different Beastclans. And those big shapes harassing even the harpies in the Windswept Plateau? Those aren't ancients. [b]In other words, we simply chose what we did and did not want in our game, and we decided that the colonialism parallels were something we did not want to have in our story.[/b] And we especially did not like the fact our unresolved story placed our players in the parallel position of destructive aggressors. There is still conflict and dark themes in the world of Sornieth. The dragon flights remain antagonistic towards one another. Dragons follow primal elemental forces as their guiding principles. There's a worker's revolution in Fire, a catastrophic proliferation of magic vs technology in Arcane and Lightning, a wartime standstill between Plague and Nature, things from deep in the stone being dug up in Earth, otherworldly threats forever jailed except maybe...not?, missing prophetic deities, an energy-sucking otherworldly force infesting Sornieth, and an overwhelming surge of elemental energy to name a few. Plus the fact that dragons—like people—aren't always going to get along with each other.