I wanted to say at the top, I think the changes to cycles and SP gain are brilliant. In my estimation, training a new character is somewhere in the realm of 10x faster than it was 15 years ago, this is a massive upgrade!

But I need to raise a concern. As someone who's played for 20+ years, I have the context to truly appreciate how big of a change this is. At a rate of 5-10 hours a week my character will likely hit the 1000 rank cap for the ludus in around 5-7 weeks. The top 20 characters in the game 15 years ago were around this level, that's incredible... But in today's TEC, 1000 ranks isn't even a fully functional new character.

I want to propose a question here to put the problem I'm describing into context. Can you think of any game you would play, where the tutorial lasted 5-10 hours a week for 6 weeks(The vast majority of which is going to be scripted in the background of youtube videos), where no actual information was learned, at the end of which you have a partially functional character that is ready to START the game?

I'm an old player. The ludus is fantastic for new characters.. made by old players. But when I think about what it would be like as a NEW player to subject myself to this experience, I genuinely have to wonder why anyone, who hasn't been playing for 10+ years already, would actually be interested in playing our game at all. Again, let me stress, love the changes. I just don't know how you convince a new player that this is a good experience because it use to be worse.

And let me stress here, 1000 ranks is a new character these days. Skill creep has set deep roots over TEC's history, establishing dozens of skills with 'homework' ranks that are required to simply avoid pains like fumbling, or being swept and impaled, or even automatically assuming stance. When talking with other players, there seems to be a general consensus that ranks 1-3000 are the 'early game', 3001-5000 are the 'mid game', and 5,000+ are late game. Truth be told though, that's probably low balling it.

To be totally clear here, I don't think these rank ranges are too high. I'm not complaining about homework ranks, and I think running your script and grinding your SP is how TEC is played. I just think this process is taking waaay too long with nothing going on for us to ever hope of keeping new players around.

So I have a proposal. We need to make those first 1000 ranks go by as fast as possible to get people out in the gameworld actually STARTING the game. But also, we probably can't just give people 1000 starter ranks, or that would already be a thing. So turn off cycles for the first 1000 ranks, and keep the enhanced SP gain. Make people work for the first 1000 ranks, just don't make it an act of torture. Every single skill usage is maximum SP value until the 1000th rank is learned, or the character has achieved 10,000 total SP. A character on first bar of new cycle at max SP gain per hit will hit around 200-300 SP per bar, taking roughly 1 hour of time. 10,000 SP would be approximately 35-40 hours of training at this rate. I don't care if someone wants to knock this out in a 3 day bender, or a week. What I KNOW is nobody wants it to take 5-7 weeks at 5-10 hours a week, especially new players.

Appreciate you guys reading, and I hope this provides some food for thought.

Cheers.