Please equalize rewards between Castrum and Prae

[Packetdancer]

Looking as you joined forum in 2019 I'm assuming you started playing not much earlier (can be wrong as somebody who joined forum more than a year after starting playing).

*raises hand* I started in 2.0 -- actually I started in 1.0, but quit and then lost that account because it was tied to a dead email, so started over with 2.0 -- and only bothered to join the forum in like, late 2019.

Anyway...

Cutscenes were skippable in the past. This game's playerbase's toxic attitude towards new players became exactly the reason why it was changed and now they are unskippable. Thank the gang that was kicking players from dungeon if they wanted to watch cutscenes and kept saying "watch it in the inn" even though new players deserved to watch it right in the dungeon just as we did when the game came out.

I'll note that in addition, back in the day, the cutscenes had dialogue options; for instance, when Gaius asks "Tell me, for whom do you fight?" you got to actually choose what to say. (Which makes his response of "Hmph, how glib." to your silence in the current cutscene somewhat unintentionally hilarious.) So even if people were watching the cutscenes, they'd finish at different times. To add to this, for some reason (possibly because of that dialogue option), the Gaius elevator scene did not appear in the inn book at the time, so if you skipped it in the dungeon you would never see it.

So you'd either watch the scenes (and have people charging on ahead, leaving you all alone and confused when you finished) or you had to insta-skip the cutscenes to stick with everyone (thus being unclear what the actual ending of A Realm Reborn was)... or you had people who saw you were a first-timer and kicked you so they wouldn't have to wait.

That roulette is there not for the benefit of endgame players; it's for the benefit of new players going through that instance, to ensure they can fill out a party. The rewards for the roulette are not for running the instance, they're for making yourself available to fill the instances where needed. As such, that's why cutscenes are no longer skippable.

And this is also why every time someone suggests "the cutscenes should be skippable if no one is a first-timer", I wince; if that were the case, I absolutely believe people would see a first-timer bonus at the beginning and either quit (so they could rejoin a new instance later where there'd be no newbie), or if there was an obvious sprout, just kick them to get a replacement so they could skip all the cutscenes.