You seem to be confusing consistency with lowering the skill floor. That’s not really the same thing. If they draw the rune exactly the same every time (including on Z-Axis), then the spell will cast exactly the same every time. The system is already perfectly consistent.
Really this whole discussion can be summed up by the discussion about the skill floor vs skill ceiling of the Runemage class. Right now the skill floor and ceiling are very high. You have to practice for several hours just to be able to play the class at a basic level. Things like not flattening the Z-Axis contribute toward that high skill floor, as to successfully cast a spell you have to: memorize it, be able to draw at least somewhat straight lines, be able to draw flat on the Z-Axis, be able to draw the spell proportionally correct, and then of course just be able to draw the spell design at all in general. Then add in the fact that if you can’t draw fast enough to get off 3 or 4 Fireball 1 spells in combat you will die. So a lot goes into that floor.
Then the skill ceiling is even higher because you’ve got lots of spells to learn which each do different things in different situations, you can learn to cast faster so you can actually have more than one spell going at once, you can learn shortcuts for each spell, you can practice until you have muscle memory for each spell, etc.
I don’t think it’s correct to make the basic claim that “any game with a high skill floor is badly designed.” People still seem to enjoy golf and most people can’t really play it until they spend a lot of time practicing at the driving range. Your first games will be filled with duffs or slices and a lot of balls out of bounds, not straight shots down the fairway. And obviously no one enjoys that. You might even throw down your club in anger and say “But I’m swinging the same way every time!”
The design of the Runemage class at its core is supposed to be a high skill floor, high skill ceiling class. That’s how it’s always been, and I don’t really intend to change that. I also don’t think it’s true that the Runemage is the class that receives the most development focus at all. I’ve spent way more time working on the Ranger in the past week, for example. I do think it receives a lot of attention from the player base, though, because a) it’s a divisive topic to some degree, b) it’s frustrating, and c) out of all the classes it’s the least like anything else in another VR game. If anything most of my Runemage “development time” is just spending time discussing the class like I am right now, haha.
In addition to all of that, as I’ve said in other threads before, the idea of just pressing a magic switch and making the class “easier” wouldn’t even really work. The “looser” I make the spell detection (so that for example sloppier drawings still cast, or the Z-axis matters less), the more likely it is that you will get a mis-detection of a different spell. I have experimented a lot back in the Beta days with those modifications, and basically you just end up with a system where if you try to cast Fireball 1 half the time you get something else. You do fail spells a lot less often, but I’m not sure that’s all that great of a solution.
However, I do think there is a difference between a high skill floor and providing the player with more information that might help them determine why they are failing. Since the Z-Axis seems to be a major pain point for a lot of folks, perhaps a good solution is coloring the line differently when it goes into the Z-Axis? That way you could look at a rune drawing and go “oh see how it’s turning Red there? That means you aren’t drawing it flat on that part”. Things like that I think would help make it more clear what’s going on and what’s important to pay attention to for accomplishing a successful cast, which I think would help.
Anyway, just a giant wall of text of my own thoughts on the matter and some of the thinking that goes on behind the scenes on these topics.
One other note I wanted to make, there are a few places in this thread (and others) where folks say things like “If you don’t do it this way people are going to abandon the game and it will fail,” or “Successful MMOs did it this way so you have to do it this way too!” Personally, those arguments don’t really hold a lot of sway. We’re making the game that we set out to make. And that includes with the community’s input (which is why I’m on here having this discussion about it). If the game we make doesn’t sell well or fails, so be it. I’d rather make the game I believe in and have it fail than make a game that is just a watered-down copy of other games, or base design decisions on what will appeal to the lowest common denominator. By all indications, the game is doing just fine anyway, but I’m just letting you know how we’re approaching this.
