Components being sold in shops have become considerably more scarce lately and components in the 'wild' have become increasingly more common. It's a great idea on paper and in small quantities it can be really fun but taken as a whole I feel that there's a risk of this becoming another element of tedium as players are forced to spend RL hours traipsing across the world map to harvest this and that.
At the moment all players have to accept a bit of skill and experience grinding if they want the code to reflect their character's expertise at their profession. It's practically a necessary evil in any MUD, RP-enforced or otherwise, and seems to be generally accepted. Furthermore, the idea of grinding generally implies fighting mobs but I think it's appropriate to extend the concept to include any repetitive task with little means for creativity or roleplay; in other words, time sinks.
Any character, regardless of class, has to try and balance their stats, the experience they gain from mobs, their equipment (including maintenance), and their skill levels, and all of this takes a little bit of time, though in some/many cases time spent acquiring experience and skill gains can be mitigated by travelling in groups and RPing along the way.
Naturally spellcasters have to worry about all of the above, just like anyone, but entirely their own concern is the matter of components. When it was an issue of buying components from shops it was simple to go and spend your hard-earned cash. It was still troubling to spend most of your character's money on components, but it didn't involve a single-minded long-term investment of time; that is to say, components were only one reason players wanted to acquire wealth, so it was something they'd probably spend at least some time doing anyways. Now it seems as though the situation is reversed; most components can't be found for any price but can be aquired via the expenditure of RL time.
However, I think it's safe to say that RP is what most of us are after when we log onto FK and any time spent doing repetitive tasks is time that could be spent on something more fun (like adventuring into that mysterious ruin). Grinding up skills is bad enough I guess, though it can safely be ignored; the skill level you get from mob trainers is more than sufficient for me, at least, speaking as a person who would prefer to spend most of their time RPing (which, for the record, includes dungeon crawling). Unfortunately spell components are a grind that simply cannot be ignored because without them you're completely unable to use the skills that rely on them, which means that if I want to RP my character as a wizard or a priest of any sort there's no longer an option to ignore grinding; I absolutely have to do it or my skills won't just be weaker, they won't be available at all.
Speaking personally I'd enjoy being able to RP without any grind at all, but that might not be feasible given the expectations of having to invest some drudgery to advance your character. If, as seems to be the case, it is decided that components must necessarily be rare and hard to acquire, I think the best course is to re-evaluate the amount of grinding required for spellcasting classes. Even if we accept that grinding is practically a requisite for a game like a MUD it doesn't mean that it has to all be the same or that it has to involve a lot of dead mobs and I think that for spellcasters components could become a replacement to skill training, rather than something else heaped on top of it. If we escalate the difficulty of finding components even more, encourage people to trade for them and to go to great lengths to collect them, I think we can create enough work for players to justify completely removing the need to also have them grind up their spell skills, and relatively speaking (compared to spell-spamming) it'd be a lot more fun, too, and create considerably more oppourtinities for interaction between PCs.
At the moment it feels like spellcasters are getting hit twice when it comes to training because components are rare and valuable but at the same time they have to be used to practice spells. You could say that gathering components feels like the grind you have to do to get at the normal grind that everyone has to do. What this would accomplish then is to peel back one of those grindy layers. Warriors and rogues and such would still have their bit of tedium in skill-training if they wanted to be competitive with one another and wizards and clerics would have to scour the world for spells and components. Both would take an investment of time and effort so even despite their differences I think that on a very basic level they are equatable.
Anyways, thank-you kindly for reading the whole of this. I know I've kind of over-used the word grind in this post but using the word grind gives good experience so I used it a lot to help level up my diction skill
(PS: To perhaps make it sound a little less like a rant let me make it clear that I'm pretty much just brainstorming here on different ways to make spellcasting classes more fun to play and less of a chore. I don't really expect people who were opposed to this idea the last time it came up to suddenly be swayed by my logical arguments but at least I hope it can serve as a jumping point for other ideas people might come up with for how they'd like to see things changed (for the better, hopefully!), regardless of how crazy they might initially sound
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) Sure it takes a little time to get components, and you have to know where to get them. However, Gesine probably uses up more components than any other wizard in the game atm, and you'll rarely find her low on anything. She doesn't just use one or two different components either, she changes up her spells regularly and uses all manner of components. If you looked in her spellpouch at any given moment, people might say she is hoarding things, but If you looked a day later and she hadn't restocked, you would see that she actually just uses that many components. I don't see that component issues would be any sort of a reason for what was suggested here. If you know where components are and make just a bit of an effort into staying stocked..it isn't bad. If you don't know where they are, I can't think of a single time someone has asked Gesine where to find something and she didn't tell them if she knew where to find it. Interact and ask people. If you simply don't have the time, find a character that does and pay them. Every other class has issues that make things uniquely difficult for them, I really do not find having to spend a bit of time getting components that big of a deal for wizards.
