Respecting thy Elders: A social catch up mechanic

[Sevenless]

Premise:

For a long time now, the concept of "Once I die I'll never catch up" has been around. As much as scaling attempts to mitigate it, you will forever remain trailing in the footsteps of those who have survived. Fair in a realistic sense maybe, this creates understandable frustration and longterm game imbalances. Further, anytime a change to food is made mid/late world, the possibility of unreachable titans rears its ugly head (looking at you Salem). To this end we need *some* sort of catch up mechanic, but the how to achieve this has general lacked realistic solutions that fit the game world. Here's my stab at it.

Suggestion:

-Villages may choose hearthlings who have contributed a minimum amount of authority to become Elders
-Elders have a non-trivial authority drain, but there is no hard limit on the number that a village can support. A % drain would act as an indirect hard limit, but might lead to multi village shenanigans that wouldn't be a fun mechanic.
-Elders gain the ability to craft a new item "Cloak of the Ancients", a ceremonial cloak that will need to be worn in order to activate Elder abilities. Gives Lore and Will, presumably with related gilding stats. Crafting components include the horns and teeth of many different wild (surface level) beasts for thematic flavour. Likely also should require gold thread as this is not meant to be an early game item.
-Elders gain the ability "Impart Wisdom", with the number of times this can be used per ingame week equal to 1 + Lore/100 rounded down. This can be used on anyone, it is not limited to village members. Elders are not eligible to receive the benefits of "Impart Wisdom", however they can use "Revering the ancients" on themselves instead at a cost of an Impart Wisdom cast. Presumably there will be an XP cost, possibly scaling with multi use, to use these abilities.

Impart Wisdom:

When received a hearthling will be given a number of options based on the lore of the Elder, more options with a better lore versed Elder. Each option consists of an ability or attribute which the hearthling has less score than either the Elder or the Elder's most powerful ancestor. Once selected, the hearthling receives a related quest which upon completion rewards a buff related to increasing that stat. Either providing a % bonus to FEPs of the attribute when consumed, or an LP cost reduction in purchasing that particular skill. A hearthling is ineligible to receive additional wisdom for a set amount of time after receiving the quest, and the buff will last until the end of this time if/when acquired. If the hearthling reaches the score of the Elder/Ancient when the wisdom was given, the buff vanishes. Abilities would not allow hearthlings to overbuy to take unfair advantage of the buff.

Revering the Ancients:

The equivalent of Impart Wisdom, but giving the Elder a bonus towards reaching their most powerful ancestor's stats. Defining "most powerful" is probably up for debate, but highest combined skills and highest combined stats could each be drawn from for this purpose without particularly being out of balance. Perhaps it would be best to split this concept into most powerful for attributes and most skillful for abilities.


Expected Impacts:

-This mechanic is purely meant to help, if hearthlings are so willing, characters who have either died or are late joining catch up to the pinnacle that particular social group has achieved. It provides an immersive use for the mostly unimplemented Lore stat that fits with the world setting. It is also capable of helping people who made mistakes, were unskilled, or were living in squalid conditions get back to relatively competitive stats with help.
-The lack of limiting a village elder from only helping their own village means that hermits still have access to this feature, and in general Realms can use this feature to help improve everyone living within them if they want to.
-This feature does not allow you to catch up to other groups, only to share the progress your group has made itself. Long term this can still lead to power imbalances, but I think stripping someone of an advantage they earned is an extremely difficult to balance and implement concept. Not to mention cries of unfairness that would be involved.
-Even in the worst case scenario of a total wipe, a significant amount of rebuilding can be aided by this feature. The wiping group will still gain ground during the healing process without outside intervention, but it lessens the impact somewhat. If a single strong character survives and is able to continue advancing, this progress can be handed down to other members.
-The use of the XP and quest feature, and only once every 2-3 days IRL, takes advantage of the "bot discouragement" mechanics already implemented without putting too much emphasis on participating in this mechanic for those who don't enjoy it.
-The use of a buff as opposed to a direct benefit reinforces existing ingame resource production and consumption rather than creating an external source of progress. This simplifies balancing required.

[Granger]

Sounds like a glorified alt farm.

[Sevenless]

Sounds like a glorified alt farm.

I disagree that this concept empowers alts more than it does regular players.

Any catchup mechanic will aid alts as well as main characters, this is completely unavoidable. The need for experience and questing helps require active play to earn the benefits, if it's deemed necessary the XP requirements could also be shifted onto the receiving characters as well. With the ability to recover more effectively from combat, would not the need for alts be lessened? Alternatively if we're talking about botting things like mining/farming/local resources, those things are already happening and speeding up the alt creation speed is fairly meaningless to the current balance.

I think it's worth defining the difference between actively played characters and afk alts. The first is unavoidable in a game with permadeath and specialization, the latter is an unfortunate and unwanted consequence. If someone's willing to put real time into raising a character, I don't have a problem with that.

Edit: The one flaw I notice is the ability to "pure" a character and pump only a single stat to distribute. I don't think this is an impossible to fix flaw and some requirements for more rounded characters to be able to pass on wisdom seems well within reach.