Magic

It has come to my attention that the Magic Approval process hinges on two primary things. These things are the approval of your concept (what is your magic and what is it capable of) and the approval of spells (up to 4 D rank spells that accompany your magic, I assume for the general purpose of ensuring that the spells also fit into regulation.)

However, this seems both tedious and ineffective for a variety of reasons. While the most obvious and blatant one is the current (and potential future) lack of Magic Rules, it seems to me like the other long-term effects would be better argument.

As it is now, with people required to make both Magic and Spells in order to get approved, that will involve someone coming up with a concept, and making 1-4 spells to accompany this concept for approval. If they are declined, they must go back and fine-tune one of the two. If they must fine-tune their spells, there is the potential for them needing to edit their concept. If they must fine-tune their concept, they most certainly will have to edit their spells. It seems much more efficient to me (for a plethora of reasons) to have magic registration focus purely on the concept of the magic (does this magic, with its description/strength/weaknesses seem fair?), and then focus on the spells in their own time (are these spells fitting the regulations and standards of the site, while still adhering to the concept of magic?)

Just a suggestion, but one I thought was prominent enough to be referenced.

We have magic rules; however, a former member deleted them after their demotion from staff. We are currently working to get them back up. On the other hand, the reason all of this is needed is to prevent people from winning unfairly in PvP to someone who, say, may be higher ranked than them. The process is quick and easy as long as the other person doesn't throw a hissy fit over something in their magic not complying to magic rules.

Dividing the process opens up loop holes. Because now two different mods can grade your core magic as your spells. So you can slip a seemingly harmless line in your main magic app that doesn't mean anything out of the context of your spells, then you can write your spells to exploit that one little line for tons of power.

Like let's say using my magic for example. As battle progresses I generate "lava counters," through spells to represent how much of the battle field is filled with lava. These counters increase the power of a passive ability.

So let's say I write in my lava counter passive into my main magic. I make it so that I can do 5% of an A-Rank spell per counter as a passive effect each turn. I put a cap of say 10 counters total and say I gain one per post(that isn't how it works in my actual magics but this is an example). The mod sees that means after I build all my counters I can do at most 50% of an A-Rank spell per post if I am actively charging up counters over the course of 10 turns. The mod sees that is fair enough and approves. Then I go and make the spells.

Except now a different mod is grading the spells. So I get sneaky and say one of the D-Rank spells can increase the cap by 20. This doesn't make much sense to the mod but they don't see how much harm it could do. Since a low rank spell can increase the cap by 20 surely one counter isn't worth that much right? Well now my ability caps out at letting me do 150% of an A-Rank spell damage per post as a passive ability. That's a lot of power the mod unwittingly approved. But being the dasterdarly fellow I am I take it a step farther. To further convince the mod that each individual counter doesn't mean much I have each spell add 5-10 counters each. Now I can get that 150% really fast too.

So the mod is looking at these spells and they see that limit of counters can be increased by 20 by a single spell and that each spell adds 5-10 counters. So they seem to come cheap and easy. Surely each counter means like 1% damage buff or something right? So they go ahead and approve the spells, and now I have sneakily acquired an OP combo from hell.

Now you'd have to be a bit more subtle about it then in the example, because realistically the spell mod would check the value of a counter before approving. But we role players are clever and sneaky; people would find ways. One little over sight caused by splitting the application could lead to incredibly broken wombo combos.