OK I think its time to make my stand...
I've recently given the Mercenaries Mod a try, and my god do they have some things we can learn from. If you haven't played they have a respeccing system which only costs a little bit of gold relative to how many kills you've racked up.
Now I am making a serious plea to our Developers, please reform the horrifically punishing respeccing system we have. There are a number of reasons to help my case.
1. With free respeccing, new players will be more likely to stay in the game, because lets face it, at the beginning once you find out you messed your build up and finding the cost of respeccing puts off a lot of new comers. I know because my friends have told me.
2. A big argument from nay sayers is that free respec would make the game unbalanced. I'm afraid from my experience this is just not true (give me your arguments) a big example is the Merc mod.
3. Right now it costs around 2-3mil gold to get a full respec. This is shockingly brutal. It's been too long that we have accepted this, the price is just way too high for the average player and the frequency of training lessons means their price are completely inflated.
4. This is my humanist point, 1000's of hours have been played on your Mod devs. This mod is all about the RPG element of grinding a character you want to be, now this takes hundreds of hours, and so this is my plea for all those with busy lives with jobs, education and family. MAKE RESPEC FREE. Having respecced many times including twice at lvl 32 and never being higher (some guys are even worse than me) , the amount of time I have wasted makes me sick. And it should make you feel bad because it is a painful thing, and really puts me off the mod at times enough to stop playing for ages.
I seriously want to hear the real arguments as to why this reform shouldn't happen, and to hear directly from chadz, Harald and the rest. Also apologies for rush job I dont have much time. But this needs to be discussed properly as it effects us all and the health of our favourite game.
Kind regards
FleetFox
EDIT: in light of the discussion we have had, it seems trading 1 loom point for a full respec or to pay between 300-400k is the best solution.