Okay, Wendy’s or Walgreens or whoever, I don’t care who you are, you’re listening to the rest.

Introduction to Part 3

Welcome back one last time to “The Challenges of Designing a Modern Skill,” a series where we discuss all aspects of skill design and development. In Part 1, we talked about OSRS’s history with skills, and started the lengthy conversation on Skill Design Philosophy, including the concepts of Core, Expansion, and Integration. This latter topic consumed the entirety of Part 2 as well, which covered Rewards and Motivations, Progression, Buyables, as well as Unconstructive Arguments.
Which brings us to today, the final part of our discussion. In this Part 3, we’ll finish up Section 3 – Skill Design Philosophy, then move on to chat about the design and blog process. One last time, this discussion was intended to be a single post, but its length outgrew the post character limit twice. Therefore, it may be important to look at the previous two parts for clarity and context with certain terms. The final product, in its purest, aesthetic, and unbroken form, can be found here.

3-C – Skill Design Philosophy, Continued

3-12 - Balancing

What follows from the discussion about XP and costs, of course, is balancing: the bane of every developer. A company like Riot knows better than anyone that having too many factors to account for makes good balance impossible. Balancing new ideas appropriately is extremely challenging and requires a great respect for current content as discussed in Section 3-5 – Integration. Thankfully, in OSRS we only have three major balancing factors: Profit, XP Rate, and Intensity, and two minor factors: Risk and Leniency. These metrics must amount to some sense of balance (besides Leniency, which as we’ll see is the definition of anti-balance) in order for a piece of content to feel like it’s not breaking the system or rendering all your previous efforts meaningless. It’s also worthy to note that there is usually a skill-specific limit to the numerical values of these metrics. For example, Runecrafting will never receive a training method that grants 200k xp/hr, while for Construction that’s easily on the lower end of the scale.
A basic model works better than words to describe these factors, and therefore, being the phenomenal artist that I am, I have constructed one, which I’ve dubbed “The Guthix Scale.” But I’ll be cruel and use words anyway.

Profit: how much you gain from a task, or how much you lose. Gain or loss can include resources, cosmetics, specialized currencies, good old gold pieces, or anything on that line.
XP Rate: how fast you gain XP.
Intensity: how much effort (click intensity), attention (reaction intensity), and thought (planning intensity) you need to put into the activity to perform it well.
Risk: how likely is the loss of your revenue and/or resource investment into the activity. Note that one must be careful with risk, as players are very good at abusing systems intended to encourage higher risk levels to minimize how much they’re actually risking.
Leniency: a measure for how imbalanced a piece of content can be before the public and/or Jagex nerfs it. Leniency serves as a simple modulator to help comprehend when the model breaks or bends in unnatural ways, and is usually determined by how enjoyable and abusable an activity is, such that players don’t want to cause an outrage over it. For example, Slayer has a high level of Leniency; people don’t mind that some Slayer tasks grant amazing XP Rates, great Profits, have middling Intensity, and low Risk. On the other hand, Runecrafting has low levels of Leniency; despite low Risk, many Runecrafting activities demand high Intensity for poor XP Rates and middling Profits.

In the end, don’t worry about applying specific numbers during the conceptual phase of your skill design. However, when describing an activity to your reader, it’s always useful if you give approximations, such as “high intensity” or “low risk,” so that they get an idea of the activity’s design goals as well as to guide the actual development of that activity. Don’t comment on the activity’s Leniency though, as that would be pretty pretentious and isn’t for you to determine anyway.

3-13 - Skill Bloat

What do the arts of weaving, tanning, sowing, spinning, pottery, glassmaking, jewellery, engraving, carving, chiselling, carpentry, and even painting have in common? In real life, there’s only so much crossover between these arts, but in Runescape they’re all simply Crafting.
The distinction between what deserves to be its own skill or instead tagged along to a current skill is often arbitrary; this is the great challenge of skill bloat. The fundamental question for many skill concepts is: does this skill have enough depth to stand on its own? The developers of 2006 felt that there was sufficient depth in Construction to make it something separate from Crafting, even if the latter could have covered the former. While there’s often no clean cut between these skills (why does making birdhouses use Crafting instead of Construction?), it is easy to see that Construction has found its own solid niche that would’ve been much too big to act as yet another Expansion of Crafting.
On the other hand, a skill with extremely limited scope and value perhaps should be thrown under the umbrella of a larger skill. Take Firemaking: it’s often asked why it deserves to be its own skill given how limited its uses are. This is one of those ideas that probably should have just been thrown under Crafting or even Woodcutting. But again, the developers who made early Runescape did not battle with the same ideas as the modern player; they simply felt like Firemaking was a good idea for a skill. Similarly, the number of topics that the Magic skill covers is so often broken down in other games, like Morrowind’s separation between Illusion, Conjuration, Alteration, Destruction, Mysticism, Restoration, Enchant, Alchemy (closer to Herblore), and Unarmored (closer to Strength and Defense). Why does Runescape not break Magic into more skills? The answer is simple: Magic was created with a much more limited scope in Runescape, and there has not been enough content in any specific magical category to justify another skill being born. But perhaps your skill concept seeks to address this; maybe your Enchantment skill takes the enchanting aspects of Magic away, expands the idea to include current imbues and newer content, and fully fleshes the idea out such that the Magic skill alone cannot contain it. Somewhat ironically, Magic used to be separated into Good and Evil Magic skills in Runescape Classic, but that is another topic.
So instead of arguments about what could be thrown under another skill’s umbrella, perhaps we should be asking: is there enough substance to this skill concept for it to stand on its own, outside of its current skill categorization? Of course, this leads to a whole other debate about how much content is enough for a skill idea to deserve individuality, but that would get too deep into specifics and is outside the scope of this discussion.

3-14 - Skill Endgame

Runescape has always been a sandbox MMO, but the original Runescape experience was built more or less with a specific endgame in mind: killing players and monsters. Take the Runescape Classic of 2001: you had all your regular combat skills, but even every other skill had an endgame whose goal was helping combat out. Fishing, Firemaking, and Cooking would provide necessary healing. Smithing and Crafting, along with their associated Gathering skill partners, served to gear you up. Combat was the simple endgame and most mechanics existed to serve that end.
However, since those first days, the changing endgame goals of players have promoted a vast expansion of the endgame goals of new content. For example, hitting a 99 in any non-combat skill is an endgame goal in itself for many players, completely separate from that skill’s combat relationship (if any). These goals have increased to aspects like cosmetic collections, pets, maxed stats, all quests completed, all diaries completed, all music tracks unlocked, a wealthy bank, the collection log, boss killcounts, and more. Whereas skills used to have a distinct part of a system that ultimately served combat, we now have a vast variety of endgame goals that a skill can be directed towards. You can even see a growth in this perspective as new skills were released up to 2007: Thieving mainly nets you valuable (or once valuable) items which have extremely flexible uses, and Construction has a strong emphasis on cosmetics for your POH.
So when designing your new skill, contemplate what the endgame of your skill looks like. For example, if you are proposing a Gathering skill, what is the Production skill tie-in, and what is the endgame goal of that Production skill? Maybe your new skill Spelunking has an endgame in gathering rare collectibles that can be shown off in your POH. Maybe your new skill Necromancy functions like a Support skill, giving you followers that help speed along resource gathering, and letting you move faster to the endgame goal of the respective Production skill. Whatever it is, a proper, clear, and unified view of an endgame goal helps a skill feel like it serves a distinct and valuable purpose. Note that this could mean that you require multiple skills to be released simultaneously for each to feed into each other and form an appropriate endgame. In that case, go for it – don’t make it a repeat of RS3’s Divination, a Gathering skill left hanging without the appropriate Production skill partner of Invention for over 2 years.
A good example of a skill with a direct endgame is… most of them. Combat is a well-accepted endgame, and traditionally, most skills are intended to lend a hand in combat whether by supplies or gear. A skill with a poor endgame would be Hunter: Hunter is so scattered in its ultimate endgame goals, trying to touch on small aspects of everything like combat gear, weight reduction, production, niche skilling tools, and food. There’s a very poor sense of identity to Hunter’s endgame, and it doesn’t help that very few of these rewards are actually viable or interesting in the current day. Similarly, while Slayer has a strong endgame goal it is terrible in its methodology, overshadowing other Production skills in their explicit purpose. A better design for Slayer’s endgame would have been to treat it as a secondary Gathering skill, to work almost like a catalyst for other Gathering-Production skill relationships. In this mindset, Slayer is where you gather valuable monster drops, combine it with traditional Gathering resources like ores from Mining, then use a Production skill like Smithing to meld them into the powerful gear that is present today. This would have kept other Gathering and Production skills at the forefront of their specialities, in contrast to today’s situation where Slayer will give fully assembled gear that’s better than anything you could receive from the appropriate skills (barring a few items that need a Production skill to piece together).

3-15 - Alternate Goals

From a game design perspective, skills are so far reaching that it can be tempting to use them to shift major game mechanics to a more favourable position. Construction is an example of this idea in action: Construction was very intentionally designed to be a massive gold sink to help a hyperinflating economy. Everything about it takes gold out of the game, whether through using a sawmill, buying expensive supplies from stores, adding rooms, or a shameless piece of furniture costing 100m that is skinned as, well, 100m on a shameless piece of furniture.
If you’re clever about it, skills are a legitimately good opportunity for such change. Sure, the gold sink is definitely a controversial feature of Construction, but for the most part it’s organic and makes sense; fancy houses and fancy cosmetics are justifiably expensive. It is notable that the controversy over Construction’s gold sink mechanism is probably levied more against the cost of training, rather than the cost of all its wonderful aesthetics. Perhaps that should have been better accounted for in its design phase, but now it is quite set in stone.
To emphasize that previous point: making large scale changes to the game through a new skill can work, but it must feel organic and secondary to the skill’s main purpose. Some people really disliked Warding because they felt it tried too hard to fix real, underlying game issues with mechanics that didn’t thematically fit or were overshadowing the skill’s Core. While this may or may not be true, if your new skill can improve the game’s integrity without sacrificing its own identity, you could avoid this argument entirely. If your skill Regency has a Core of managing global politics, but also happens to serve as a resource sink to help your failing citizens, then you’ve created a strong Core design while simultaneously improving the profitability of Gathering skills.

3-16 - The Combat No-Touch Rule

So, let’s take a moment to examine the great benefits and rationale of RS2’s Evolution of Combat:
This space has been reserved for unintelligible squabbling.
With that over, it’s obvious that the OSRS playerbase is not a big fan of making major changes to the combat system. If there’s anything that defines the OSRS experience, it has to be the janky and abusable combat system that we love. So, in the past 7 years of OSRS, how many times have you heard someone pitch a new combat skill? Practically no one ever has; a new combat skill, no matter how miniscule, would feel obtrusive to most players, and likely would not even receive 25% of votes in a poll. This goes right back to Section 3-5 – Integration, and the importance of preserving the fundamentals of OSRS’s design.
I know that my intention with this discussion was to be as definitive about skill design as possible, and in that spirit I should be delving into the design philosophy specifically behind combat skills, but I simply don’t see the benefit of me trying, and the conversation really doesn’t interest me that much. It goes without saying that as expansive as this discussion is, it does not cover every facet of skill design, which is a limitation both of my capabilities and desire to do so.

3-17 - Aesthetics

I don’t do aesthetics well. I like them, I want them, but I do not understand them; there are others much better equipped to discuss this topic than I. Nonetheless, here we go.
Since the dawn of OSRS, debates over art style and aesthetics have raged across Gielinor. After all, the OSRS Team is filled with modern day artists while OSRS is an ancient game. What were they supposed to do? Keep making dated graphics? Make content with a modernized and easily digestible style? Something in-between?
While many players shouted for more dated graphics, they were approached by an interesting predicament: which dated graphics did they want? We had a great selection present right from the start of OSRS: 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. People hungry for nostalgia chose the era that they grew up in, leading to frequent requests for older models like the dragon or imp, most of which were denied by Jagex (except the old Mining rock models). But which era was OSRS supposed to follow?
Jagex elected to carve their own path, but not without heavy criticism especially closer to OSRS’s conception. However, they adapted to player requests and have since gone back and fixed many of the blatant early offenders (like the Kingdom of Kourend) and adopted a more consistent flavour, one that generally respects the art style of 2007. Even though it doesn’t always hit the mark, one has to appreciate the OSRS artists for making their best attempt and listening to feedback, and here’s to hoping that their art style examination mentioned in June 2020’s Gazette bears fruit.
But what exactly is the old school art style? There are simple systems by which most players judge it in OSRS, usually by asking questions like, “Would you believe if this existed in 2007?” More informed artists will start pointing out distinct features that permeated most content from back in the day, such as low quality textures, low poly models, low FPS animations, a “low fantasy” or grounded profile that appeals somewhat to realism, reducing cartoonish exaggerations, and keeping within the lore. Compiled with this, music and sound design help that art style come to life; it can be very hard on immersion when these don’t fit. An AGS would sound jarring if its special attack sounded like a weak dagger stab, and having to endure Country Jig while roaming Hosidius suddenly sweeps you off into a different universe.
But coming back to skill design, the art, models, and sound design tend to be some of the last features, mostly because the design phase doesn’t demand such a complete picture of a skill. However, simple concept art and models can vastly improve how a skill concept is communicated and comfort players who are concerned about maintaining that “old school feel.” This will be touched on again later in this discussion under Section 5-2 – Presentation and Beta Testing.

3-18 - Afterword

Now we’ve set down the modern standards for a new skill, but the statements that started this section bear repeating: the formula we’ve established does not automatically make a good or interesting skill, as hard as we might have tried. Once again, harken back to the First Great Irony: that we are trying to inject the modern interpretation of what defines a skill upon a game that was not necessarily built to contain it. Therefore, one could just as easily deny each of the components described above, as popular or unpopular as the act might be, and their opinion could be equally valid and all this effort meaningless. Don’t take these guidelines with such stringency as to disregard all other views.

5-0 - The OSRS Team and the Design Process

If you’ve followed me all the way here, you’re likely A) exhausted and fed up of any conversation concerning new skills, or B) excited, because you’ve just struck an incredible skill idea (or perhaps one that’s always hung around your head) that happens to tick off all the above checkboxes. But unfortunately for you B types, it’s about to get pretty grim, because we’re going to go through every aspect of skill design that’s exterior to the game itself. We’ll be touching on larger topics like democracy, presentation, player mindsets, effort, and resource consumption. It’ll induce a fantastic bout of depression, so don’t get left behind.

5-1 - Designing a Skill

Thus far, Jagex has offered three potential skills to OSRS, each of which has been denied. This gives us the advantage of understanding how the skill design process works behind the scenes and lets us examine some of the issues Jagex has faced with presenting a skill to the players.
The first problem is the “one strike and you’re out” phenomenon. Simply put, players don’t like applying much effort into reading and learning. They’ll look at a developer blog highlighting a new skill idea, and if you’re lucky they’ll even read the whole thing, but how about the second developer blog? The third? Fourth? Even I find it hard to get that far. In general, people don’t like long detail-heavy essays or blogs, which is why I can invoke the ancient proverb “Ban Emily” into this post and it’ll go (almost) completely unnoticed. No matter how many improvements you make between developer blogs, you will quickly lose players with each new iteration. Similarly, developer blogs don’t have the time to talk about skill design philosophy or meta-analyse their ideas – players would get lost far too fast. This is the Second Great Irony of skill design: the more iterations you have of a lengthy idea, the less players will keep up with you.
This was particularly prominent with Warding: Battle Wards were offered in an early developer blog but were quickly cut when Jagex realized how bad the idea was. Yet people would still cite Battle Wards as the reason they voted against Warding, despite the idea having been dropped several blogs before. Similarly, people would often comment that they hated that Warding was being polled multiple times; it felt to them like Jagex was trying to brute-force it into the game. But Warding was only ever polled once, and only after the fourth developer blog - the confusion was drawn from how many times the skill was reiterated and from the length of the public design process. Sure, there are people for whom this runs the opposite way; they keep a close eye on updates and judge a piece of content on the merits of the latest iteration, but this is much less common. You could argue that one should simply disregard the ignorant people as blind comments don't contribute to the overall discussion, but you should remember that these players are also the ones voting for the respective piece of content. You could also suggest re-educating them, which is exactly what Jagex attempts with each developer blog, and still people won’t get the memo. And when it comes to the players themselves, can the playerbase really be relied on to re-educate itself?
Overall, the Second Great irony really hurts the development process and is practically an unavoidable issue. What’s the alternative? To remove the developer-player interface that leads to valuable reiterations, or does you simply have to get the skill perfect in the first developer blog?
It’s not an optimal idea, but it could help: have a small team of “delegates” – larger names that players can trust, or player influencers – come in to review a new, unannounced skill idea under NDA. If they like it, chances are that other players will too. If they don’t, reiterate or toss out the skill before it’s public. That way, you’ve had a board of experienced players who are willing to share their opinions to the public helping to determine the meat and potatoes of the skill before it is introduced to the casual eye. Now, a more polished and well-accepted product can be presented on the first run of selling a skill to the public, resulting in less reiterations being required, and demanding less effort from the average player to be fully informed over the skill’s final design.

5-2 - Presentation and Beta Testing

So you’ve got a great idea, but how are you going to sell it to the public? Looking at how the OSRS Team has handled it throughout the years, there’s a very obvious learning curve occurring. Artisan had almost nothing but text blogs being thrown to the players, Sailing started introducing some concept art and even a trailer with terrible audio recording, and Warding had concept art, in game models, gifs, and a much fancier trailer with in-game animations. A picture or video is worth a thousand words, and often the only words that players will take out of a developer blog.
You might say that presentation is everything, and that would be more true in OSRS than most games. Most activities in OSRS are extremely basic, involve minimal thought, and are incredibly grindy. Take Fishing: you click every 20 seconds on a fishing spot that is randomly placed along a section of water, get rid of your fish, then keep clicking those fishing spots. Boiling it down further, you click several arbitrary parts of your computer screen every 20 seconds. It’s hardly considered engaging, so why do some people enjoy it? Simply put: presentation. You’re given a peaceful riverside environment to chill in, you’re collecting a bunch of pixels shaped like fish, and a number tracking your xp keeps ticking up and telling you that it matters.
Now imagine coming to the players with a radical new skill idea: Mining. You describe that Mining is where you gather ores that will feed into Smithing and help create gear for players to use. The audience ponders momentarily, but they’re not quite sure it feels right and ask for a demonstration. You show them some gameplay, but your development resources were thin and instead of rocks, you put trees as placeholders. Instead of ores in your inventory, you put logs as placeholders. Instead of a pickaxe, your character is swinging a woodcutting axe as a placeholder. Sure, the mechanics might act like mining instead of woodcutting, but how well is the skill going to sell if you haven’t presented it correctly or respected it contextually?
Again, presentation is everything. Players need to be able to see the task they are to perform, see the tools they’ll use, and see the expected outcomes; otherwise, whatever you’re trying to sell will feel bland and unoriginal. And this leads to the next level of skill presentation that has yet to be employed: Beta Worlds.
Part of getting the feel of an activity is not just watching, it but acting it out as well - you’ll never understand the thrill of skydiving unless you’ve actually been skydiving. Beta Worlds are that chance for players to act out a concept without risking the real game’s health. A successful Beta can inspire confidence in players that the skill has a solid Core and interesting Expansions, while a failed Beta will make them glad that they got to try it and be fully informed before putting the skill to a poll (although that might be a little too optimistic for rage culture). Unfortunately, Betas are not without major disadvantages, the most prominent of which we shall investigate next.

5-3 - Development Effort

If you thought that the previous section on Skill Design Philosophy was lengthy and exhausting, imagine having to know all that information and then put it into practice. Mentally designing a skill in your head can be fun, but putting all that down on paper and making it actually work together, feel fully fleshed out, and following all the modern standards that players expect is extremely heavy work, especially when it’s not guaranteed to pay off in the polls like Quest or Slayer content. That’s not even taking into account the potentially immense cost of developing a new skill should it pass a poll.
Whenever people complain that Jagex is wasting their resources trying to make that specific skill work, Jagex has been very explicit about the costs to pull together a design blog being pretty minimal. Looking at the previous blogs, Jagex is probably telling the truth. It’s all just a bunch of words, a couple art sketches, and maybe a basic in-game model or gif. Not to downplay the time it takes to write well, design good models, or generate concept art, but it’s nothing like the scale of resources that some players make it out to be. Of course, if a Beta was attempted as suggested last section, this conversation would take a completely new turn, and the level of risk to invested resources would exponentially increase. But this conversation calls to mind an important question: how much effort and resources do skills require to feel complete?
Once upon a time, you could release a skill which was more or less unfinished. Take Slayer: it was released in 2005 with a pretty barebones structure. The fundamentals were all there, but the endgame was essentially a couple cool best-in-slot weapons and that was it. Since then, OSRS has updated the skill to include a huge Reward Shop system, feature 50% more monsters to slay, and to become an extremely competitive money-maker. Skills naturally undergo development over time, but it so often comes up during the designing of an OSRS skill that it "doesn't have enough to justify its existence." This was touched on deeply in Section 3-13 – Skill Bloat, but deserves reiterating here. While people recognize that skills continually evolve, the modern standard expects a new skill, upon release, to be fully preassembled before purchase. Whereas once you could get away with releasing just a skill's Core and working on Expansions down the line, that is no longer the case. But perhaps a skill might stand a better chance now than it did last year, given that the OSRS Team has doubled in number since that time.
However, judging from the skill design phases that have previously been attempted (as we’ve yet to see a skill development phase), the heaviest cost has been paid in developer mentality and motivational loss. When a developer is passionate about an idea, they spend their every waking hour pouring their mind into how that idea is going to function, especially while they’re not at work. And then they’re obligated to take player feedback and adapt their ideas, sometimes starting from scratch, particularly over something as controversial as a skill. Even if they have tough enough skin to take the heavy criticism that comes with skill design, having to write and rewrite repeatedly over the same idea to make it “perfect” is mentally exhausting. Eventually, their motivation drains as their labour bears little fruit with the audience, and they simply want to push it to the poll and be done with it. Even once all their cards are down, there’s still no guarantee that their efforts will be rewarded, even less so when it comes to skills.
With such a high mental cost with a low rate of success, you have to ask, “Was it worth it?” And that’s why new skill proposals are far and few between. A new skill used to be exciting for the development team in the actual days of 2007, as they had the developmental freedom to do whatever they wanted, but in the modern day that is not so much the case.

5-4 - The Problems of Democracy

Ever since the conceptualization of democracy in the real world, people have been very aware of its disadvantages. And while I don’t have the talent, knowledge, or time to discuss every one of these factors, there are a few that are very relevant when it comes to the OSRS Team and the polling process.
But first we should recognize the OSRS Team’s relationship with the players. More and more, the Team acts like a government to its citizens, the players, and although this situation was intentionally instated with OSRS’s release, it’s even more prominent now. The Team decides the type of content that gets to go into a poll, and the players get their input over whether that particular piece makes it in. Similarly, players make suggestions to the Team that, in many cases, the Team hadn’t thought of themselves. This synergy is phenomenal and almost unheard of among video games, but the polling system changes the mechanics of this relationship.
Polls were introduced to the burned and scarred population of players at OSRS’s release in 2013. Many of these players had just freshly come off RS2 after a series of disastrous updates or had quit long before from other controversies. The Squeal of Fortune, the Evolution of Combat, even the original Wilderness Removal had forced numerous players out and murdered their trust in Jagex. To try and get players to recommit to Runescape, Jagex offered OSRS a polling system by which the players would determine what went into the game, where the players got to hold all the cards. They also asked the players what threshold should be required for polled items to pass, and among the odd 50% or 55% being shouted out, the vast majority of players wanted 70%, 75%, 80%, or even 85%. There was a massive population in favour of a conservative game that would mostly remain untouched, and therefore kept pure from the corruption RS2 had previously endured.
Right from the start, players started noticing holes in this system. After all, the OSRS Team was still the sole decider of what would actually be polled in the first place. Long-requested changes took forever to be polled (if ever polled at all) if the OSRS Team didn’t want to deal with that particular problem or didn’t like that idea. Similarly, the Team essentially had desk jobs with a noose kept around their neck – they could perform almost nothing without the players, their slave masters, seeing, criticizing, and tearing out every inch of developmental or visionary freedom they had. Ever hear about the controversy of Erin the duck? Take a look at the wiki or do a search through the subreddit history. It’s pretty fantastic, and a good window into the minds of the early OSRS playerbase.
But as the years have gone on, the perspective of the players has shifted. There is now a much healthier and more trusting relationship between them and the Team, much more flexibility in what the players allow the Team to handle, and a much greater tolerance and even love of change.
But the challenges of democracy haven’t just fallen away. Everyone having the right to vote is a fundamental tenet of the democratic system, but unfortunately that also means that everyone has the right to vote. For OSRS, that means that every member, whether it’s their first day in game, their ten thousandth hour played, those who have no idea about what the poll’s about, those who haven’t read a single quest (the worst group), those who RWT and bot, those who scam and lure, and every professional armchair developer like myself get to vote. In short, no one will ever be perfectly informed on every aspect of the game, or at least know when to skip when they should. Similarly, people will almost never vote in favour of making their game harder, even at the cost of game integrity, or at least not enough people would vote in such a fashion to reach a 75% majority.
These issues are well recognized. The adoption of the controversial “integrity updates” was Jagex’s solution to these problems. In this way, Jagex has become even more like a government to the players. The average citizen of a democratic country cannot and will not make major decisions that favour everyone around themselves if it comes at a personal cost. Rather, that’s one of the major roles of a government: to make decisions for changes for the common good that an individual can’t or won’t make on their own. No one’s going to willingly hand over cash to help repave a road on the opposite side of the city – that’s why taxes are a necessary evil. It’s easy to see that the players don’t always know what’s best for their game and sometimes need to rely on that parent to decide for them, even if it results in some personal loss.
But players still generally like the polls, and Jagex still appears to respect them for the most part. Being the government of the game, Jagex could very well choose to ignore them, but would risk the loss of their citizens to other lands. And there are some very strong reasons to keep them: the players still like having at least one hand on the wheel when it comes to new content or ideas. Also, it acts as a nice veto card should Jagex try to push RS3’s abusive tactics on OSRS and therefore prevent such potential damage.
But now we come to the topic of today: the introduction of a new skill. Essentially, a new skill must pass a poll in order to enter the game. While it’s easy to say, “If a skill idea is good enough, it’ll pass the threshold,” that’s not entirely true. The only skill that could really pass the 75% mark is not necessarily a well-designed skill, but rather a crowd-pleasing skill. While the two aren’t mutually exclusive, the latter is far easier to make than the former. Take Dungeoneering: if you were to poll it today as an exact replica of RS2’s version, it would likely be the highest scoring skill yet, perhaps even passing, despite every criticism that’s been previously emphasized describing why it has no respect for the current definition of “skill.” Furthermore, a crowd-pleasing skill can easily fall prey to deindividualization of vision and result in a bland “studio skill” (in the same vein as a “studio film”), one that feels manufactured by a board of soulless machines rather than a director’s unique creation. This draws straight back to the afore-mentioned issues with democracy: that people A) don’t always understand what they’re voting for or against, and B) people will never vote for something that makes their game tougher or results in no benefit to oneself. Again, these were not issues in the old days of RS2, but are the problems we face with our modern standards and decision making systems.
The reality that must be faced is that the polling system is not an engine of creation nor is it a means of constructive feedback – it’s a system of judgement, binary and oversimplified in its methodology. It’s easy to interact with and requires no more than 10 seconds of a player’s time, a mere mindless moment, to decide the fate of an idea made by an individual or team, regardless of their deep or shallow knowledge of game mechanics, strong or weak vision of design philosophy, great or terrible understanding of the game’s history, and their awareness of blindness towards the modern community. It’s a system which disproportionately boils down the quality of discussion that is necessitated by a skill, which gives it the same significance as the question “Should we allow players to recolour the Rocky pet by feeding it berries?” with the only available answers being a dualistic “This idea is perfect and should be implemented exactly as outlined” or “This idea is terrible and should never be spoken of again.”
So what do you do? Let Jagex throw in whatever they want? Reduce the threshold, or reduce it just for skills? Make a poll that lists a bunch of skills and forces the players to choose one of them to enter the game? Simply poll the question, “Should we have a new skill?” then let Jagex decide what it is? Put more options on the scale of “yes” to “no” and weigh each appropriately? All these options sound distasteful because there are obvious weaknesses to each. But that is the Third Great Irony we face: an immense desire for a new skill, but no realistic means to ever get one.

6-0 - Conclusion

I can only imagine that if you’ve truly read everything up to this point, it’s taken you through quite the rollercoaster. We’ve walked through the history of OSRS skill attempts, unconstructive arguments, various aspects of modern skill design philosophy, and the OSRS Team and skill design process. When you take it all together, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the thought that needs to go into a modern skill and all the issues that might prevent its success. Complexity, naming conventions, categorizations, integration, rewards and motivations, bankstanding and buyables, the difficulties of skill bloat, balancing, and skill endgames, aesthetics, the design process, public presentation, development effort, democracy and polling - these are the challenges of designing and introducing modern skills. To have to cope with it all is draining and maybe even impossible, and therefore it begs the question: is trying to get a new skill even worth it?
Maybe.
Thanks for reading.
Tl;dr: Designing a modern skill requires acknowledging the vast history of Runescape, understanding why players make certain criticisms and what exactly they’re saying in terms of game mechanics, before finally developing solutions. Only then can you subject your ideas to a polling system that is built to oversimplify them.

Bitbinary.net - 0.3-3% daily for 365 days ($20 BONUS)

Practicing SR since July 2017; currently have a 3+ month streak

2 accounts got shadowbanned for uploading this post. Spam filter kept on removing it this post. Messaged the moderators, but received no answer. Removed many links, so check post history for full version.

First time making a Reddit post. Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes
Brief summary of post:

History of Journey
Using Subliminals (affirmations converted into audio) to reprogram the subconscious, overcome nocturnal emissions, and turbo-charge the Law of Attraction
Experience from meditation retreats
Massive booklist covering psychotherapy, spirituality, and general books such as negotiating and advanced social skills
Fundamental shifts that occurred
Experiences with semen-retention benefits
How I overcame and conquered negative entities
Tantric meditation method that actually works with zero side effects
Experience on speaking Japanese for 1 full hour with native speakers without notes after 3 months of learning

Terminology:
Wet dream/WD – sexual dream causing semen emission while sleeping
Nocturnal Emission/NE – semen emission occurring while sleeping even without dreaming
Semen-retention/SR streak – avoiding porn, masturbation, and ejaculation whether conscious or unconscious
Nofap Hardmode – avoiding porn, masturbation, and conscious ejaculation. Unconscious ejaculation/WD is considered fine.

As the title suggests, my current streak started in the middle of June 2017. Haven’t watched any porn or masturbated in 3 years. Experienced almost all the benefits such as massive attraction (men, women, children), an aura/energy surrounding me, enhanced charisma, less need for sleep, insane levels of energy, drive, and motivation, zero anxiety or fear, massive confidence occasionally bordering on arrogance, increased manifestation/LOA, people admiring/respecting me for no reason, online attraction, less procrastination, better athletic performance, greater creativity/intelligence, the desire to live a purposeful life, greater emphasis on spirituality, and much much more. Could probably write several posts just on the benefits themselves. Only thing that didn’t improve was my skin, which was later fixed using subliminals.
It’s been a long journey, so I’ll start with background information, and later elaborate on how I managed to go from nocturnal emissions every 5 days (avg) to having a perfect SR streak for 3 months.
Used to watch anime which led to hentai (2013), and eventually western/japanese porn. Don’t even bother to search these terms on Google. It’s not worth it. Thankfully, those days are long behind me. As a side-note, I discovered the nofap/semen-retention subreddit in November 2017. Didn’t even know about SR before that.
I was raised a Catholic in a fairly religious family. Always started various streaks, and eventually broke them due to boredom/emotional coping/curiosity about new videos. Thankfully, I got good grades, read books, and was interested in self-development, but all that time spent on porn was a complete waste. Assuming I spent at least 2 hours everyday for 4 years (1460 days), it amounts to 122 complete days or around 4 months in total. It’s pretty sad on reflection, but at least the experience is now absorbed, and I can write this post.
On June 2017, after summer break started and final exams were over, I decided to permanently quit this habit. Downloaded an application called Cold Turkey and completely blocked all websites I used to visit. Now use Leechblock, which is available on most browsers (also use it to block/restrict access to non-NSFW websites which impair productivity like ESPN). Started 30 minutes of daily meditation (mindfulness + metta). Still continue the habits to this day, although the length is increased to 1 hour. Read Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana and Lovingkindness by Sharon Salzberg for instructions. Have re-read these books multiple times.
Mindfulness will allow you to be self-aware of your mental conditioning, while metta (feeling compassion for yourself, a friend, neutral person, and enemy) can remove thoughts of lust and fundamentally alter your mental programming. Compassion is a very powerful exercise. Read “The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion by Christopher Germer” while you’re at it and learn tonglen. All of these books contain zero fluff, and are invaluable reads.
Started drinking 16 glasses of water (thought it would help skin, but helped in other ways), and doing 100 pushups + 100 sit-ups everyday. Increased it to 200 pushups + 200 sit-ups after 1 month. After 2 months, I made a decent amount of gains (SR helps), and people started asking me workout tips and what gym I go to. Had a Kindle Paperwhite, which is frankly one of my most valued possessions. Still works perfectly fine after 5 years, and costs only $130. Buy one now. Read a lot of books mostly consisting of biographies/spirituality/practical social skills/800+ page novels for around 6 hours per day. Still try to read for at least 15 minutes/1 chapter even when extremely busy. Will post a small booklist at the end of this post.
You can upload books to it for free if you lack money. Visit (gen.lib.rus.ec), download the ebook in epub/mobi format, open it with Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/), and send it to Kindle using USB. Knowledge is an investment that produces continuous returns. Warren Buffett spends 80% of his time just reading! and takes action based on that knowledge.
Even managed to have the motivation to learn Japanese by joining a foreign language exchange website. People, especially women, accepted and sent a lot of invitations to have a conversation; didn’t realize online attraction was due to SR back then. None of us showed our faces, so my physical appearance had nothing to do with it. From experience, the best way to learn a language was to make a phrase sheet with the most common phrases/questions, such as “okay”, “that’s awesome”, “what is that word in English/Japanese?” Basically a human AI bot. Don’t waste time trying to learn how to write the alphabet, although my primary purpose was to learn how to speak. Google Translate is good enough to understand the pronunciation.
I learned Japanese primarily by watching Terrace House. First watched the episode with subtitles, then re-watched it without, while simultaneously writing all the connectives/conversational phrases. You can try unique methods to remember, but brute-force memorization/review worked the best. Never tried Anki since it was cumbersome to use.
For the accent, the best way is to watch Japanese people trying to speak English, and try to mirror their accent as much as possible. It honestly helps. After 3 months, I could have a full 1 hour conversation in Japanese with a native speaker without looking at any notes. I wasn’t “fluent” (still stuttered and made mistakes), but it was a huge amount of progress for starting from scratch. Eventually after 6 months, I gave up practicing/speaking the language. I was mainly trying to fulfill a childhood fantasy, and I’m glad I tried since I learned a lot from it and got to talk with interesting people. But in reality, I stopped watching anime, and honestly never needed to speak Japanese in real-life. Now I barely remember any of the words, except a few basic phrases. Could probably last 30 seconds of full conversation at best.
So, everything was going great until December 2017. During this time period, I probably had wet dreams/nocturnal emissions every 1 – 2 months. Barely felt much difference since there was a decent time interval between emissions. Drank 2 glasses of water everyday before bed, slept on my stomach, and ate spicy food (practices that cause nocturnal emissions), but was perfectly fine. However in December I started having emissions every 2 weeks. Initially didn’t care about it. In January it started happening every 1 week. Nothing really changed in my life during this time to cause emissions to increase. Then it started happening every 5 days, every 3 days, sometimes even 2 days in a row!
Most of you will have no idea how terrible it feels to be on top of the world, and then suddenly crash down. The difference between living life with/without SR benefits is night and day. Even after sleeping 10 hours, I used to feel completely exhausted. People ignored me, or worse started “joking” around me. Complete disrespect by friends, family, and acquaintances. No energy/motivation to do anything. Constant brain fog, could barely concentrate. Felt even worse than my porn days when I ejaculated everyday. Voice completely shot, started feeling anxious about oral presentations for no reason, when I always excelled. Felt like my soul was dying. Those were really dark times. People started saying I “changed”, and started pointing out and constantly magnifying my flaws. It’s strange how people exaggerate our skills/talents on SR, while they completely ignore them post WD/ejaculation, and focus only on your flaws/mistakes. It makes you lose trust in everyone around you, as if all of them are energy vampires who only like you due to SR.
I grew desperate. During this whole time I meditated, practiced no lust/no arousal as best as possible since July 2017, yet emissions increased massively in frequency. Some occurred due to sexual dreams, but most were nocturnal emissions. Thought I had a UTI at first, and went to a general practitioner. He didn’t seem very reliable, so I went to a prominent urologist. Did all sorts of tests, paid a good amount of money, and the doctor said everything was fine. Having nocturnal emissions every 5 days was perfectly normal at my age. Encouraged me to masturbate regularly if it became an inconvenience :)
So medical science obviously failed. Started following all the tips/methods in this subreddit, and believe me I tried almost everything no matter how uncomfortable or time-consuming. Omad, avoid food/water before bed, vegetarianism, tantric meditation, different diets, various sleeping positions, no/increased meditation before bed, no/more exercise, yogic exercises, qigong, some tips mentioned by Soaring Eagle, prayed to God. None of them worked. The only method I didn’t try extensively were kegels. Initially tried a normal + reverse kegel routine, then found an article by coincidence on this subreddit about someone who permanently damaged their penis from doing kegels. Immediately stopped, thank you to that person for sharing your experience. It’s as if the universe was looking out for me. Best to avoid such risky methods even if you’re desperate. Currently sleep on my back since it avoids any "accidental physical stimulation" from occurring.
So this nocturnal emission phenomena continued for over a year. Some methods worked better than others, while for some, I wasn’t sure if it was merely the placebo effect. In mid-2019 I came across subliminal videos (finally the good part!) on YouTube. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0W5AB1sGr0) This video explains it more thoroughly, but basically you convert affirmations (sentences like “I am happy/smart/handsome”) into audio using text-to-speech software and reprogram your subconscious mind. Tried a beauty subliminal (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEXaAsm-Iys) as a joke, but the next day I noticed changes in my facial structure. Listened for an hour the first day, which was easy given the music. You have no idea how amazing it feels to know that you can control your reality just by using your mind. Completely magical. Supposedly it works due to the Law of Attraction; you can find out more by reading/watching “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, and later reading all the books by Neville Goddard. Started using a skin subliminal as well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqi8Q80pspk and later moved onto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COxz8hvl14Y ), and now my skin is completely normal. Visited prominent US dermatologists, tried all sorts of acne medicine including Accutane, and even did SR, yet none of them worked. Skin was pretty terrible, and I was glad it got fixed. Took around 4 months of daily listening although it can be shortelonger depending on your belief, blockages, and levels of positivity. There’s a CIA document on holographic universes, astral projection, time travel, and psychic powers if you need scientific validation: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5.pdf
Disclaimer: Although there can be bad subliminal makers, they are very rare, and there has been only 2 of them in the history of the community. Someone named MindPower and Rose subliminals. The vast majority (99%) put positive affirmations. It’s best that you verify by checking all the comments, seeing their subscriber count, general personality, etc, but ultimately there’s no guarantee. The only way to make sure the affirmations are 100% positive and safe are to make them yourself or use a subliminal that blocks negative affirmations.
One thing to note is that physical change (biokinesis; search that term)/spiritual subliminals utilize the prana in your body to a certain extent to make changes. It makes sense since physical change is essentially a psychic poweenergy work. So your SR benefits/aura might temporarily decrease. Hydration is also recommended, and you will notice feeling thirsty. Personally drink 20 glasses of water everyday.
Obviously, my interest now turned towards using subliminals to cure nocturnal emissions. Unfortunately there’s a huge lack of subliminals regarding semen-retention or those targeted towards nocturnal emissions. Initially bought a subliminal using a paid request (you pay a subliminal maker for a specialized subliminal), but it didn’t work that well. Desired to be permanently free of nocturnal emissions, or at least reduce the frequency to once a month. So I decided to make my own subliminal. The affirmations will be posted below, and this is how I eventually cured my nocturnal emissions.
Steps on how to make your own subliminal:

Write all the affirmations in a word document and save it.
Download text-to-speech software like Balabolka and output the audio file in wav format (you want both uncompressed + lossless)
Optional but recommended; download an audio editor like Audacity, and fast-forward the audio as much as possible using the “Change Tempo” effect. Personally I speed the audio to one second and then loop it 1000x. Continue the process as much as possible, but never make the audio length less than 1 second. Some subliminal makers make their subliminals even more powerful by creating multiple audio streams of their affirmations using different voices, merging all the voices together, and speeding them up. It’s called layering. Why super-sped affirmations work better can be somewhat explained by this article (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sensorium/201812/experiments-suggest-humans-can-directly-observe-the-quantum), but science still doesn’t have all the answers. Will take time.
Converting the affirmations to binary code (https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/numbeascii-to-binary.html) is a technique some subliminal makers use. Supposedly it penetrates the subconscious faster.

Affirmations Link: https://www.reddit.com/pureretention/comments/hg0tjb/practicing_sr_since_july_2017_finally_conquered/ (same content; scroll down to the subliminal section and download the affirmations file from the mega link)
Listened to this personal subliminal for 1 hour everyday for an entire month. Still listen just to be safe. Took months of testing and editing affirmations to make it perfect. Experienced massive sexual dreams on certain days, more than normal, and found out that entities could be responsible. Try to avoid this subreddit as well, since reading the posts can trigger memories. More energetically sensitive now, and sometimes there’s a lot of low-vibrational energy. On a side-note, porn cripples your aura and invites negative entities (https://www.awakeningstaryoga.com/blog/expanding-away-from-porn-aura).
Non-subliminal solutions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMx69hgYq0s (morphic field)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWK0D1g069I (powerful aura cleanse; Tibetan bowl sounds)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7moRsibNyMA (reiki)

Subliminal solutions (ordered in terms of effectiveness):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kt9s5tY1YE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvyPscRD1ss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTmnrFzR0_Q (for spells, curses, black magic, etc)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kt9s5tY1YE (last resort)

The entire channel is a gem; these were some of the best. Have used them for a few months and feel much lighter and peaceful; experienced only headaches due to subconscious absorbing the affirmations, but zero negative effects.
Advice: Remember to immediately download any subliminal video you find that is useful in wav format (https://www.savethevideo.com/download). Subliminal channels are sometimes deleted by YouTube (spam filter) or the creators themselves.
Waited 3 whole months before deciding to make a Reddit post to make sure the method was 100% foolproof. Remember many people offering solutions in the past, yet 1 month later they would have another wd/nocturnal emission.
The first month there was a lot of fear. Will I have a wet dream/nocturnal emission tonight? Was so traumatized it was difficult getting to sleep every night. After the 2nd month, I experimented with sleeping on my stomach and eating/drinking before bed. Nothing happened. Stopped recently to stay careful.
After 2 years of suffering, this is a method that has worked. Try and see for yourself.
Present day:
How do you feel now? Some days it’s meh (due to flatline) like today; on other days I feel divine. No idea why flatline still occurs. Have regained all the benefits, feel love and happiness all the time. Experience intense states of bliss in meditation more frequently, although it’s just a distraction.
Religiously/Spiritually I’ve moved from Christianity to Buddhism/Advaita Vedanta/parts of New Age. Found them more practical and useful in life. Was inspired to aim for spiritual enlightenment after reading “The 3 pillars of Zen” by Philip Kapleau. Read it, it might change your life.
Have attended a number of meditation retreats now, along with 10-day ones. Everyone reading this post should try it. Understood how much our mental programming defined us, and that we aren’t are thoughts. Our childhood traumas define so much of our habitual reactions. Realized its okay to feel bored rather than chasing after constant stimulation.
Even attended a Jhana retreat, which is exclusive for people who have attended prior retreats. Entered intense states of meditative absorption, understood the permeability/impermanence of reality, and had all sorts of mystical experiences. Experienced past lives; can confirm my mind did not make it up, since it’s an experience you can constantly replicate using the same methods. Before attempting such methods, you need to have the ability to sit down and meditate continuously for at least 3 hours. If you live in the US, attend IMS (Insight Meditation Society) or any prominent Vipassana/Theravada related retreat. Zen is a valid form of enlightenment, but it personally felt unstructured.
Gave up music, took time since I was convinced it was needed for creativity. Instead, it was just a substitute source of dopamine and a way to avoid my emotions. Have much less brain fog after quitting. Only communicate using regular phone calls these days, which no one uses, and Snapchat/WhatsApp for texting. Avoid stories, waste of time. Instagram/TwitteFacebook are a waste of time unless you are using it for business purposes. The only social media you really need is LinkedIn.
Women: You’ll learn more about them by reading romantic novels, Korean mangas, and watching Kdramas then reading all that seduction/red pill stuff. Focus on general charisma (men and women) instead of a specific gender. Read “The Charisma Myth” by Olivia Fox Cabane; it’s the most practical book on social skills I have ever read, and possibly the most life-changing as well. Teaches you self-awareness, applies Buddhist psychology to social interaction. Used to train executives in Google, read it now (and do all the exercises). The bibliography sent me on a rabbit hole that made me read ton of books on psychotherapy, meditation, mindfulness, and Buddhism; this was before SR. Inspired me to practice meditation, although the habit only became regular after SR.
Read books such as Crucial Conversations by Al Switzer, Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, How to Talk so Kids will Listen by Adele Faber (works very well in general since even adults have childhood programming, and can act like children), Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss (FBI's chief international hostage and kidnapping negotiator from 2003 to 2007), Getting More by Stuart Diamond (trains negotiators at Google), and Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff (more theoretical but useful). Also read The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan Pease and What Every Body is Saying by Joe Navarro. These are all books that will greatly improve your human interactions and contain limited fluff. Have re-read all of these books in difficult times, and they have never let me down. You should read it as well. Even if you become a monk, there’s lots of social infighting even in monasteries. Highly-developed social skills are invaluable whenever you are dealing with individuals. Read “How to make friends and influence people” by Dale Carnegie once in a while, since most forget to apply his “basic” advice. Learned a lot about oral presentations by watching Alan Shore on Boston Legal (TV show).
Current position in life? Studying for a bachelor’s degree. My family is financially well-off, and my father is paying for my college tuition and dorm. Scholarships aren’t available for all income levels. Although I come from “privilege”, the above information can help anyone regardless of their financial position. We live in an era where information is accessible to all social classes, so excuses aren’t that relevant. If you’re practicing SR, you are already 20 steps closer to success. The tips above can be applied for free as long as you have a computesmartphone. Read books starting from today, knowledge is a source of power. People spend so much time reading the news, scrolling social media feeds, reacting to comments, chatting about useless things with friends, binging shows on Netflix, browsing YouTube/Reddit, that time quietly passes by. Time is the most valuable commodity you have; don’t waste such a limited resource on things that will contribute nothing towards your purpose in life. Once it’s spent, you can never get it back.
Personally, I schedule the next day before going to bed. Leisure, Reading, Schoolwork, Meditation, everything is mapped out perfectly. Try to eliminate habits that just waste time and stick to your schedule perfectly (working on it myself). If you feel tired after work/studying, take a nap or meditate instead of receiving even more stimulation from videogames, YouTube, or other artificial dopamine sources. Try NoSurf.

Basic Booklist:

Spirituality:

The End of Your World by Adyashanti (fantastic writer; must-read if you have had an awakening experience or believe you are "enlightened")
How to Attain Enlightenment -> The Essence of Enlightenment by James Swartz (best introduction to Advaita Vedanta I have read so far)
I am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
In the Buddha's Words by Bhikkhu Bodhi (best introduction to Buddhist scripture)
Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright (secular perspective but informative; his previous book The Moral Animal is a good introduction to evolutionary psychology. Read this first if you are non-spiritual)
Wisdom Wise and Deep by Shaila Catherine (comprehensive introduction by one of the best Jhana teachers in the US)
Manual of Insight by Mahasi Sayadaw
Emptiness: A Practical Guide by Guy Armstrong (good introduction to the Buddhist version of reality)
Books by Loch Kelly (practical guide to non-dual meditation practices within Buddhism; The Little Book of Being by Diana Winston may be a better introduction)
Seeing that Frees by Rob Burbea (really advanced but profound)
http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2007/03/thusnesss-six-stages-of-experience.html (Buddhism > Advaita)
Books by Robert Bruce such as Psychic Self-Defence and Energy Work
Psychic Witch by Mat Auryn
Dream Yoga by Andrew Holecek (amazing/practical book on lucid dreaming -> dream yoga)
Autobiography of a Yogi
The Practice of Brahmacharya by Swami Sivananda and Soaring Eagle (https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/6-years-clean-rebooting-as-the-best-remedy.135983/) if you haven’t read already
Xunzi trans. by Eric Hutton (final evolution of Confucianism)

Novels (use translators mentioned):
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/fiction/? for foreign literature

Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa (Taiko is decent as well, but this one was a masterpiece)
Romance of the Three Kingdoms trans. Moss Roberts
The Dream of the Red Chamber trans. David Hawkes (read it in the summer of 2017, profound but not all may see the deeper meaning)
The Nine Cloud Dream trans. Heinz Insu Fenkl
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (Inspirational for Entrepreneurs, however don’t start adopting this book as economic philosophy. It’s just a novel!)
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (read now if you are experiencing an existential crisis)
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment + The Brothers Karamazov (optional reading; prefer Pevear translation)
Perry Mason and Sherlock Holmes Series (pleasure reading but not useless)

Psychotherapy (never visited a therapist, but found these useful):

Getting Past Your Past by Francine Shapiro (by the founder of EMDR, best practical book on trauma and exercises to resolve it)
Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (another immensely practical book on recovering from trauma)
Breaking the Cycle by George Collins (best practical workbook on sexual addiction I have read; all should read)
Get out of your mind and into your life by Steven Hayes (Was mentioned in the charisma myth booklist; take control of your thoughts and mind by the founder of ACT)
Mindful Compassion by Paul Gilbert and Choden (prominent researcher on compassion applied to therapy; part one can be boring, but part two on practical exercises is invaluable)
Feeling Book by David Burns (rightfully a classic book on therapy and CBT; read if you are suffering from depression)
Healing Development Trauma by Laurence Heller (best book on the impact of childhood/development trauma but meant for therapists, might explain why we use addiction to cope from childhood memories; google ACE study as well)
The Boy who was raised as a Dog by Bruce Perry (stories about children experiencing trauma. Increases empathy for yourself and others; you realize how childhood trauma affects how a lot of people think and behave)
Whole Again: Healing Your Heart and Rediscovering Your True Self After Toxic Relationships and Emotional Abuse by Jackson MacKenzie (fantastic book on recovering from relationship abuse. Many of us have emotional baggage that fuels coping and addiction loops. Read Healing from Hidden Abuse by Shannon Thomas as well.)
Self-Compassion by Kristen Neff (optional reading, but complimentary)

For biographies, read those of presidents and important leaders. Also about famous/successful individuals. Read all of Ron Chernow’s books. Abuse the Amazon Search Engine and look through their categories. Reading biographies can fundamentally enhance your worldview so you realize that real-life issues are much more nuanced and gray rather than black and white. Also shows how successful people deal with difficult crises and their perspective on life. Especially for public policy. If a President implements an economic policy that has short-term gains, but long-term loss, he has a greater chance of being re-elected. However, short-term loss in favor of long-term gain is the correct policy. Employ critical-thinking! Avoid cable news even if you need to stay informed. Don’t even have a television in my house. Unnecessary. Just read 2 – 3 reputable news sources for 20 minutes max. Sometimes I even avoid the news since there’s too much negativity.
https://www.reddit.com/kundalini/comments/1unyph/a_tantric_perspective_on_the_use_of_sexual_energy/ (tantric meditation technique that actually works; you are supposed to do it for 1 hour. Optional.)
https://www.reddit.com/kundalini/comments/2zn8ev/grounding_201_two_effective_quick_methods/ (energetic protection + grounding method after doing the tantric meditation)
Avoid learning Mantak Chia’s techniques from a book, since some have suffered side-effects to their energetic/biological body. For NEO, Tibetan buddhists practice meditation for 13 years before attempting it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karmamudr%C4%81). Not easy. Not sure about women, since SR streak is more important. Don’t pick a partner to fulfill some kind of emotional void, or due to societal programming where women are held to be the ultimate goal. Spiritual Enlightenment is the ultimate goal now, but even enlightened people need money for food and shelter.
Youtubers I follow are Graham Stephan, Ryan Serhant, Rupert Spira, and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUX1V5UNWP1RUkhLewe77ZQ (cured women objectification for me; wholesome content) although mostly I avoid the website. Easy to loose track of time.
Avoid smoking, alcohol, recreational drug use (https://www.elitedaily.com/wellness/drugs-alcohol-aura-damage/1743959), casual sex (https://mywakingpath.wordpress.com/tag/aura/; sensitive images but useful), and fast food. Budget your money, and learn how to save as much as possible.
Hope everyone reading this post experiences their definition of success and leads a purposeful life. Will end it by stating two quotes that have inspired and guided me:
“You yourself have to change first, or nothing will change for you!”
― Hideaki Sorachi
“It is not important to be better than someone else, but to be better than you were yesterday.”
― Jigoro Kano (Founder of Judo)
Update 1, 2, 3: Added a post summary and the audio as well in the affirmations link
Update 4: https://starseedsunited.com/negative-entities-and-psychic-attacks (basic article on entities)
Some solutions are posted above. Updated* daily routine:

https://www.reddit.com/kundalini/comments/1xyp5k/a_simple_and_universal_white_light_protection/ (basic psychic self-defence)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kt9s5tY1YE (at least once everyday; cures sexual dreams and flushes all entities)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLeubTQv65Q (best shielding subliminal so far; general protection. Listen at least once everyday)

Note: Will continuously update this post based on further clarification. Close to 40,000 character word limit.

Practicing SR since July 2017; finally conquered Nocturnal Emissions for 3 Whole Months using Subliminals

2 accounts got shadowbanned for uploading this post. Spam filter kept on removing it on Semenretention. Messaged the moderators for help, but they didn't care. Takes less than 3 minutes to approve a post from the spam folder. No idea if they read this post.

First time making a Reddit post.
Terminology:
Wet dream/WD – sexual dream causing semen emission while sleeping
Nocturnal Emission/NE – semen emission occurring while sleeping even without dreaming
Semen-retention/SR streak – avoiding porn, masturbation, and ejaculation whether conscious or unconscious
Nofap Hardmode – avoiding porn, masturbation, and conscious ejaculation. Unconscious ejaculation/WD is considered fine.

As the title suggests, my current streak started in the middle of June 2017. Haven’t watched any porn or masturbated in 3 years. Experienced almost all the benefits such as massive attraction (men, women, children), an aura/energy surrounding me, enhanced charisma, less need for sleep, insane levels of energy, drive, and motivation, zero anxiety or fear, massive confidence occasionally bordering on arrogance, increased manifestation/LOA, people admiring/respecting me for no reason, online attraction, less procrastination, better athletic performance, greater creativity/intelligence, the desire to live a purposeful life, greater emphasis on spirituality, and much much more. Could probably write several posts just on the benefits themselves. Only thing that didn’t improve was my skin, which was later fixed using subliminals.
It’s been a long journey, so I’ll start with background information, and later elaborate on how I managed to go from nocturnal emissions every 5 days (avg) to having a perfect SR streak for 3 months.
Used to watch anime which led to hentai (2013), and eventually western/japanese porn. Don’t even bother to search these terms on Google. It’s not worth it. Thankfully, those days are long behind me. As a side-note, I discovered the nofap/semen-retention subreddit in November 2017. Didn’t even know about SR before that.
I was raised a Catholic in a fairly religious family. Always started various streaks, and eventually broke them due to boredom/emotional coping/curiosity about new videos. Thankfully, I got good grades, read books, and was interested in self-development, but all that time spent on porn was a complete waste. Assuming I spent at least 2 hours everyday for 4 years (1460 days), it amounts to 122 complete days or around 4 months in total. It’s pretty sad on reflection, but at least the experience is now absorbed, and I can write this post.
On June 2017, after summer break started and final exams were over, I decided to permanently quit this habit. Downloaded an application called Cold Turkey and completely blocked all websites I used to visit. Now use Leechblock, which is available on most browsers (also use it to block/restrict access to non-NSFW websites which impair productivity like ESPN). Started 30 minutes of daily meditation (mindfulness + metta). Still continue the habits to this day, although the length is increased to 1 hour. Read Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana and Lovingkindness by Sharon Salzberg for instructions. Have re-read these books multiple times.
Mindfulness will allow you to be self-aware of your mental conditioning, while metta (feeling compassion for yourself, a friend, neutral person, and enemy) can remove thoughts of lust and fundamentally alter your mental programming. Compassion is a very powerful exercise. Read “The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion by Christopher Germer” while you’re at it and learn tonglen. All of these books contain zero fluff, and are invaluable reads.
Started drinking 16 glasses of water (thought it would help skin, but helped in other ways), and doing 100 pushups + 100 sit-ups everyday. Increased it to 200 pushups + 200 sit-ups after 1 month. After 2 months, I made a decent amount of gains (SR helps), and people started asking me workout tips and what gym I go to. Had a Kindle Paperwhite, which is frankly one of my most valued possessions. Still works perfectly fine after 5 years, and costs only $130. Buy one now. Read a lot of books mostly consisting of biographies/spirituality/practical social skills/800+ page novels for around 6 hours per day. Still try to read for at least 15 minutes/1 chapter even when extremely busy. Will post a small booklist at the end of this post.
You can upload books to it for free if you lack money. Visit “gen.lib.rus.ec” without quotes, download the ebook in epub/mobi format, open it with Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/), and send it to Kindle using USB. Knowledge is an investment that produces continuous returns. Warren Buffett spends 80% of his time just reading! and takes action based on that knowledge.
Even managed to have the motivation to learn Japanese by joining a foreign language exchange website. People, especially women, accepted and sent a lot of invitations to have a conversation; didn’t realize online attraction was due to SR back then. None of us showed our faces, so my physical appearance had nothing to do with it. From experience, the best way to learn a language was to make a phrase sheet with the most common phrases/questions, such as “okay”, “that’s awesome”, “what is that word in English/Japanese?” Basically a human AI bot. Don’t waste time trying to learn how to write the alphabet, although my primary purpose was to learn how to speak. Google Translate is good enough to understand the pronunciation.
I learned Japanese primarily by watching Terrace House. First watched the episode with subtitles, then re-watched it without, while simultaneously writing all the connectives/conversational phrases. You can try unique methods to remember, but brute-force memorization/review worked the best. Never tried Anki since it was cumbersome to use.
For the accent, the best way is to watch Japanese people trying to speak English, and try to mirror their accent as much as possible. It honestly helps. After 3 months, I could have a full 1 hour conversation in Japanese with a native speaker without looking at any notes. I wasn’t “fluent” (still stuttered and made mistakes), but it was a huge amount of progress for starting from scratch. Eventually after 6 months, I gave up practicing/speaking the language. I was mainly trying to fulfill a childhood fantasy, and I’m glad I tried since I learned a lot from it and got to talk with interesting people. But in reality, I stopped watching anime, and honestly never needed to speak Japanese in real-life. Now I barely remember any of the words, except a few basic phrases. Could probably last 30 seconds of full conversation at best.
So, everything was going great until December 2017. During this time period, I probably had wet dreams/nocturnal emissions every 1 – 2 months. Barely felt much difference since there was a decent time interval between emissions. Drank 2 glasses of water everyday before bed, slept on my stomach, and ate spicy food (practices that cause nocturnal emissions), but was perfectly fine. However in December I started having emissions every 2 weeks. Initially didn’t care about it. In January it started happening every 1 week. Nothing really changed in my life during this time to cause emissions to increase. Then it started happening every 5 days, every 3 days, sometimes even 2 days in a row!
Most of you will have no idea how terrible it feels to be on top of the world, and then suddenly crash down. The difference between living life with/without SR benefits is night and day. Even after sleeping 10 hours, I used to feel completely exhausted. People ignored me, or worse started “joking” around me. Complete disrespect by friends, family, and acquaintances. No energy/motivation to do anything. Constant brain fog, could barely concentrate. Felt even worse than my porn days when I ejaculated everyday. Voice completely shot, started feeling anxious about oral presentations for no reason, when I always excelled. Felt like my soul was dying. Those were really dark times. People started saying I “changed”, and started pointing out and constantly magnifying my flaws. It’s strange how people exaggerate our skills/talents on SR, while they completely ignore them post WD/ejaculation, and focus only on your flaws/mistakes. It makes you lose trust in everyone around you, as if all of them are energy vampires who only like you due to SR.
I grew desperate. During this whole time I meditated, practiced no lust/no arousal as best as possible since July 2017, yet emissions increased massively in frequency. Some occurred due to sexual dreams, but most were nocturnal emissions. Thought I had a UTI at first, and went to a general practitioner. He didn’t seem very reliable, so I went to a prominent urologist. Did all sorts of tests, paid a good amount of money, and the doctor said everything was fine. Having nocturnal emissions every 5 days was perfectly normal at my age. Encouraged me to masturbate regularly if it became an inconvenience :)
So medical science obviously failed. Started following all the tips/methods in this subreddit, and believe me I tried almost everything no matter how uncomfortable or time-consuming. Omad, avoid food/water before bed, vegetarianism, tantric meditation, different diets, various sleeping positions, no/increased meditation before bed, no/more exercise, yogic exercises, qigong, some tips mentioned by Soaring Eagle, prayed to God. None of them worked. The only method I didn’t try extensively were kegels. Initially tried a normal + reverse kegel routine, then found an article by coincidence on this subreddit about someone who permanently damaged their penis from doing kegels. Immediately stopped, thank you to that person for sharing your experience. It’s as if the universe was looking out for me. Best to avoid such risky methods even if you’re desperate. Currently sleep on my back since it avoids any "accidental physical stimulation" from occurring.
So this nocturnal emission phenomena continued for over a year. Some methods worked better than others, while for some, I wasn’t sure if it was merely the placebo effect. In mid-2019 I came across subliminal videos (finally the good part!) on YouTube. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0W5AB1sGr0) This video explains it more thoroughly, but basically you convert affirmations (sentences like “I am happy/smart/handsome”) into audio using text-to-speech software and reprogram your subconscious mind. Tried a beauty subliminal (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEXaAsm-Iys) as a joke, but the next day I noticed changes in my facial structure. Listened for an hour the first day, which was easy given the music. You have no idea how amazing it feels to know that you can control your reality just by using your mind. Completely magical. Supposedly it works due to the Law of Attraction; you can find out more by reading/watching “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, and later reading all the books by Neville Goddard. Started using a skin subliminal as well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqi8Q80pspk and later moved onto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COxz8hvl14Y ), and now my skin is completely normal. Visited prominent US dermatologists, tried all sorts of acne medicine including Accutane, and even did SR, yet none of them worked. Skin was pretty terrible, and I was glad it got fixed. Took around 4 months of daily listening although it can be shortelonger depending on your belief, blockages, and levels of positivity. There’s a CIA document on holographic universes, astral projection, time travel, and psychic powers if you need scientific validation: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5.pdf
Disclaimer: Although there can be bad subliminal makers, they are very rare, and there has been only 2 of them in the history of the community. Someone named MindPower and Rose subliminals. The vast majority (99%) put positive affirmations. It’s best that you verify by checking all the comments, seeing their subscriber count, general personality, etc, but ultimately there’s no guarantee. The only way to make sure the affirmations are 100% positive and safe are to make them yourself or use a subliminal that blocks negative affirmations.
One thing to note is that physical change (biokinesis; search that term)/spiritual subliminals utilize the prana in your body to a certain extent to make changes. It makes sense since physical change is essentially a psychic poweenergy work. So your SR benefits/aura might temporarily decrease. Hydration is also recommended, and you will notice feeling thirsty. Personally drink 20 glasses of water everyday.
Obviously, my interest now turned towards using subliminals to cure nocturnal emissions. Unfortunately there’s a huge lack of subliminals regarding semen-retention or those targeted towards nocturnal emissions. Initially bought a subliminal using a paid request (you pay a subliminal maker for a specialized subliminal), but it didn’t work that well. Desired to be permanently free of nocturnal emissions, or at least reduce the frequency to once a month. So I decided to make my own subliminal. The affirmations will be posted below, and this is how I eventually cured my nocturnal emissions.
Steps on how to make your own subliminal:

Write all the affirmations in a word document and save it.
Download text-to-speech software like Balabolka (http://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm) and output the audio file in wav format (you want both uncompressed + lossless)
Optional but recommended; download an audio editor like Audacity (https://www.audacityteam.org/), and fast-forward the audio as much as possible using the “Change Tempo” effect. Personally I speed the audio to one second and then loop it 1000x. Continue the process as much as possible, but never make the audio length less than 1 second. Some subliminal makers make their subliminals even more powerful by creating multiple audio streams of their affirmations using different voices, merging all the voices together, and speeding them up. It’s called layering. Why super-sped affirmations work better can be somewhat explained by this article (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sensorium/201812/experiments-suggest-humans-can-directly-observe-the-quantum), but science still doesn’t have all the answers. Will take time.
Converting the affirmations to binary code (https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/numbeascii-to-binary.html) is a technique some subliminal makers use. Supposedly it penetrates the subconscious faster.

Affirmations + Audio Link: https://mega.nz/foldeWcwhhAia#RmD8e0I3uzjyeDdW22wEHg
Listened to this personal subliminal for 1 hour everyday for an entire month. Still listen just to be safe. Took months of testing and editing affirmations to make it perfect. Experienced massive sexual dreams on certain days, more than normal, and found out that entities could be responsible. Try to avoid this subreddit as well, since reading the posts can trigger memories. More energetically sensitive now, and sometimes there’s a lot of low-vibrational energy. On a side-note, porn cripples your aura and invites negative entities (https://www.awakeningstaryoga.com/blog/expanding-away-from-porn-aura).
Non-subliminal solutions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5-DrYahaSc (morphic field)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWK0D1g069I (powerful aura cleanse; Tibetan bowl sounds)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7moRsibNyMA (reiki)

Subliminal solutions (ordered in terms of effectiveness):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLeubTQv65Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvyPscRD1ss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTmnrFzR0_Q (for spells, curses, black magic, etc)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kt9s5tY1YE (last resort)

The entire channel is a gem; these were some of the best. Have used them for a few months and feel much lighter and peaceful; experienced only headaches due to subconscious absorbing the affirmations, but zero negative effects.
Advice: Remember to immediately download any subliminal video you find that is useful in wav format (https://www.savethevideo.com/download). Subliminal channels are sometimes deleted by YouTube (spam filter) or the creators themselves.
Waited 3 whole months before deciding to make a Reddit post to make sure the method was 100% foolproof. Remember many people offering solutions in the past, yet 1 month later they would have another wd/nocturnal emission.
The first month there was a lot of fear. Will I have a wet dream/nocturnal emission tonight? Was so traumatized it was difficult getting to sleep every night. After the 2nd month, I experimented with sleeping on my stomach and eating/drinking before bed. Nothing happened. Stopped recently to stay careful.
After 2 years of suffering, this is a method that has worked. Try and see for yourself.

Present day:
How do you feel now? Some days it’s meh (due to flatline) like today; on other days I feel divine. No idea why flatline still occurs. Have regained all the benefits, feel love and happiness all the time. Experience intense states of bliss in meditation more frequently, although it’s just a distraction.
Religiously/Spiritually I’ve moved from Christianity to Buddhism/Advaita Vedanta/parts of New Age. Found them more practical and useful in life. Was inspired to aim for spiritual enlightenment after reading “The 3 pillars of Zen” by Philip Kapleau. Read it, it might change your life.
Have attended a number of meditation retreats now, along with 10-day ones. Everyone reading this post should try it. Understood how much our mental programming defined us, and that we aren’t are thoughts. Our childhood traumas define so much of our habitual reactions. Realized its okay to feel bored rather than chasing after constant stimulation.
Even attended a Jhana retreat, which is exclusive for people who have attended prior retreats. Entered intense states of meditative absorption, understood the permeability/impermanence of reality, and had all sorts of mystical experiences. Experienced past lives; can confirm my mind did not make it up, since it’s an experience you can constantly replicate using the same methods. Before attempting such methods, you need to have the ability to sit down and meditate continuously for at least 3 hours. If you live in the US, attend IMS (Insight Meditation Society) or any prominent Vipassana/Theravada related retreat. Zen is a valid form of enlightenment, but it personally felt unstructured.
Gave up music, took time since I was convinced it was needed for creativity. Instead, it was just a substitute source of dopamine and a way to avoid my emotions. Have much less brain fog after quitting. Only communicate using regular phone calls these days, which no one uses, and Snapchat/WhatsApp for texting. Avoid stories, waste of time. Instagram/TwitteFacebook are a waste of time unless you are using it for business purposes. The only social media you really need is LinkedIn.
Women: You’ll learn more about them by reading romantic novels, Korean mangas, and watching Kdramas then reading all that seduction/red pill stuff. Focus on general charisma (men and women) instead of a specific gender. Read “The Charisma Myth” by Olivia Fox Cabane; it’s the most practical book on social skills I have ever read, and possibly the most life-changing as well. Teaches you self-awareness, applies Buddhist psychology to social interaction. Used to train executives in Google, read it now (and do all the exercises). The bibliography sent me on a rabbit hole that made me read ton of books on psychotherapy, meditation, mindfulness, and Buddhism; this was before SR. Inspired me to practice meditation, although the habit only became regular after SR.
Read books such as Crucial Conversations by Al Switzer, Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, How to Talk so Kids will Listen by Adele Faber (works very well in general since even adults have childhood programming, and can act like children), Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss (FBI's chief international hostage and kidnapping negotiator from 2003 to 2007), Getting More by Stuart Diamond (trains negotiators at Google), and Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff (more theoretical but useful). Also read The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan Pease and What Every Body is Saying by Joe Navarro. These are all books that will greatly improve your human interactions and contain limited fluff. Have re-read all of these books in difficult times, and they have never let me down. You should read it as well. Even if you become a monk, there’s lots of social infighting even in monasteries. Highly-developed social skills are invaluable whenever you are dealing with individuals. Read “How to make friends and influence people” by Dale Carnegie once in a while, since most forget to apply his “basic” advice. Learned a lot about oral presentations by watching Alan Shore on Boston Legal (TV show).
Current position in life? Studying for a bachelor’s degree. My family is financially well-off, and my father is paying for my college tuition and dorm. Scholarships aren’t available for all income levels. Although I come from “privilege”, the above information can help anyone regardless of their financial position. We live in an era where information is accessible to all social classes, so excuses aren’t that relevant. If you’re practicing SR, you are already 20 steps closer to success. The tips above can be applied for free as long as you have a computesmartphone. Read books starting from today, knowledge is a source of power. People spend so much time reading the news, scrolling social media feeds, reacting to comments, chatting about useless things with friends, binging shows on Netflix, browsing YouTube/Reddit, that time quietly passes by. Time is the most valuable commodity you have; don’t waste such a limited resource on things that will contribute nothing towards your purpose in life. Once it’s spent, you can never get it back.
Personally, I schedule the next day before going to bed. Leisure, Reading, Schoolwork, Meditation, everything is mapped out perfectly. Try to eliminate habits that just waste time and stick to your schedule perfectly (working on it myself). If you feel tired after work/studying, take a nap or meditate instead of receiving even more stimulation from videogames, YouTube, or other artificial dopamine sources. Try NoSurf.

Basic Booklist:

Spirituality:

The End of Your World by Adyashanti (fantastic writer; must-read if you have had an awakening experience or believe you are "enlightened")
How to Attain Enlightenment -> The Essence of Enlightenment by James Swartz (best introduction to Advaita Vedanta I have read so far)
I am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (essence of Advaita)
In the Buddha's Words by Bhikkhu Bodhi (best introduction to Buddhist scripture)
Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright (secular perspective but informative; his previous book The Moral Animal is a good introduction to evolutionary psychology. Read this first if you are non-spiritual)
Wisdom Wise and Deep by Shaila Catherine (comprehensive introduction by one of the best Jhana teachers in the US)
The Visuddhimagga
Manual of Insight by Mahasi Sayadaw
Emptiness: A Practical Guide by Guy Armstrong (good introduction to the Buddhist version of reality)
Books by Loch Kelly (practical guide to non-dual meditation practices within Buddhism; The Little Book of Being by Diana Winston may be a better introduction)
Seeing that Frees by Rob Burbea (really advanced but profound)
http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2007/03/thusnesss-six-stages-of-experience.html (Buddhism > Advaita; ebooks in sidebar)
Books by Robert Bruce such as Psychic Self-Defence and Energy Work
Psychic Witch by Mat Auryn
Dream Yoga by Andrew Holecek (amazing/practical book on lucid dreaming -> dream yoga)
Autobiography of a Yogi
The Practice of Brahmacharya by Swami Sivananda and Soaring Eagle (https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/6-years-clean-rebooting-as-the-best-remedy.135983/) if you haven’t read already
Xunzi trans. by Eric Hutton (final evolution of Confucianism)

Novels (use translators mentioned):
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/fiction/ for foreign literature

Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa (Taiko is decent as well, but this one was a masterpiece)
Romance of the Three Kingdoms trans. Moss Roberts
The Dream of the Red Chamber trans. David Hawkes (read it in the summer of 2017, profound but not all may see the deeper meaning)
The Nine Cloud Dream trans. Heinz Insu Fenkl
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (Inspirational for Entrepreneurs, however don’t start adopting this book as economic philosophy. It’s just a novel!)
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (read now if you are experiencing an existential crisis)
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment + The Brothers Karamazov (optional reading; prefer Pevear translation)
Perry Mason and Sherlock Holmes Series (pleasure reading but not useless)

Psychotherapy (never visited a therapist, but found these useful):

Getting Past Your Past by Francine Shapiro (by the founder of EMDR, best practical book on trauma and exercises to resolve it)
Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (another immensely practical book on recovering from trauma)
Breaking the Cycle by George Collins (best practical workbook on sexual addiction I have read; all should read)
Get out of your mind and into your life by Steven Hayes (Was mentioned in the charisma myth booklist; take control of your thoughts and mind by the founder of ACT)
Mindful Compassion by Paul Gilbert and Choden (prominent researcher on compassion applied to therapy; part one can be boring, but part two on practical exercises is invaluable)
Feeling Book by David Burns (rightfully a classic book on therapy and CBT; read if you are suffering from depression)
Healing Development Trauma by Laurence Heller (best book on the impact of childhood/development trauma but meant for therapists, might explain why we use addiction to cope from childhood memories; google ACE study as well)
The Boy who was raised as a Dog by Bruce Perry (stories about children experiencing trauma. Increases empathy for yourself and others; you realize how childhood trauma affects how a lot of people think and behave)
Whole Again: Healing Your Heart and Rediscovering Your True Self After Toxic Relationships and Emotional Abuse by Jackson MacKenzie (fantastic book on recovering from relationship abuse. Many of us have emotional baggage that fuels coping and addiction loops. Read Healing from Hidden Abuse by Shannon Thomas as well.)
Self-Compassion by Kristen Neff (optional reading, but complimentary)

For biographies, read those of presidents and important leaders. Also about famous/successful individuals. Read all of Ron Chernow’s books. Abuse the Amazon Search Engine and look through their categories. Reading biographies can fundamentally enhance your worldview so you realize that real-life issues are much more nuanced and gray rather than black and white. Also shows how successful people deal with difficult crises and their perspective on life. Especially for public policy. If a President implements an economic policy that has short-term gains, but long-term loss, he has a greater chance of being re-elected. However, short-term loss in favor of long-term gain is the correct policy. Employ critical-thinking! Avoid cable news even if you need to stay informed. Don’t even have a television in my house. Unnecessary. Just read 2 – 3 reputable news sources for 20 minutes max. Sometimes I even avoid the news since there’s too much negativity.
https://www.reddit.com/kundalini/comments/1unyph/a_tantric_perspective_on_the_use_of_sexual_energy/ (tantric meditation technique that actually works; you are supposed to do it for 1 hour. Optional.)
https://www.reddit.com/kundalini/comments/2zn8ev/grounding_201_two_effective_quick_methods/ (grounding method after doing the tantric meditation)
Avoid learning Mantak Chia’s techniques from a book, since some have suffered side-effects to their energetic/biological body. Zero advice for those practicing NEO. Must be hard. Not sure about women, since SR streak is more important. Don’t pick a partner to fulfill some kind of emotional void, or due to societal programming where women are held to be the ultimate goal. Spiritual Enlightenment is the ultimate goal now, but even enlightened people need money for food and shelter.
Youtubers I follow are Graham Stephan, Ryan Serhant, Rupert Spira, and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUX1V5UNWP1RUkhLewe77ZQ (cured women objectification for me; wholesome content) although mostly I avoid the website. Easy to loose track of time.
Avoid smoking, alcohol, recreational drug use (https://www.elitedaily.com/wellness/drugs-alcohol-aura-damage/1743959, http://sshc.in/?p=1123 ), casual sex (https://mywakingpath.wordpress.com/tag/aura/; sensitive images but useful), and fast food. Budget your money, and learn how to save as much as possible.
Hope everyone reading this post experiences their definition of success and leads a purposeful life. Will end it by stating two quotes that have inspired and guided me:
“You yourself have to change first, or nothing will change for you!”
― Hideaki Sorachi
“It is not important to be better than someone else, but to be better than you were yesterday.”
― Jigoro Kano (Founder of Judo)

Update 1: Made the instructions regarding super-sped affirmations more clearer.
Update 2: Added the audio file as well to the affirmations link since someone requested it
Update 3: https://starseedsunited.com/negative-entities-and-psychic-attacks (basic article on entities)
Some solutions are posted above. Updated* daily routine:

https://www.reddit.com/kundalini/comments/1xyp5k/a_simple_and_universal_white_light_protection/ (basic psychic self-defence)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kt9s5tY1YE (at least once everyday; cures sexual dreams and flushes all entities)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLeubTQv65Q (best shielding subliminal so far; general protection. Listen at least once everyday)

Note: Will continuously update this post based on further clarification.

Practicing SR since July 2017; finally conquered Nocturnal Emissions for 3 Whole Months using Subliminals

2 accounts got shadowbanned for uploading this post. Spam filter kept on removing it this post. Messaged the moderators, but received no answer. Removed many links, so check post history for full version.

Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes
Brief summary of post:

History of Journey
Using Subliminals (affirmations converted into audio) to reprogram the subconscious, overcome nocturnal emissions, and turbo-charge the Law of Attraction
Experience from meditation retreats
Massive booklist covering psychotherapy, spirituality, and general books such as negotiating and advanced social skills
Fundamental shifts that occurred
Experiences with semen-retention benefits
How I overcame and conquered negative entities
Tantric meditation method that actually works with zero side effects
Experience on speaking Japanese for 1 full hour with native speakers without notes after 3 months of learning

Write all the affirmations in a word document and save it.
Download text-to-speech software like Balabolka and output the audio file in wav format (you want both uncompressed + lossless)
Optional but recommended; download an audio editor like Audacity, and fast-forward the audio as much as possible using the “Change Tempo” effect. Personally I speed the audio to one second and then loop it 1000x. Continue the process as much as possible, but never make the audio length less than 1 second. Some subliminal makers make their subliminals even more powerful by creating multiple audio streams of their affirmations using different voices, merging all the voices together, and speeding them up. It’s called layering. Why super-sped affirmations work better can be somewhat explained by this article (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sensorium/201812/experiments-suggest-humans-can-directly-observe-the-quantum), but science still doesn’t have all the answers. Will take time.
Converting the affirmations to binary code (https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/numbeascii-to-binary.html) is a technique some subliminal makers use. Supposedly it penetrates the subconscious faster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMx69hgYq0s (morphic field)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWK0D1g069I (powerful aura cleanse; Tibetan bowl sounds)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7moRsibNyMA (reiki)

Subliminal solutions (ordered in terms of effectiveness):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLeubTQv65Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvyPscRD1ss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTmnrFzR0_Q (for spells, curses, black magic, etc)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kt9s5tY1YE (last resort)

The entire channel is a gem; these were some of the best. Have used them for a few months and feel much lighter and peaceful; experienced only headaches due to subconscious absorbing the affirmations, but zero negative effects.
Advice: Remember to immediately download any subliminal video you find that is useful in wav format (https://www.savethevideo.com/download). Subliminal channels are sometimes deleted by YouTube (spam filter) or the creators themselves.
Waited 3 whole months before deciding to make a Reddit post to make sure the method was 100% foolproof. Remember many people offering solutions in the past, yet 1 month later they would have another wd/nocturnal emission.
The first month there was a lot of fear. Will I have a wet dream/nocturnal emission tonight? Was so traumatized it was difficult getting to sleep every night. After the 2nd month, I experimented with sleeping on my stomach and eating/drinking before bed. Nothing happened. Stopped recently to stay careful.
After 2 years of suffering, this is a method that has worked. Try and see for yourself.

Present day:
How do you feel now? Some days it’s meh (due to flatline) like today; on other days I feel divine. No idea why flatline still occurs. Have regained all the benefits, feel love and happiness all the time. Experience intense states of bliss in meditation more frequently, although it’s just a distraction.
Religiously/Spiritually I’ve moved from Christianity to Buddhism/Advaita Vedanta/parts of New Age. Found them more practical and useful in life. Was inspired to aim for spiritual enlightenment after reading “The 3 pillars of Zen” by Philip Kapleau. Read it, it might change your life.
Have attended a number of meditation retreats now, along with 10-day ones. Everyone reading this post should try it. Understood how much our mental programming defined us, and that we aren’t are thoughts. Our childhood traumas define so much of our habitual reactions. Realized its okay to feel bored rather than chasing after constant stimulation.
Even attended a Jhana retreat, which is exclusive for people who have attended prior retreats. Entered intense states of meditative absorption, understood the permeability/impermanence of reality, and had all sorts of mystical experiences. Experienced past lives; can confirm my mind did not make it up, since it’s an experience you can constantly replicate using the same methods. Before attempting such methods, you need to have the ability to sit down and meditate continuously for at least 3 hours. If you live in the US, attend IMS (Insight Meditation Society) or any prominent Vipassana/Theravada related retreat. Zen is a valid form of enlightenment, but it personally felt unstructured.
Gave up music, took time since I was convinced it was needed for creativity. Instead, it was just a substitute source of dopamine and a way to avoid my emotions. Have much less brain fog after quitting. Only communicate using regular phone calls these days, which no one uses, and Snapchat/WhatsApp for texting. Avoid stories, waste of time. Instagram/TwitteFacebook are a waste of time unless you are using it for business purposes. The only social media you really need is LinkedIn.
Women: You’ll learn more about them by reading romantic novels, Korean mangas, and watching Kdramas then reading all that seduction/red pill stuff. Focus on general charisma (men and women) instead of a specific gender. Read “The Charisma Myth” by Olivia Fox Cabane; it’s the most practical book on social skills I have ever read, and possibly the most life-changing as well. Teaches you self-awareness, applies Buddhist psychology to social interaction. Used to train executives in Google, read it now (and do all the exercises). The bibliography sent me on a rabbit hole that made me read ton of books on psychotherapy, meditation, mindfulness, and Buddhism; this was before SR. Inspired me to practice meditation, although the habit only became regular after SR.
Read books such as Crucial Conversations by Al Switzer, Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, How to Talk so Kids will Listen by Adele Faber (works very well in general since even adults have childhood programming, and can act like children), Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss (FBI's chief international hostage and kidnapping negotiator from 2003 to 2007), Getting More by Stuart Diamond (trains negotiators at Google), and Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff (more theoretical but useful). Also read The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan Pease and What Every Body is Saying by Joe Navarro. These are all books that will greatly improve your human interactions and contain limited fluff. Have re-read all of these books in difficult times, and they have never let me down. You should read it as well. Even if you become a monk, there’s lots of social infighting even in monasteries. Highly-developed social skills are invaluable whenever you are dealing with individuals. Read “How to make friends and influence people” by Dale Carnegie once in a while, since most forget to apply his “basic” advice. Learned a lot about oral presentations by watching Alan Shore on Boston Legal (TV show).
Current position in life? Studying for a bachelor’s degree. My family is financially well-off, and my father is paying for my college tuition and dorm. Scholarships aren’t available for all income levels. Although I come from “privilege”, the above information can help anyone regardless of their financial position. We live in an era where information is accessible to all social classes, so excuses aren’t that relevant. If you’re practicing SR, you are already 20 steps closer to success. The tips above can be applied for free as long as you have a computesmartphone. Read books starting from today, knowledge is a source of power. People spend so much time reading the news, scrolling social media feeds, reacting to comments, chatting about useless things with friends, binging shows on Netflix, browsing YouTube/Reddit, that time quietly passes by. Time is the most valuable commodity you have; don’t waste such a limited resource on things that will contribute nothing towards your purpose in life. Once it’s spent, you can never get it back.
Personally, I schedule the next day before going to bed. Leisure, Reading, Schoolwork, Meditation, everything is mapped out perfectly. Try to eliminate habits that just waste time and stick to your schedule perfectly (working on it myself). If you feel tired after work/studying, take a nap or meditate instead of receiving even more stimulation from videogames, YouTube, or other artificial dopamine sources. Try NoSurf.

Basic Booklist:

Spirituality:

The End of Your World by Adyashanti (fantastic writer; must-read if you have had an awakening experience or believe you are "enlightened")
How to Attain Enlightenment -> The Essence of Enlightenment by James Swartz (best introduction to Advaita Vedanta I have read so far)
I am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
In the Buddha's Words by Bhikkhu Bodhi (best introduction to Buddhist scripture)
Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright (secular perspective but informative; his previous book The Moral Animal is a good introduction to evolutionary psychology. Read this first if you are non-spiritual)
Wisdom Wise and Deep by Shaila Catherine (comprehensive introduction by one of the best Jhana teachers in the US)
Manual of Insight by Mahasi Sayadaw
Emptiness: A Practical Guide by Guy Armstrong (good introduction to the Buddhist version of reality)
Books by Loch Kelly (practical guide to non-dual meditation practices within Buddhism; The Little Book of Being by Diana Winston may be a better introduction)
Seeing that Frees by Rob Burbea (really advanced but profound)
http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2007/03/thusnesss-six-stages-of-experience.html (Buddhism > Advaita)
Books by Robert Bruce such as Psychic Self-Defence and Energy Work
Psychic Witch by Mat Auryn
Dream Yoga by Andrew Holecek (amazing/practical book on lucid dreaming -> dream yoga)
Autobiography of a Yogi
The Practice of Brahmacharya by Swami Sivananda and Soaring Eagle (https://forum.nofap.com/index.php?threads/6-years-clean-rebooting-as-the-best-remedy.135983/) if you haven’t read already
Xunzi trans. by Eric Hutton (final evolution of Confucianism)

Novels (use translators mentioned):
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/fiction/? for foreign literature

Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa (Taiko is decent as well, but this one was a masterpiece)
Romance of the Three Kingdoms trans. Moss Roberts
The Dream of the Red Chamber trans. David Hawkes (read it in the summer of 2017, profound but not all may see the deeper meaning)
The Nine Cloud Dream trans. Heinz Insu Fenkl
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (Inspirational for Entrepreneurs, however don’t start adopting this book as economic philosophy. It’s just a novel!)
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (read now if you are experiencing an existential crisis)
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment + The Brothers Karamazov (optional reading; prefer Pevear translation)
Perry Mason and Sherlock Holmes Series (pleasure reading but not useless)

Psychotherapy (never visited a therapist, but found these useful):

Getting Past Your Past by Francine Shapiro (by the founder of EMDR, best practical book on trauma and exercises to resolve it)
Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (another immensely practical book on recovering from trauma)
Breaking the Cycle by George Collins (best practical workbook on sexual addiction I have read; all should read)
Get out of your mind and into your life by Steven Hayes (Was mentioned in the charisma myth booklist; take control of your thoughts and mind by the founder of ACT)
Mindful Compassion by Paul Gilbert and Choden (prominent researcher on compassion applied to therapy; part one can be boring, but part two on practical exercises is invaluable)
Feeling Book by David Burns (rightfully a classic book on therapy and CBT; read if you are suffering from depression)
Healing Development Trauma by Laurence Heller (best book on the impact of childhood/development trauma but meant for therapists, might explain why we use addiction to cope from childhood memories; google ACE study as well)
The Boy who was raised as a Dog by Bruce Perry (stories about children experiencing trauma. Increases empathy for yourself and others; you realize how childhood trauma affects how a lot of people think and behave)
Whole Again: Healing Your Heart and Rediscovering Your True Self After Toxic Relationships and Emotional Abuse by Jackson MacKenzie (fantastic book on recovering from relationship abuse. Many of us have emotional baggage that fuels coping and addiction loops. Read Healing from Hidden Abuse by Shannon Thomas as well.)
Self-Compassion by Kristen Neff (optional reading, but complimentary)

For biographies, read those of presidents and important leaders. Also about famous/successful individuals. Read all of Ron Chernow’s books. Abuse the Amazon Search Engine and look through their categories. Reading biographies can fundamentally enhance your worldview so you realize that real-life issues are much more nuanced and gray rather than black and white. Also shows how successful people deal with difficult crises and their perspective on life. Especially for public policy. If a President implements an economic policy that has short-term gains, but long-term loss, he has a greater chance of being re-elected. However, short-term loss in favor of long-term gain is the correct policy. Employ critical-thinking! Avoid cable news even if you need to stay informed. Don’t even have a television in my house. Unnecessary. Just read 2 – 3 reputable news sources for 20 minutes max. Sometimes I even avoid the news since there’s too much negativity.
https://www.reddit.com/kundalini/comments/1unyph/a_tantric_perspective_on_the_use_of_sexual_energy/ (tantric meditation/sexual transmutation technique that actually works; you are supposed to do it for 1 hour. Optional.)
https://www.reddit.com/kundalini/comments/2zn8ev/grounding_201_two_effective_quick_methods/ (energetic protection + grounding method after doing the tantric meditation)
Avoid learning Mantak Chia’s techniques from a book, since some have suffered side-effects to their energetic/biological body. For NEO, Tibetan buddhists practice meditation for 13 years before attempting it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karmamudr%C4%81). Not easy. Not sure about women, since SR streak is more important. Don’t pick a partner to fulfill some kind of emotional void, or due to societal programming where women are held to be the ultimate goal. Spiritual Enlightenment is the ultimate goal now, but even enlightened people need money for food and shelter.
Youtubers I follow are Graham Stephan, Ryan Serhant, Rupert Spira, and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUX1V5UNWP1RUkhLewe77ZQ (cured women objectification for me; wholesome content) although mostly I avoid the website. Easy to loose track of time.
Avoid smoking, alcohol, recreational drug use (https://www.elitedaily.com/wellness/drugs-alcohol-aura-damage/1743959), casual sex (https://mywakingpath.wordpress.com/tag/aura/; sensitive images but useful), and fast food. Budget your money, and learn how to save as much as possible.
Hope everyone reading this post experiences their definition of success and leads a purposeful life. Will end it by stating two quotes that have inspired and guided me:
“You yourself have to change first, or nothing will change for you!”
― Hideaki Sorachi
“It is not important to be better than someone else, but to be better than you were yesterday.”
― Jigoro Kano (Founder of Judo)

Update 1: Added the audio file as well to the mega link
Update 2: https://starseedsunited.com/negative-entities-and-psychic-attacks (basic article on entities)
Some solutions are posted above. Updated* daily routine:

https://www.reddit.com/kundalini/comments/1xyp5k/a_simple_and_universal_white_light_protection/ (basic psychic self-defence)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kt9s5tY1YE (at least once everyday; cures sexual dreams and flushes all entities)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLeubTQv65Q (best shielding subliminal so far; general protection. Listen at least once everyday)

Note: Will continuously update this post based on further clarification. Close to 40,000 character word limit.

[ANN][ANDROID MINING][AIRDROP] NewEnglandcoin: Scrypt RandomSpike

New England
New England 6 States Songs: https://www.reddit.com/newengland/comments/er8wxd/new_england_6_states_songs/
NewEnglandcoin
Symbol: NENG
NewEnglandcoin is a clone of Bitcoin using scrypt as a proof-of-work algorithm with enhanced features to protect against 51% attack and decentralize on mining to allow diversified mining rigs across CPUs, GPUs, ASICs and Android phones.
Mining Algorithm: Scrypt with RandomSpike. RandomSpike is 3rd generation of Dynamic Difficulty (DynDiff) algorithm on top of scrypt.
1 minute block targets base difficulty reset: every 1440 blocks subsidy halves in 2.1m blocks (~ 2 to 4 years) 84,000,000,000 total maximum NENG 20000 NENG per block Pre-mine: 1% - reserved for dev fund ICO: None RPCPort: 6376 Port: 6377
NewEnglandcoin has dogecoin like supply at 84 billion maximum NENG. This huge supply insures that NENG is suitable for retail transactions and daily use. The inflation schedule of NengEnglandcoin is actually identical to that of Litecoin. Bitcoin and Litecoin are already proven to be great long term store of value. The Litecoin-like NENG inflation schedule will make NewEnglandcoin ideal for long term investment appreciation as the supply is limited and capped at a fixed number
Bitcoin Fork - Suitable for Home Hobbyists
NewEnglandcoin core wallet continues to maintain version tag of "Satoshi v0.8.7.5" because NewEnglandcoin is very much an exact clone of bitcoin plus some mining feature changes with DynDiff algorithm. NewEnglandcoin is very suitable as lite version of bitcoin for educational purpose on desktop mining, full node running and bitcoin programming using bitcoin-json APIs.
The NewEnglandcoin (NENG) mining algorithm original upgrade ideas were mainly designed for decentralization of mining rigs on scrypt, which is same algo as litecoin/dogecoin. The way it is going now is that NENG is very suitable for bitcoin/litecoin/dogecoin hobbyists who can not , will not spend huge money to run noisy ASIC/GPU mining equipments, but still want to mine NENG at home with quiet simple CPU/GPU or with a cheap ASIC like FutureBit Moonlander 2 USB or Apollo pod on solo mining setup to obtain very decent profitable results. NENG allows bitcoin litecoin hobbyists to experience full node running, solo mining, CPU/GPU/ASIC for a fun experience at home at cheap cost without breaking bank on equipment or electricity.
MIT Free Course - 23 lectures about Bitcoin, Blockchain and Finance (Fall,2018)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63UUkfL0onkxF6MYgVa04Fn
CPU Minable Coin Because of dynamic difficulty algorithm on top of scrypt, NewEnglandcoin is CPU Minable. Users can easily set up full node for mining at Home PC or Mac using our dedicated cheetah software.
Research on the first forked 50 blocks on v1.2.0 core confirmed that ASIC/GPU miners mined 66% of 50 blocks, CPU miners mined the remaining 34%.
NENG v1.4.0 release enabled CPU mining inside android phones.
Youtube Video Tutorial
How to CPU Mine NewEnglandcoin (NENG) in Windows 10 Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdOoPvAjzlE How to CPU Mine NewEnglandcoin (NENG) in Windows 10 Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHnRJvJRzZg
How to CPU Mine NewEnglandcoin (NENG) in macOS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj7NLMeNSOQ
Decentralization and Community Driven NewEnglandcoin is a decentralized coin just like bitcoin. There is no boss on NewEnglandcoin. Nobody nor the dev owns NENG.
We know a coin is worth nothing if there is no backing from community. Therefore, we as dev do not intend to make decision on this coin solely by ourselves. It is our expectation that NewEnglandcoin community will make majority of decisions on direction of this coin from now on. We as dev merely view our-self as coin creater and technical support of this coin while providing NENG a permanent home at ShorelineCrypto Exchange.
Twitter Airdrop
Follow NENG twitter and receive 100,000 NENG on Twitter Airdrop to up to 1000 winners
Graphic Redesign Bounty
Top one award: 90.9 million NENG Top 10 Winners: 500,000 NENG / person Event Timing: March 25, 2019 - Present Event Address: NewEnglandcoin DISCORD at: https://discord.gg/UPeBwgs
Please complete above Twitter Bounty requirement first. Then follow Below Steps to qualify for the Bounty: (1) Required: submit your own designed NENG logo picture in gif, png jpg or any other common graphic file format into DISCORD "bounty-submission" board (2) Optional: submit a second graphic for logo or any other marketing purposes into "bounty-submission" board. (3) Complete below form.
Please limit your submission to no more than two total. Delete any wrongly submitted or undesired graphics in the board. Contact DISCORD u/honglu69#5911 or u/krypton#6139 if you have any issues.
Twitter Airdrop/Graphic Redesign bounty sign up: https://goo.gl/forms/L0vcwmVi8c76cR7m1
Milestones

Sep 3, 2018 - Genesis block was mined, NewEnglandcoin created
Sep 8, 2018 - github source uploaded, Window wallet development work started
Sep 11,2018 - Window Qt Graphic wallet completed
Sep 12,2018 - NewEnglandcoin Launched in both Bitcointalk forum and Marinecoin forum
Sep 14,2018 - NewEnglandcoin is listed at ShorelineCrypto Exchange
Sep 17,2018 - Block Explorer is up
Nov 23,2018 - New Source/Wallet Release v1.1.1 - Enabled Dynamic Addjustment on Mining Hashing Difficulty
Nov 28,2018 - NewEnglandcoin became CPU minable coin
Nov 30,2018 - First Retail Real Life usage for NewEnglandcoin Announced
Dec 28,2018 - Cheetah_Cpuminer under Linux is released
Dec 31,2018 - NENG Technical Whitepaper is released
Jan 2,2019 - Cheetah_Cpuminer under Windows is released
Jan 12,2019 - NENG v1.1.2 is released to support MacOS GUI CLI Wallet
Jan 13,2019 - Cheetah_CpuMiner under Mac is released
Feb 11,2019 - NewEnglandcoin v1.2.0 Released, Anti-51% Attack, Anti-instant Mining after Hard Fork
Mar 16,2019 - NewEnglandcoin v1.2.1.1 Released - Ubuntu 18.04 Wallet Binary Files
Apr 7, 2019 - NENG Report on Security, Decentralization, Valuation
Apr 21, 2019 - NENG Fiat Project is Launched by ShorelineCrypto
Sep 1, 2019 - Shoreline Tradingbot project is Launched by ShorelineCrypto
Dec 19, 2019 - Shoreline Tradingbot v1.0 is Released by ShorelineCrypto
Jan 30, 2020 - Scrypt RandomSpike - NENG v1.3.0 Hardfork Proposed
Feb 24, 2020 - Scrypt RandomSpike - NENG core v1.3.0 Released
Jun 19, 2020 - Linux scripts for Futurebit Moonlander2 USB ASIC on solo mining Released
Jul 15, 2020 - NENG v1.4.0 Released for Android Mining and Ubuntu 20.04 support
Jul 21, 2020 - NENG v1.4.0.2 Released for MacOS Wallet Upgrade with Catalina
Jul 30, 2020 - NENG v1.4.0.3 Released for Linux Wallet Upgrade with 8 Distros
Aug 11, 2020 - NENG v1.4.0.4 Released for Android arm64 Upgrade, Chromebook Support
Aug 30, 2020 - NENG v1.4.0.5 Released for Android/Chromebook with armhf, better hardware support

Roadmap

2018 Q3 - Birth of NewEnglandcoin, window/linux wallet - Done
2018 Q4 - Decentralization Phase I
- Blockchain Upgrade - Dynamic hashing algorithm I - Done
- Cheetah Version I- CPU Mining Automation Tool on Linux - Done
2019 Q1 - Decentralization Phase II
- Cheetah Version II- CPU Mining Automation Tool on Window/Linux - Done
- Blockchain Upgrade Dynamic hashing algorithm II - Done
2019 Q2 - Fiat Phase I
- Assessment of Risk of 51% Attack on NENG - done
- Launch of Fiat USD/NENG offering for U.S. residents - done
- Initiation of Mobile Miner Project - Done
2019 Q3 - Shoreline Tradingbot, Mobile Project
- Evaluation and planning of Mobile Miner Project - on Hold
- Initiation of Trading Bot Project - Done
2019 Q4 - Shoreline Tradingbot
- Shoreline tradingbot Release v1.0 - Done
2020 Q1 - Evaluate NENG core, Mobile Wallet Phase I
- NENG core Decentralization Security Evaluation for v1.3.x - Done
- Light Mobile Wallet Project Initiation, Evaluation
2020 Q2 - NENG Core, Mobile Wallet Phase II
- NENG core Decentralization Security Hardfork on v1.3.x - Scrypt RandomSpike
- Light Mobile Wallet Project Design, Coding
2020 Q3 - NENG core, NENG Mobile Wallet Phase II
- Review on results of v1.3.x, NENG core Dev Decision on v1.4.x, Hardfork If needed
- Light Mobile Wallet Project testing, alpha Release
2020 Q4 - Mobile Wallet Phase III
- Light Mobile Wallet Project Beta Release
- Light Mobile Wallet Server Deployment Evaluation and Decision
2021 Q1 - NENG to the Moon?

NENG v1.4.0 Android Mining, randomSpike Evaluation https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/NewEnglandCoin/releases/download/NENG_2020_Q3_report/NENG_2020_Q3_report.pdf

Major Success - v1.3.x Scrypt randomSpike Release
randomSpike Overview, Observation, Conclusion
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Support on v1.4.0
NENG core v1.4.0 Upgrade Proposal – Mobile Mining Start on Android Phones
Table 1 – Mobile Mining Comparison of Electroneum (ETN) and NewEnglandcoin (NENG)
Linux, Cloud, DockeQEMU virtualization Tech Advancement
Userland for arm64 android – Easy to Setup or Use
Alpha Release - GNUroot for 32 bits arm android

RandomSpike - NENG core v1.3.0 Hardfork Upgrade Proposal https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/NewEnglandCoin/releases/download/2020Q1_Report/Scrypt_RandomSpike_NENGv1.3.0_Hardfork_Proposal.pdf

Background
NENG Algorithm Change History
NENG 1.2.x is subject to Timestamp Attack
Explanation of Jan 29,2020 Timestamp Attack
Why Scrypt RandomSpike is Proposed
Technical Detail - How Scrypt RandomSpike Works

NENG Security, Decentralization & Valuation
https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/NewEnglandCoin/releases/download/2019Q2_report/NENG_Security_Decentralization_Value.pdf

No Hard Fork in 2019 Q2 or in Near Future
NENG v1.2.x Hard Fork Evaluation
Post Hard Fork: GPU vs ASIC, Solo vs Pool Mining
NENG 51% Attack Cost - $10,000 USD
Decentralization - Solo Mining Up, Mining Pool Down
What if 51% Attackers Utilize GPU fleet?
NENG Valuation is Dirt Cheap
Announcement of NENG Fiat Project for all U.S. Residents
Announcement for Mobile Miner Project Initiation

Whitepaper v1.0 https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/NewEnglandCoin/releases/download/whitepaper_v1.0/NENG_WhitePaper.pdf

NENG – CPU Minable, fun, easy full node set up at Home PC
NENG – Security Against 51% Attack by Design
Security - Dynamic Diff Short Term, Higher Network Hashrate Long Term
Decentralization Phase 1- CPU Mining is Key Feature of NENG
Why Block Time is Gaussian Shaped Random Event
ASIC is Like Lion, CPU is Like Cheetah
Decentralization Phase II – Security Against 51% Attack
Why the Proposed Phase II Hardfork Upgrade will Prevent 51% Attacks?
What if 51% Attacker re-engineer the software to attack NENG?
Conclusion - Sound Money, Take Back Monetary Independence, Relive Crypto Dreams with Full Node

DISCORD https://discord.gg/UPeBwgs
Explorer
http://www.findblocks.com/exploreNENG http://86.100.49.209/exploreNENG http://nengexplorer.mooo.com:3001/
Step by step guide on how to setup an explorer: https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/nengexplorer
Github https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/NewEnglandCoin
Wallet
Android with UserLand App (arm64/armhf), Chromebook (x64/arm64/armhf): https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/NewEnglandCoin/releases/tag/v1.4.0.5
Linux Wallet (Ubuntu/Linux Mint, Debian/MX Linux, Arch/Manjaro, Fedora, openSUSE): https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/NewEnglandCoin/releases/tag/v1.4.0.3
MacOS Wallet (10.11 El Capitan or higher): https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/NewEnglandCoin/releases/tag/v1.4.0.2
Android with GNUroot on 32 bits old Phones (alpha release) wallet: https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/NewEnglandCoin/releases/tag/v1.4.0
Windows wallet: https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/NewEnglandCoin/releases/tag/v1.3.0.1
addnode ip address for the wallet to sync faster, frequently updated conf file: https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/cheetah_cpumineblob/mastenewenglandcoin.conf-example
How to Sync Full Node Desktop Wallet https://www.reddit.com/NewEnglandCoin/comments/er6f0q/how_to_sync_full_node_desktop_wallet/
TWITTER https://twitter.com/newenglandcoin
REDDIT https://www.reddit.com/NewEnglandCoin/
Cheetah CPU Miner Software https://github.com/ShorelineCrypto/cheetah_cpuminer
Solo Mining with GPU or ASIC https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg52187727#msg52187727
How to Run Two Full Node in Same Desktop PC https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg53581449#msg53581449
ASIC/GPU Mining Pools Warning to Big ASIC Miners Due to DynDiff Algo on top of Scrypt, solo mining is recommended for ASIC/GPU miners. Further more, even for mining pools, small mining pool will generate better performance than big NENG mining pool because of new algo v1.2.x post hard fork.
The set up configuration of NENG for scrypt pool mining is same as a typical normal scrypt coin. In other word, DynDiff on Scrypt algo is backward compatible with Scrypt algo. Because ASIC/GPU miners rely on CPU miners for smooth blockchain movement, checkout bottom of "Latest News" section for A WARNING to All ASIC miners before you decide to dump big ASIC hash rate into NENG mining.
(1) Original DynDiff Warning: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg48324708#msg48324708 (2) New Warning on RandomSpike Spike difficulty (244k) introduced in RandomSpike served as roadblocks to instant mining and provide security against 51% attack risk. However, this spike difficulty like a roadblock that makes big ASIC mining less profitable. In case of spike block to be mined, the spike difficulty immediately serve as base difficulty, which will block GPU/ASIC miners effectively and leave CPU cheetah solo miners dominating mining almost 100% until next base difficulty reset.
FindBlocks http://findblocks.com/
CRpool http://crpool.xyz/
Cminors' Pool http://newenglandcoin.cminors-pool.com/
SPOOL https://spools.online/
Exchange
📷
https://shorelinecrypto.com/
Features: anonymous sign up and trading. No restriction or limit on deposit or withdraw.
The trading pairs available: NewEnglandcoin (NENG) / Dogecoin (DOGE)
Trading commission: A round trip trading will incur 0.10% trading fees in average. Fees are paid only on buyer side. buy fee: 0.2% / sell fee: 0% Deposit fees: free for all coins Withdraw fees: ZERO per withdraw. Mining fees are appointed by each coin blockchain. To cover the blockchain mining fees, there is minimum balance per coin per account: * Dogecoin 2 DOGE * NewEnglandcoin 1 NENG
Latest News Aug 30, 2020 - NENG v1.4.0.5 Released for Android/Chromebook Upgrade with armhf, better hardware support https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg55098029#msg55098029
Aug 11, 2020 - NENG v1.4.0.4 Released for Android arm64 Upgrade / Chromebook Support https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg54977437#msg54977437
Jul 30, 2020 - NENG v1.4.0.3 Released for Linux Wallet Upgrade with 8 Distros https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg54898540#msg54898540
Jul 21, 2020 - NENG v1.4.0.2 Released for MacOS Upgrade with Catalina https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg54839522#msg54839522
Jul 19, 2020 - NENG v1.4.0.1 Released for MacOS Wallet Upgrade https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg54830333#msg54830333
Jul 15, 2020 - NENG v1.4.0 Released for Android Mining, Ubuntu 20.04 support https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg54803639#msg54803639
Jul 11, 2020 - NENG v1.4.0 Android Mining, randomSpike Evaluation https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg54777222#msg54777222
Jun 27, 2020 - Pre-Announce: NENG v1.4.0 Proposal for Mobile Miner Upgrade, Android Mining Start in July 2020 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg54694233#msg54694233
Jun 19, 2020 - Best Practice for Futurebit Moonlander2 USB ASIC on solo mining mode https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg54645726#msg54645726
Mar 15, 2020 - Scrypt RandomSpike - NENG v1.3.0.1 Released for better wallet syncing https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg54030923#msg54030923
Feb 23, 2020 - Scrypt RandomSpike - NENG Core v1.3.0 Relased, Hardfork on Mar 1 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg53900926#msg53900926
Feb 1, 2020 - Scrypt RandomSpike Proposal Published- NENG 1.3.0 Hardfork https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg53735458#msg53735458
Jan 15, 2020 - NewEnglandcoin Dev Team Expanded with New Kickoff https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg53617358#msg53617358
Jan 12, 2020 - Explanation of Base Diff Reset and Effect of Supply https://www.reddit.com/NewEnglandCoin/comments/envmo1/explanation_of_base_diff_reset_and_effect_of/
Dec 19, 2019 - Shoreline_tradingbot version 1.0 is released https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5121953.msg53391184#msg53391184
Sept 1, 2019 - NewEnglandcoin (NENG) is Selected as Shoreline Tradingbot First Supported Coin https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg52331201#msg52331201
Aug 15, 2019 - Mining Update on Effect of Base Difficulty Reset, GPU vs ASIC https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg52169572#msg52169572
Jul 7, 2019 - CPU Mining on macOS Mojave is supported under latest Cheetah_Cpuminer Release https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg51745839#msg51745839
Jun 1, 2019 - NENG Fiat project is stopped by Square, Inc https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg51312291#msg51312291
Apr 21, 2019 - NENG Fiat Project is Launched by ShorelineCrypto https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg50714764#msg50714764
Apr 7, 2019 - Announcement of Fiat Project for all U.S. Residents & Mobile Miner Project Initiation https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg50506585#msg50506585
Apr 1, 2019 - Disclosure on Large Buying on NENG at ShorelineCrypto Exchange https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg50417196#msg50417196
Mar 27, 2019 - Disclosure on Large Buying on NENG at ShorelineCrypto Exchange https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg50332097#msg50332097
Mar 17, 2019 - Disclosure on Large Buying on NENG at ShorelineCrypto Exchange https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg50208194#msg50208194
Feb 26, 2019 - Community Project - NewEnglandcoin Graphic Redesign Bounty Initiated https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg49931305#msg49931305
Feb 22, 2019 - Dev Policy on Checkpoints on NewEnglandcoin https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg49875242#msg49875242
Feb 20, 2019 - NewEnglandCoin v1.2.1 Released to Secure the Hard Kork https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg49831059#msg49831059
Feb 11, 2019 - NewEnglandCoin v1.2.0 Released, Anti-51% Attack, Anti-instant Mining after Hard Fork https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg49685389#msg49685389
Jan 13, 2019 - Cheetah_CpuMiner added support for CPU Mining on Mac https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg49218760#msg49218760
Jan 12, 2019 - NENG Core v1.1.2 Released to support MacOS OSX Wallet https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg49202088#msg49202088
Jan 2, 2019 - Cheetah_Cpuminer v1.1.0 is released for both Linux and Windows https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg49004345#msg49004345
Dec 31, 2018 - Technical Whitepaper is Released https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg48990334#msg48990334
Dec 28, 2018 - Cheetah_Cpuminer v1.0.0 is released for Linux https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg48935135#msg48935135
Update on Dec 14, 2018 - NENG Blockchain Stuck Issue https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg48668375#msg48668375
Nov 27, 2018 - Exclusive for PC CPU Miners - How to Steal a Block from ASIC Miners https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg48258465#msg48258465
Nov 28, 2018 - How to CPU Mine a NENG block with window/linux PC https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg48298311#msg48298311
Nov 29, 2018 - A Warning to ASIC Miners https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5027091.msg48324708#msg48324708
Disclosure: Dev Team Came from ShorelineCrypto, a US based Informatics Service Business offering Fee for service for Coin Creation, Coin Exchange Listing, Blockchain Consulting, etc.

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Introduction to Part 3

3-C – Skill Design Philosophy, Continued

3-12 - Balancing

3-13 - Skill Bloat

3-14 - Skill Endgame

3-15 - Alternate Goals

3-16 - The Combat No-Touch Rule

3-17 - Aesthetics

3-18 - Afterword

5-0 - The OSRS Team and the Design Process

5-1 - Designing a Skill

5-2 - Presentation and Beta Testing

5-3 - Development Effort

5-4 - The Problems of Democracy

6-0 - Conclusion

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