Project: Gorgon's 4th weekly poetry reading just finished up, and it was the event's biggest turnout yet, with just under 100 players packed into the corner of the Chortling Beaver. The animals were dancing, the smell was gut-renching, and the blank Gruzark's Chapbooks were read aloud ad nauseam. Poetry reading is one of my favorite additions to Project: Gorgon, but I heard some complaints about it afterward that I think speak to two aspects of the skill/community event that should be addressed to the developers for their consideration.

1. Blank Book Overload
There are so many books... so many blank Gruzark's Chapbooks. So many, in fact, that it became inconvenient to click through them all. I heard suggestions to decrease the drop rate of Gruzark's Chapbooks to reduce blank book spamming as well as suggestions that the Oratory system should be changed so that there is legitimate incentive to write or share quality work.

2. Oratory Leveling Curve
I know the turnout for poetry reading could not have been predicted, so the XP required to level it had to be estimated based on some degree of speculation, but the poetry readings have become a huge event (which I love and should not change), and I've heard from multiple people that they have maxed Oratory by reading about 5 books, which may well have been Gruzark's. Perhaps a decrease in XP per listener, a scaling mechanism, or a flat rate of XP per book should be considered, since Oratory sits far apart from ANY skill in the game regarding ease of leveling.

3. Two Bugs
I will not address the topics regarding the podium which have been addressed by the devs. But another major issues I've seen are the problem of poems not popping up, and poems lagging several seconds to minutes behind the initial reading for some players. First, despite being within range of the podium and having no poetry screen open, the poetry window did not open despite several poems being read. This was easily remedied by clicking "Use" on the podium, but I don't think that will be practical when the range for reading increases and is probably not what was intended in the first place. The second issue, the lag, may well be the result of this, the fact that books are spammed in these events, or some other factor - I don't know. But in any case, it would be nice to have some mechanic where the entire poetry audience viewed the poems at the same time, such that any remarks or discussion would be relevant to all players and the poem at hand.

As is the case with many of the complaints in these forums, I would now like to thank the devs for making such an amazing game and implementing this unique, community-driven feature into it. I look forward to seeing how this developing game grows and what becomes of it, since it is already incredible.

tl;dr: Oratory is awesome but is new and has room for improvement in terms of mechanics and bugs. What does everybody else think about Oratory and poetry reading?