In illarion, things never really work out the way they were planned. The problem is as usual murphy's law : If you leave people a chance to do something terribly wrong, someone will do exactly that, sooner or later.
The magic teaching system is a great example for that, have a small, not complete history recap :
- The new magic system was introduced by a few NPC teachers who primarily taught old mage players who had well known and well played mages in the old system. Teaching was put in with the sense to enhance the roleplay and make players rely on each another, plus making magic a bit more rare. It is quite powerful and intended to be so. That first magic system state was very powerful and strong runes were only intended to be given out to responsibly acting players.
- then, the teaching was handed over to the players. Those first player teachers had to powergame alot because if you taught someone a rune, you lost skill. So the mage players powergamed and some hated it and left the game, some liked and overdid it, some abused the system (a good example for that was a mage who created thousands of edibles and mass-sold huge amounts of magically created meat, cakes, fruits and vegetables for a much cheaper price than every baker or farmer could afford to sell them for). Some mage players taught OC-friends who were not acting responsible with the runes, and other players complained mainly about those uberpowergamed and abusive ones, so the magic system got tweaked, skilling was made much harder for every mage, etc.
- the system got changed and a teaching room got involved so you could teach without the loss of skill. Several places / groups got teaching rooms in the long run. Again, a few mage players powergamed like hell, more teacher players left cause the magic learning sucked and you had to powergame to be able to compete with the powergaming ones, and there were a few bugs in the magic system as well that at some point made it impossible for an almost fully skilled mage to cast some of the middle to higher spells.. and so on. You see, stuff like that drives people (and teachers) away.
Since then, you have different groups of mages that can teach magic :
1. the magic academy. They are kinda neutral to stuff. You need some magic theory texts from their forums to pass their tests, they are the first place to go to usually.
2. the university in varshikar. They are an alternative to the above group, their playing style is a bi different.
3. the evil temple group. They may teach runes much faster than the other groups, but their agressive and kinda "powergamed" playing style plus the fact that they play "evil" or at least "dirty and mean" characters does not make them very well-liked amongst the other players and has given mages in general a very bad image. Most Characters will see a mage and run away by now thinking that he is a cultist... plus, there is a rumor that for getting taught magic by them, you have to sleep with at least one demon, of course after selling your soul to him...
4. Only for elves there may be a possibility to learn runes on Vanima, but their teachers are rare as well, since many elves prefer to stay in other places because Vanima lacks a good infrastructure of NPCs.
So you see, there has been quite a past, and there have been quite some abuses by players who were trusted, so things which usually were fun had to be changed in a way to prohibit said abuse. And since those changes had to be "quick and dirty" changes, there has been some fun factor loss in the skilling / teaching system.
I have not teached since the last "attribute"-change with my mage char, so i don't know how the atributes take influence and if he can still teach all runes - i just hope that no rune got connected with non-mage-attributes like strength or constitution *g*. Honestly, the need for continuous powergaming just to bring the skills up to a "useful" level was the thing that kinda discouraged me from playing on, plus the fact that many poorly (means style-lacking) rped, powergamed chars started to dominate the playing field... you see, i am one of those guys who thinks that in a game, you don't need to behave like an asshole to play a char with such an attitude, and who also thinks that "give me all your coins" is not a very good rp excuse for starting an engine fight. It's frickin' flat if you ask me... but so much for that. Illarion can be a lot of fun even though it has some flaws and even if some of our players never understood that "roleplay" does NOT mean "ego-trip all way to hell and back" - but what do you expect from an alpha stage game with the goal to teach some roleplay. At least, it's fully playable, the server is up all around the clock and you can be assured that it will always stay free and that there will be a lot of future development.
So, don't get too annoyed, but trust in the abilities of our staff. In the long run, they will make it fun again - doing so and tweaking it both includes a learning curve - that needs both work and time on the staff side. But they keep it up !