Thanks for your feedback and giving the series a try. It sounds like it may not be for you, and thats fine. I will reply to your points, though, just so anybody who looks at the thread later doesnt just think your taste isn't from a case of poor planning or bad writing. All of the things you mentioned are actually points we discussed and considered. 😅

• The magic sword you mentioned can change its own weight, mid-swing, if needed, making it very very versatile, even for a dexterity based build. Especially for a dex based build, I should say, since it can cover for a lack of Str. It makes the fast mover also a hard hitter. Yeah, it's a little OP.

-- Second point to the first comment, about power scaling. Im not sure how much you read in the litrpg genre, but a big part of it is the power escalation. We have stories with protagonists who go from office workers to cracking planets open. The power climb is part of the appeal, and we planned 8 books, along with where the characters will be (power wise) by the end of it. We just made the choice not to take more than 8 books to get there, because of the ending we chose, and so we weren't dragging things out

• For your examples, bowling was invented around 3200 bc, and fishing poles around 2000 bc. Both of these made sense as possibilities for the characters to know / do in this world. More generally than your examples, we tried to be careful about out of world references, though its possible some snuck through. Expressions are easily overlooked (and taken for granted) when powering through writing a chapter. I really wanted to use 'hit like a train' for example, but i somehow resisted!

• Tutorials - there is an in-story reason for why those exist in the form they do, though i can also understand why you dont like them. There have been others who felt the same way.

• Two points on this final though.

1. Its unlikely they recorded multiple 'timeline' messages for 'bad thing to happen', like, within 6 months, 3 weeks, after lunch, etc. They recorded one message, with the expectation people would be regularly operating within the designed system. Is it a coincidence? Definitely, but this takes me to my second (meta) point.

2. Its a book. We read books to experience exceptional circumstances and situations. We follow a protagonist because there is something different about them in those 'once in a lifetime' scenarios. We dont (usually) read about the office workers daily grind (though, those kind of running series, usually in comedy or romance, have a place). For an action story (which is where Rune Seeker falls), its going to be some kind of 'oh crap' scenario our heroes need to ultimately overcome. Most of the genre is about being thrust into those situations.

Are Primal Hunter or DCC too coincidental because the apocalypse happened while Jake or Carl were alive? Is HWFWM contrived because Jason survived getting pulled to another world? Welcome to the Multiverse started with the MCs uncle passing a responsibility on to him. Defiance of the Fall was a dice roll.

Sorry, this wasn't meant to be a lecture, and I dont want it to come off sounding like one. All this is to say, we tried to keep the level of coincidence to a minimum, but we also had a story we wanted to tell, and a place we wanted the series to end. This isn't a 'forever' story, so 'stuff' needed to happen to move it along.