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Rave to @Orael for investigating and quickly fixing a problem

To repeat what I've said on discord, my understanding has always been that the real point of recognize is to encourage people to keep doing something in the game that other people enjoy them doing. Anything we do in the game is done for character motivations, aka roleplay, and that's how I've always viewed it. And I've known people who roleplay "hardcore pker" really well. Not by doing long emotes or writing books about it, but just being able to justify their actions consistently.

Ayisdra said:

Mboagn said:

As an aside, I find it disingenuous that you seem to think that it's okay to play specifically to deny Ixion an Ascension win but cry foul over participation denial in flares.

There is a bit of difference between Ascension and flares/revolts. But also denying a win and denying someone from participation points is different as well. If I'm just getting org points and not even trying to win the flare/revolt, that's a bit different than trying to stop me from winning.

If I was trying to win the conflict - absolutely I understand them to try and stop me (although I still don't understand why have ground forces when you can use those for faster bombard claiming instead of dragging it out, but that's a personal thought).

If I'm just showing up for the <3mins required to get participation points and then getting out and not coming back or not slowing down the claim? maybe not so much.

I disagree. Keeping people from getting participation points is denying them a win. Said another way, getting participation points can make or break a win. For the better part of the last five game years, Gaudiguch has managed to snatch the orgcredits win over Magnagora and Serenwilde precisely because we made sure to get participation points on top of win points. We've actually been pretty incessant on nudging Mags and Serens to raise colossuses during flares or sending a citizen to sit on a village just for that reason.

With that said, I maintain my position that the entire philosophy - playing to deny others - is a problem for the game as a whole. The players can surely do their part in ensuring that some semblance of equity tempers actions, but the game's conflict systems should also work to discourage it. One way to do it would be to lessen the burden on the 'losing' orgs. Make winning be about winning, not about avoiding losing.

Scarcity should not be the dominant vehicle of conflict in the game. And I know - Lusternia is post-apocalyptic, and the hunger for power (nexus power, astral power, etc.) is a major part of its story. But it's not sustainable, especially not when simple activities (such as crafting) can become so impacted by conflict systems that are so easily gamed.

Ayisdra said:

My understanding is that Creeping is easily avoidable. That it is only great in lag(as we saw in ascension). How would you even envoy something that like? To me, that sounds more like a problem for how the game handles having 100+ people around than something the skill itself. (Of course, I'm one of those people that doesn't combat. so maybe this is wrong)

The lag is one thing, but the 'feeder' afflictions of Creeping is another. For the record, it includes entanglement, which is a questionable affliction especially considering it is also delivered by Noose (on top of damage). Entanglement is a special affliction in that it immediately shuts down almost all offensive actions of the target: they cannot do anything to the user until it's cured. Other hindering afflictions require some preparation or stacking to achieve the same effect (prone/mangle requires build up and paralysis requires dust stacking, for example). Entanglement is just straight up repeating the same attack over and over; there's a reason why vine/web is the move that people recommend to nooblings (even across other IRE games, heh).

Ayisdra said:

Are these not the same thing, largely? If we can't win (or show up to conflict events because we are outnumbered), then our orgcredits are going to be much lower. We can't compete in orgcredits when IHC can keep us out from even participation points (such as in aetherflares and non-peaced revolts). Getting those participation points for revolts/flares is vital to even being able to have a chance at compete in orgcredits.

Gaudiguch and Serenwilde managed to swing 2nd and 3rd place in orgcredits from time to time even back when their/our orgs were down on the combat scene. Books and stage productions are fantastic. So is psychodrama; there were a couple of years when Glomdoring managed to snatch a pedestal finish on orgcredits from the 15-point boost of psychodrama. Heck, Celest almost managed a number 1 finish this year if not for flares happening just before the year turn.

As an aside, I find it disingenuous that you seem to think that it's okay to play specifically to deny Ixion an Ascension win but cry foul over participation denial in flares.  For the record, I'll repeat myself: that sort of gameplay is ruinous and should be discouraged, both actively by the players and passively by the game's systems.

Yes! I'm having a little trouble articulating this right now, but "Balancing Lusternia" implicitly puts forth this idea that there's a possible version of the game in which all evaluated player-to-player interaction takes place in the context of zero-sum competition for placement in a victory hierarchy but that is tweaked and fiddled to the point of somehow not generating losers, only winners and temporarily displaced winners. That is, that you can have all of the formal game systems prioritize play that creates incentives to beat opponents, have losing be all part of the fun, and not have those conditions leak out of those bounds. Somehow.

  Additionally, it assumes that there is a broader context for friendly relationships among players outside of the game itself, such that meta-game considerations such as envoy reporting operate on a shared set of values beyond the game itself. This is... nonsense? That kind of utopian game playing where losing doesn't create resentment and winning doesn't create incumbent advantages only exists if you suppose and preexisting and durable relationship between players. Relationships only survive a cut-throat game of Monopoly because they existed before it, and exist outside of the context of that Monopoly game.

The project of Balancing Lusternia is a red-herring, a complex quagmire that distracts from the fundamental and unresolvable tension between needing players on all sides to broadly enjoy their time, and the core concept of every mechanic producing a ranked list of best players and worst players. 

This is part of the frustration that, along with a decrease in spare time and energy, led me to stop playing. It became increasingly clear to me that the Envoy system, reporting, and even forums interaction had become extensions of In Game conflict mechanics. That is, participation in them was not viewed by all as a collaborative or community-centered operation, but as an adversarial process, however friendly the competition was perceived to be. The way the game was played included social hegemony, creating conditions in which you could persuade the referees and crowd that the rules of the game (or their adjudication) should favor you. The primary conflict mechanic in Lusternia was (and is, arguably) not timequakes or raids, but rhetoric and the promotion of ideology.  It is NOT shocking that when this proved insufficient and the admins decided to follow through on a frankly rather straightforwards reparative action when Game Balance failed, that ideal was instantly abandoned by many of its vocal proponents - it was always just a rhetorical tool for domination. Or perhaps became one over time, doesn't matter. In other words, every point of contact between players was subsumed by competition - the ONLY context players interact is a zero sum battlefield that produces winners and losers to some degree. No wonder people get really nasty, and feelings get hurt. 

The focus needs to be taken entirely off of direct competition in Lusternia, as a whole. Such things have their place, and that  place is embedded in a more comprehensive cooperative context. Until that happens there can be no productive discourse on how to right the ship, because any discussion becomes a proxy battlefield for the total war - even for people who genuinely do not have that intent.  There's such a huge focus on fixing "conflict mechanics" because those are the only scenarios where most of a players skills function at all, and the only times when the formal systems of the game come into play - AND THAT'S THE PROBLEM. All of the game's incentives revolve around preparing a faction for fighting, or not doing so. It's hard to overstate how totalizing this is, it's the whole formal game. That's not to say that players (and admins) don't do cool things with roleplaying, but that's pretty much purely on an individual basis without the benefit of supporting systems. Really just god orders, and the good part about orders isn't really the mechanics underlying them anyways. Mechanical and administrative support for roleplay is almost vestigial.

In terms of what to do:
For "Conflict" events (mechanical events requiring the use of skills): some that reward everyone equally for participating and MORE the more people really participate successfully. Retool wildnodes and/or some Timequakes into players vs. the Soulless events. Make some of these all players against the server, and some of the player-vs-player type events, but with a story underpinning that makes it clear the objective isn't "cause your enemy players to lose". Can be creative, like a scenario in which the different sides need to engage in a mock-fight to trick an npc adversary, which means you should fight but the goal isn't "wipe the other players" but rather "keep up a fight for as long as possible without stalemating or stomping outright". The better your opponent becomes at fighting, the better outcome for both sides. 

For Economic woes: get away from punitive drivers of demand, and away from the profit model as it doesn't... work. It's just too quick and easy to expose how it fails to work in a micro-economy like Lusternia, and one where capital accumulation and market expansion are sharply constrained. The goal should be to have players interacting with each other, and working together to accomplish projects, and not solely competing against each other to achieve purely personal goals. Again, there is a place for personal wealth goals (like: I want to buy a big manse) embedded within a cooperative system. This means providing a cooperative and ideally a creative outlet for the economic system - ideally through the orgs and a more hands-on role for org politics. There's just not that much within the realm of actual mechanical role for orgs, outside of roleplay that can just be ignored by individual players (sometimes to really disasterous results, trolls who just have no real check besides kicking them from an org to deny them skill use). Obvious first thing: Ministry of Construction. Without SOME kind of impact on the story of the game, the economy will always just be a function of conflict events and subject to exactly all of the same problems.