Best Of

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. 

I was wondering if it would be possible to expand the recognize command to also cover combat related things, so you could recognize people for things like fighting well and bravely even if they lost, or for stepping up to lead or to fill a role your team needs, or for being sportsmanlike, or for taking risks to save others, or whatnot.

It is my hope that something like this would help to take away from the negative emotions tied up in a loss by helping to provide an avenue for, and hopefully normalizing, positive feedback for people that are out there doing their best.