Anyway, getting back on topic, and I'll reiterate this again, but Malarious has this bang on. This needs addressing from our side, not the admins. Let's discuss the merits and faults of his post.
Everiine said: The reason population is low isn't because there are too many orgs. It's because so many facets of the game are outright broken and protected by those who benefit from it being that way. An overabundance of gimmicks (including game-breaking ones), artifacts that destroy any concept of balance, blatant pay-to-win features, and an obsession with convenience that makes few things actually worthwhile all contribute to the game's sad decline.
Anyway, getting back on topic, and I'll reiterate this again, but Malarious has this bang on. This needs addressing from our side, not the admins. Let's discuss the merits and faults of his post.
Remember all those posts of mine you flagged? Said the exact same thing
This thread isn't going to achieve anything. It's nice and all to think that players can affect a change, and in certain circumstances, they can. But the evolution of combat toward group conflict and numbers is never going to be reversed. Nor should it be. 1v1 is not entirely dead yet, because there IS still avenue for strategical and tactical application of combat between certain archetypes, and because the arena exists. Also because Lusternia's population during off-peak means that there is sometimes only enough players in the game for a 1v1. But it's never going to make a return to the OOA scene on a big scale. You will never see a domoth fight being resolved by having a huge group of 10v10 intentionally splitting themselves up to face off between one another, gladiator style. If the admin can't change this by implementing hard-coded mechanics, players certainly won't be able to make any more of a difference by "changing their own mindsets" or whatever.
If there's anything that can be done in the current status quo, it would be to innovate and come up with new ways to make a difference in group combat. True, group combat in the current Lusternian system has many cons - one of them being that once your group is past a certain critical mass relative to your opponents', the level of strategy required to achieve certain combat goals (ie. kill certain targets) decreases rapidly. However, within a certain range of numbers, the outcome is nowhere near guarantee'd, and strategy in terms of your role in a group comes into play. Mashing the manifest destruction button is sometimes enough to land you kills, but not enough to win you the fight. Think of it in terms of traditional roles that everyone is familiar with, like melder, or hinderer (webber, shieldstunner, aeoner etc) but except more specific. I find great satisfaction in constantly finding new roles and objectives for myself in a group, even though I haven't changed my repertoire in a while (recently flexed back to acro for the first time in real-life months). Sure, I've had my fair share of mashing my damage form to contribute to
damage kills. But I have also done things like be a permanent gust enchantment. I have played the role of doing nothing but bashing wiccan ents. I once did nothing the entire fight but manual parry/stance to try and survive a prominent warrior so that he won't change targets to another more important person. I sometimes ignore my group leader's target calls to hinder a secondary target so as to disrupt the opponent strategy.
Give up on the idea of being a one-man army, and you'll find yourself enjoying Lusternian combat more. If you want to win a fight by yourself, get a sparring partner (who is of an archetype you can win against). And guess what, if you adopt this mindset, what do you think will happen to those one-man raids everyone complains about? Yeah, you're right. They'll disappear, because no one will bother raiding alone. How's that?
Comments
If there's anything that can be done in the current status quo, it would be to innovate and come up with new ways to make a difference in group combat. True, group combat in the current Lusternian system has many cons - one of them being that once your group is past a certain critical mass relative to your opponents', the level of strategy required to achieve certain combat goals (ie. kill certain targets) decreases rapidly. However, within a certain range of numbers, the outcome is nowhere near guarantee'd, and strategy in terms of your role in a group comes into play. Mashing the manifest destruction button is sometimes enough to land you kills, but not enough to win you the fight. Think of it in terms of traditional roles that everyone is familiar with, like melder, or hinderer (webber, shieldstunner, aeoner etc) but except more specific. I find great satisfaction in constantly finding new roles and objectives for myself in a group, even though I haven't changed my repertoire in a while (recently flexed back to acro for the first time in real-life months). Sure, I've had my fair share of mashing my damage form to contribute to damage kills. But I have also done things like be a permanent gust enchantment. I have played the role of doing nothing but bashing wiccan ents. I once did nothing the entire fight but manual parry/stance to try and survive a prominent warrior so that he won't change targets to another more important person. I sometimes ignore my group leader's target calls to hinder a secondary target so as to disrupt the opponent strategy.
Give up on the idea of being a one-man army, and you'll find yourself enjoying Lusternian combat more. If you want to win a fight by yourself, get a sparring partner (who is of an archetype you can win against). And guess what, if you adopt this mindset, what do you think will happen to those one-man raids everyone complains about? Yeah, you're right. They'll disappear, because no one will bother raiding alone. How's that?