This was going to be a response to another thread, but I figured I'd put it somewhere else so that it can be easily ignored or deleted and not throw unnecessary shade on what could be quite a positive discussion over there.
I'm answering a slightly different question, which is "What would you have liked to have seen in Lusternia last year, before your giveadamn finally and irrevocably broke?" On the one hand, my opinion doesn't matter, because I'm leaving Lusty the second Starmourn spreads its legs to retirees. On the other, the reasons I'm about to list for leaving might give you some indication of what's wrong with your game. Or not. You know Lusty better than I do, and this isn't a conversation, an apportioning of blame, or the gospel according to Versalean. I won't be elaborating or qualifying, so take this or leave it.
1)
Toxic players. This is both the most and least important. Most because it's the splinter that got under my skin and continued to fester and itch long after the wound has closed. The assholes who really broke Lusty for me have largely retired, and yet the fact that they were allowed to strut around this community for as long as they were, swinging their epeens with impunity, poisoning any forums debate, Envoys, etc with little more than a slap on the wrist... I never got past that. Lusty.
What do I want you to fix? Discipline. It is never the fun part of administration, and nor can you always get it right. But you do more damage than you can imagine by allowing assholery in your game.
2)
Class Imbalance. The RP behind Wyrdenwood is sex made textual. The flavour of the skills - hell, the writing when you change class. Beautiness. And yet the class is so broken that I fear that nothing short of a root and branch (kekeke!) overhaul is going to fix it. I poured as many credits into that class as any monk and yet it remains more expensive, less effective, and
less fun than I can tell you. To be clear, it's not just WW on its own, but the whole kit (WW, Crow, and Dreamweaving until very recently). Upkeep in wood. A dreammote artefact that has been promising
for as long as I've been playing that it would be embeddable, yet failed to deliver (ASHOP 133 INFO). The carrion system, which needs to die in a freezing cold alley. Is this the biggest problem in the game? I genuinely don't know, because I've only ever played with WW/Druid, but it's part of the reason I'm outtahere.
What do I want you to fix? Chemwoods.3)
Economy. A wise man once said that the only way to get IRE producers to take a problem seriously was to abuse the [censored] out of it. That wise man has clearly not played Lusternia. I genuinely don't understand a) how the economy was allowed to get to where it is, or b) why somebody hasn't bitten the bullet yet (okay, I do understand that second one: because there will be an uproar when you do it, but that's better than a dead game amirite?). I came over with 5k retirement credits from MKO. After investing very carefully in two, maybe three promotions (see if you can guess which ones), I have 'slightly more credits' in retirement value. I'm not gonna post the figure here because it will piss people off, but this is me giving any Godmin with the power permission to take a peek. Can you folks seriously not see that this is game-breaking? I'm rubbing up about 20cr a day from my genies, belching up a couple of lessons a day from poteens, wiping my ass with treasure maps, spinning the Wheel frugally from my urtraps, and pulling wondergems out of my backside wondercorn 7 times a RL year,
all the while generating three credits a day of aethergoop.
And I'm not even in the top ten percent of players generating currency. Side-by-side with this issue is the constant devaluing of things (e.g., aethergoop and wondergems) which personally gives me absolutely zero faith in the IG economy. Throw in the fact that a good many players are self-sufficient trade-wise, and you have a situation that not only beggars belief, but also the average Lusternian. A wise man once said that Lusty was the Zimbabwe of IRE. Never a truer word has been spake.
What do I want you to fix? This festering mess we're calling an economy. Put an immediate stop to all the income generators.
I continue to genuinely love Esty, Ianir, and the rest of the Admin team, but your game sucks. I don't say that vindictively or with any modicum of enjoyment, but it's a simple explanation of where I'm at right now.
Much love. I'm done here. Enjoy