We should reshuffle the alliances. Better yet, alliances should be more ephemeral and flexible overall.
No amount of mechanics can make this happen, though. It has to come from the players (and better yet, the admins via patrons). Ideally, we're all friends who play this game for fun (even though we get MAD from time to time). So, even though it might make no sense IC, we should always be nudging our orgs into positions that would equalize whatever two sides happen to be present. Achaea does this mostly by their patrons being very grump grump when their city becomes too friendly with another city; this shuts down hard-set alliances. Lusternia, with its lower population, could settle for very loose 3v3 coalitions.
I've been reading the treaties that bind the various orgs in the game; they all read pretty much the same. And they all need to be thrown out.
Right now, for example, Gaudiguch and Serenwilde should break things off with Magnagora. Not because grr Magnagorans are evil and we hates them, but because our numbers and their numbers make up more than three quarters of the active playerbase. We should (theoretically...) be mature enough that breaking off alliances doesn't mean we dislike the players from the other org; it just means that we know it's better for the game.
The patrons would need to be very active in pushing for this, though (at least until the player culture adjusts enough that they can enforce it themselves).
TL;DR - break off hard alliances; admins pls send help
Admin being involved in this sorta thing has been a recipe for drama here. Some times it's fine, other times people get really annoyed at the admin because the players don't want to change things or worse, if an admin pushed for a change and it went bad.
At the same time, I feel like we've kinda seen what happens when you just leave it up to players to take care of. It's the current method and why the game keeps having this same situation.
Which is why I tend to end up at mechanics really. Different mechanics in place can radically reshape player behavior in a game. If you make it better to regularly change alliances then players will do so, you can use mechanics to make it rewarding and to try to mitigate the potential risk while also providing IC justification for the regular swapping.
I came back after so actually not 100%. But aren't we here right now basically because things happened, alliances shuffled, and it didn't work out? We could shuffle to try to fix it and it might fix things for a while, or it could fall over and we're in the same situation just with different orgs and the top 3, in that case, might not want to risk another roll of the dice.
Conflict has always been a revolving door of numbers/leadership/unit coherence. This has been a thing for the 10 years I've played around on Lusternia. Alliances have also always shifted, more often than not it has had the opposite effect than the 'lets split things up to shake it up and balance out' desired.
Ex: Morbo's master plan for Mag, Seren, Halli to split to force Glom/Gaudi/Celest to all split up that backfired the moment Seren voted to side with the Halli plan.
The tide always turns, especially post-ascension however it was a bit more of a dramatic shift this time. Granted there was plenty of engagements pre-ascension where we would be vastly outnumbered but our unit coherence won the day. (I remember an almost 3:1 advantage to Shadowlight in a Rikenfriez revolt that we swept them out multiple times while a lone Seren did all the influencing as that's all that was online until Sondy showed up).
I hear a lot of complaints about the lack of team understanding/workability from the other side. I'm not saying people aren't being team players for Shadowlight, I just mean that you guys don't have a solid number of strong leaders/teachers to the degree we have. You have a few that try very hard to lead and train, but it seems like if one of them isn't around you guys fall apart. That used to be a severe Mag issue after Akyaevin's Ascension when all our old guard quit for most of the next year. Hell, I quit playing during my first stint as a Vernal Ascendant just because I was the ONLY one leading combat for Mag for months and people would always bombard me with hatred for not waking up at 3:43am to defend a Domoth Absolve. So I know that pain.
I think one of the big issues, in my mind, is that the conflict avenues we have do not generate a lot of worth. Outside of Wildnodes which typically sees a lot of back and forth more often than not. Revolts/Flares are always a toss up on timing, they can literally pop at the worst or best time for one side, and very rarely at an even playing field time. Timequakes are all but pointless at this point, how many guilds are actually not at level 5 with years worth of surplus in reserve? I think Society is a few bits behind, and maybe Serenwilde has a guild or two not max? Not sure about Shadowlight guilds.
Domoths tend to be mostly evenly spread out, but thats the nature of how the opposing system works, and I hate to say it given how much I hate the Domoth structure, but Domoth's seem to be about the only fair and balanced system these days.
I think if we had more conflict routes it would go a long way to encourage people to be active and do things. Because honestly, for those of us who enjoy PK, Quakes are our only outlet especially since theres no xp loss. And lets also be honest amongst ourselves, those of us who were hardcore raiding all day every day (Myself, Ruiku, Melech) have mostly stopped that outside of very random bits of boredom. I mean really, aside from maybe Rastamutti, Mag doesn't live in peoples territories like we used to/are still able to. We did take a sort of unspoken gentleman's agreement to slack off a LOT. But there is an extent to what we as players can do outside of just not playing the game. That is not a solution at all. Admin force breaking alliances and making it a forces 1v1 1v1 1v1 between all 6 orgs is also not a solution. That right there would drive more players off in my opinion.
tldr: conflict sucks, don't know what to do to help
TL;DR - break off hard alliances; admins pls send help
I hate the treaties more than I could probably coherently type right now. They're restrictive to a ridiculous degree, forcing orgs and players into positions that don't necessarily make rp sense, and I don't see why it's necessary. It ends up meaning that any change in alliance takes weeks, if not months and is a lot of tedious legalizing. Down with the paperwork, I didn't move to Gaudiguch for this!
@Nelras, there are rp justifications for orgs choosing to break off from more powerful ones. Yes it might also be good for the game, but that doesn't make it bad rp. Plenty of people in real life choose to root for the underdog, whoever that may be.
"Chairwoman," Princess Setisoki states, holding up a hand in a gesture for her to stop and returning the cup. "That would be quite inappropriate. One of the males will serve me."
@Kethaera I am not saying that there aren't potential RP justifications, only that they were not being considered in the post I was replying to. My point is not that it cannot be good RP just because it is good for the game, it is that ignoring the RP consequences of any decision made is bad for the game.
Furthermore, said post seemed to advocate for frequently changing alliances, for which there are fewer reasons. Yes, you might break off from a more powerful alliance. Would you do it every time you got too powerful though?
Conflict has always been a revolving door of numbers/leadership/unit coherence. This has been a thing for the 10 years I've played around on Lusternia. Alliances have also always shifted, more often than not it has had the opposite effect than the 'lets split things up to shake it up and balance out' desired.
I hear a lot of complaints about the lack of team understanding/workability from the other side. I'm not saying people aren't being team players for Shadowlight, I just mean that you guys don't have a solid number of strong leaders/teachers to the degree we have. You have a few that try very hard to lead and train, but it seems like if one of them isn't around you guys fall apart. That used to be a severe Mag issue after Akyaevin's Ascension when all our old guard quit for most of the next year. Hell, I quit playing during my first stint as a Vernal Ascendant just because I was the ONLY one leading combat for Mag for months and people would always bombard me with hatred for not waking up at 3:43am to defend a Domoth Absolve. So I know that pain.
tldr: conflict sucks, don't know what to do to help
It is largely a numbers issues. We can muster 5-6 to fight, sometimes evening out the starting enemy forces that went to the timequake/whatever, but when you guys then call in 3 times as many then it just becomes pointless for us to try with those numbers imbalance.
@Kethaera I am not saying that there aren't potential RP justifications, only that they were not being considered in the post I was replying to. My point is not that it cannot be good RP just because it is good for the game, it is that ignoring the RP consequences of any decision made is bad for the game.
Furthermore, said post seemed to advocate for frequently changing alliances, for which there are fewer reasons. Yes, you might break off from a more powerful alliance. Would you do it every time you got too powerful though?
I think making it easier to change alliances would work better toward conflict and combat balance. And part of that could be to rework treaties so that they only cover conflict events. Rp-wise it could be that the orgs don't like each other but have chosen to work together for mutual benefit during conflict events. Whether because one powerful org is always in control/calling the shots in conflict or for the sake of taking the side of people who are struggling more, that is rp motivation to switch alliances.
"Chairwoman," Princess Setisoki states, holding up a hand in a gesture for her to stop and returning the cup. "That would be quite inappropriate. One of the males will serve me."
I don't think it has a lot to do with the players- it's not on IHC to change things and never has been. I've been pretty consistent in telling the administration that they've been making bad choices. It's not enough to just say "trust us," at some point you have to actually do something to earn that trust, and... well. The Ascension Debacle screwed up a lot of things, but it started a ways before that.
In the end, the producers are the gamemasters. If they want a strong, healthy, competitive game- it's on them to take an interest in actually making it so, and acting to make that happen instead of acting to drive players away. If they don't want to, then I don't think it's right or fair for the players to try to shoulder that burden and burn themselves out on it either.
Lusternia is no longer a conflict game, and it's really not the players' responsibility to fix that. Thankfully there are plenty of other, non-conflict things to participate in and enjoy.
@Kethaera The post that I was responding to wasn't about making it easier to change alliances, it was about having the admin intervene to force them to change regularly, which would eventually end up feeling artificial (because it would be). Making it easier to change alliances wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, given how difficult it usually is both IC and OOC. But with that comes the OOC expectation to do so regularly and, with that repetition, it becomes harder and harder to justify IC.
I don't think that making treaties only cover combat events would work. There is more to an alliance than setting the teams for combat, and it would probably lead to increased drama as there is no way to deal with other situations that might arise.
I don't think it has a lot to do with the players- it's not on IHC to change things and never has been. I've been pretty consistent in telling the administration that they've been making bad choices. It's not enough to just say "trust us," at some point you have to actually do something to earn that trust, and... well. The Ascension Debacle screwed up a lot of things, but it started a ways before that.
In the end, the producers are the gamemasters. If they want a strong, healthy, competitive game- it's on them to take an interest in actually making it so, and acting to make that happen instead of acting to drive players away. If they don't want to, then I don't think it's right or fair for the players to try to shoulder that burden and burn themselves out on it either.
Lusternia is no longer a conflict game, and it's really not the players' responsibility to fix that. Thankfully there are plenty of other, non-conflict things to participate in and enjoy.
I think you're demanding too much and too vague a solution from the admin. I have tried to be clear that this is not the fault of the players in my mind - everyone, on both sides, is playing to what they enjoy.
And there are a number of problems to putting this all off on admin to fix. If that means enforcing alliances or breaking up alliances altogether, that's a hard pass for me. There's also plenty else they could be doing with their time, that players have repeatedly said is "the most important thing". That is not to say that some adjustment in mechanics or altering the incentives of combat events wouldn't work towards fixing the imbalance. But give specific ideas HOW, don't just say "it's broke, so fix it."
Also, while it is not on players to fix, some of us like the potential of rp solutions to these problems - a potential completely eliminated by enforced alliances. Saying to just wait for admin to come up with a solution that no one's offering apparently also means that people aren't allowed to rp and advocate for a preferred alliance change? Just because it's not on me, personally, to fix the fact that combat isn't fun for me doesn't mean that I don't want to try.
"Chairwoman," Princess Setisoki states, holding up a hand in a gesture for her to stop and returning the cup. "That would be quite inappropriate. One of the males will serve me."
Solutions have been offered, and ignored. That is why we're in this situation, in fact.
Is it on the administration to come up with a solution entirely on their own? Of course not. But they have to actually be interested in addressing the problem, and they have to be willing to make changes, and they have to be willing to acknowledge their mistakes. Where do you go from there? Well, months ago we suggested that they actually sit down and talk with the playerbase and try to work things out / come up with something that engaged players and drew them to work together instead of against one another.
@Kethaera The post that I was responding to wasn't about making it easier to change alliances, it was about having the admin intervene to force them to change regularly, which would eventually end up feeling artificial (because it would be). Making it easier to change alliances wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, given how difficult it usually is both IC and OOC. But with that comes the OOC expectation to do so regularly and, with that repetition, it becomes harder and harder to justify IC.
I don't think that making treaties only cover combat events would work. There is more to an alliance than setting the teams for combat, and it would probably lead to increased drama as there is no way to deal with other situations that might arise.
I can agree that having the admin force alliance changes arbitrarily would likely end badly. But as it is, players aren't terribly likely to change them organically themselves, which I do think is a bad thing.
Of course there's ways to deal with other situations that might arise. Negotiations, verbal agreements, or taking it up with city leaders. The avoidance of drama isn't necessarily a good thing, if the alternative is the situation we have now. I realize that a lot of people are used to having every possible circumstance covered by the treaties, and that this makes handling conflict simpler. That doesn't mean it's beneficial, or that it's impossible to make it work any other way.
"Chairwoman," Princess Setisoki states, holding up a hand in a gesture for her to stop and returning the cup. "That would be quite inappropriate. One of the males will serve me."
The primary thing I'm seeing here is that people are complaining about population sizes?
That fights end up being one-sided to the point that it's not worth the effort to even try?
What exactly do you all think we can do to fix that besides continue to work on improving the game and making it something people want to play?
Here's a few things we have done to fix it to encourage participation and encourage people to play. Every decision we've made it to encourage the participation of players.
1) We've added in alternative conflict events and removed xp-loss (timequakes and death-karma) 2) We've put in a lot of work to making each side feel like they can compete with the skillsets they have (I'm not seeing any complaints about one side being so OP here, mechanically speaking) 3) We've directed volunteer effort to improving orgs and org outlooks. Celest in particular has had a lot of work put into it to encourage players to play and participate. Those volunteers have done a fantastic job. We have other things here in the works as well. 4) We've been open and transparent about the decisions we've made and why we made them.
5) You also made decisions, knowing that they were going to crash the morale of half of your game, and did them anyways- and instead of trying to work with them to make the blow less hard, you just said "too bad we're doing this as is" and rammed it through.
You chose to shatter the concept of Lusternia as a competitive conflict game, and those who were interested in it as a conflict game ended up moving on. Without them, well. You have this.
The primary thing I'm seeing here is that people are complaining about population sizes?
That fights end up being one-sided to the point that it's not worth the effort to even try?
What exactly do you all think we can do to fix that besides continue to work on improving the game and making it something people want to play?
Here's a few things we have done to fix it to encourage participation and encourage people to play. Every decision we've made it to encourage the participation of players.
1) We've added in alternative conflict events and removed xp-loss (timequakes and death-karma) 2) We've put in a lot of work to making each side feel like they can compete with the skillsets they have (I'm not seeing any complaints about one side being so OP here, mechanically speaking) 3) We've directed volunteer effort to improving orgs and org outlooks. Celest in particular has had a lot of work put into it to encourage players to play and participate. Those volunteers have done a fantastic job. We have other things here in the works as well. 4) We've been open and transparent about the decisions we've made and why we made them.
I agree that the admin have done well to improve the game and the actual mechanics of combat. And the improvements going on in Celest and rp there is really cool and the volunteers deserve a ton of praise for it.
Personally, I don't know that there is an administrative or mechanical solution that wouldn't make this or some other problem worse. There's a lot of orgs for the population we have, which means a lot of pressure for people to keep logging in during conflict events. If you don't, you might be letting down your people. That's good in terms of keeping people playing. But if all you login to is another loss, it's demotivating. At some point it will be even for the winners. And yeah, as Thalkros says these things go back and forth. But the time in waiting for that to happen or waiting for those few times when numbers+ability are equal is incredibly frustrating and exhausting.
But the only solution I can think of to that problem is to delete orgs. Which I don't think most people want, including me. All I can say is here is this problem, can someone think of a way to fix it?
"Chairwoman," Princess Setisoki states, holding up a hand in a gesture for her to stop and returning the cup. "That would be quite inappropriate. One of the males will serve me."
Yes- delete the "winner takes all" mechanics. Incentivize trying; if you try, you get something portion of it (kind of like wildnodes, but even then it's only generally 2 orgs that get anything instead of all participants). Work on addressing the so-called snowball effect (the more you have, the easier it is to get more right now- it should function the other way). Lots of little details and such that can be gotten into, but we've even written envoy reports to try to address some of it that are on indefinite hold.
An actual alliance mechanic system could also be leveraged to share earnings from events.
None of that really addresses past mistakes / issues, but it does at least leave room for new blood to see a reason to try.
5) You also made decisions, knowing that they were going to crash the morale of half of your game, and did them anyways- and instead of trying to work with them to make the blow less hard, you just said "too bad we're doing this as is" and rammed it through.
You chose to shatter the concept of Lusternia as a competitive conflict game, and those who were interested in it as a conflict game ended up moving on. Without them, well. You have this.
I respectfully disagree with this. We made a decision that we felt was best for the game overall. You are free to disagree of course. As has been pointed out numerous times, either way, half the game's morale was going to be crushed, so we went for what we felt was the best choice of the game overall.
It is unfortunate that admitting to a fault and trying our best to rectify it while taking nothing away from anyone led to people quitting the game. Maybe we could have done something better, but I believe we did the best we could.
I'm not interested in debating this further here though. If you have ideas on how to move forward, I'm all ears.
PS (I'm also not interested in seeing people defend this decision further either, it's done, we're moving forward).
I was mulling something about wargame tournaments happening more frequently for orgpoints or something.
Unfortunately either its hosted manually by admin (time intensive for them) or its an automated system which is both coding resources and would probably just end up just getting gamed.
I was mulling something about wargame tournaments happening more frequently for orgpoints or something.
Unfortunately either its hosted manually by admin (time intensive for them) or its an automated system which is both coding resources and would probably just end up just getting gamed.
I mean, things can already get gamed with orgpoints. I really like the idea of making individual or small group combat linked to orgpoints. People should be encouraged to get better at combat, and to see some tangible benefit for it. The avoidance of gaming, well -
- Make it so you have to compete in wargames against non-allied orgs - Randomize teams and distribute points based on whoever is alive at the end - Limit the number of times you can challenge another org(ie, two orgs can only compete against each other once per year, for orgpoints)
As some thoughts.
"Chairwoman," Princess Setisoki states, holding up a hand in a gesture for her to stop and returning the cup. "That would be quite inappropriate. One of the males will serve me."
Yes- delete the "winner takes all" mechanics. Incentivize trying; if you try, you get something portion of it (kind of like wildnodes, but even then it's only generally 2 orgs that get anything instead of all participants). Work on addressing the so-called snowball effect (the more you have, the easier it is to get more right now- it should function the other way). Lots of little details and such that can be gotten into, but we've even written envoy reports to try to address some of it that are on indefinite hold.
An actual alliance mechanic system could also be leveraged to share earnings from events.
I like the idea of this, but not sure how this would work for things like villages and flares. I think I or someone else suggested at one time the idea of making it harder to capture villages the more you have, with the idea that no one likes huge empires.
"Chairwoman," Princess Setisoki states, holding up a hand in a gesture for her to stop and returning the cup. "That would be quite inappropriate. One of the males will serve me."
Yes- delete the "winner takes all" mechanics. Incentivize trying; if you try, you get something portion of it (kind of like wildnodes, but even then it's only generally 2 orgs that get anything instead of all participants). Work on addressing the so-called snowball effect (the more you have, the easier it is to get more right now- it should function the other way). Lots of little details and such that can be gotten into, but we've even written envoy reports to try to address some of it that are on indefinite hold.
An actual alliance mechanic system could also be leveraged to share earnings from events.
I like the idea of this, but not sure how this would work for things like villages and flares. I think I or someone else suggested at one time the idea of making it harder to capture villages the more you have, with the idea that no one likes huge empires.
Yep! That was a report we put forward in the last report cycle.
Other options include things like: An organization doesn't claim a village / flare, but an alliance does. Thus, everyone in the alliance gets some of the commodities / power / output, etc. Make things really a group effort in which everyone is rewarded. If you focus on and nab one, then you all prosper.
I think an underlying issue that causes a lot of problems is that people fight to win. They will garner every advantage they can, be it cheesy strategies or calling in reinforcements. This isn't a critique on a particular side, as I've seen both sides do it without hesitation whenever they can or need to. People aren't as interested in fair play and even fights as they are in winning at any cost, and it's not really a mindset that can be avoided as it is a competitive game, so it kind of is what it is.
Yes- delete the "winner takes all" mechanics. Incentivize trying; if you try, you get something portion of it (kind of like wildnodes, but even then it's only generally 2 orgs that get anything instead of all participants). Work on addressing the so-called snowball effect (the more you have, the easier it is to get more right now- it should function the other way). Lots of little details and such that can be gotten into, but we've even written envoy reports to try to address some of it that are on indefinite hold.
An actual alliance mechanic system could also be leveraged to share earnings from events.
I like the idea of this, but not sure how this would work for things like villages and flares. I think I or someone else suggested at one time the idea of making it harder to capture villages the more you have, with the idea that no one likes huge empires.
Yep! That was a report we put forward in the last report cycle.
Other options include things like: An organization doesn't claim a village / flare, but an alliance does. Thus, everyone in the alliance gets some of the commodities / power / output, etc. Make things really a group effort in which everyone is rewarded. If you focus on and nab one, then you all prosper.
Eh, but that sounds like it would force alliances to be static. If one side is always going to be winning, I'm not sure this would help. I don't remember the details of the report, but I agree with the spirit of it.
"Chairwoman," Princess Setisoki states, holding up a hand in a gesture for her to stop and returning the cup. "That would be quite inappropriate. One of the males will serve me."
I think an underlying issue that causes a lot of problems is that people fight to win. They will garner every advantage they can, be it cheesy strategies or calling in reinforcements. This isn't a critique on a particular side, as I've seen both sides do it without hesitation whenever they can or need to. People aren't as interested in fair play and even fights as they are in winning at any cost, and it's not really a mindset that can be avoided as it is a competitive game, so it kind of is what it is.
To some extent, sure. The point is not to tell people they aren't allowed to try and win, but to shift the motivations away from 15 vs 5, or to give those 5 some other way to compete. Both in pk, or in improving the org.
"Chairwoman," Princess Setisoki states, holding up a hand in a gesture for her to stop and returning the cup. "That would be quite inappropriate. One of the males will serve me."
Yes- delete the "winner takes all" mechanics. Incentivize trying; if you try, you get something portion of it (kind of like wildnodes, but even then it's only generally 2 orgs that get anything instead of all participants). Work on addressing the so-called snowball effect (the more you have, the easier it is to get more right now- it should function the other way). Lots of little details and such that can be gotten into, but we've even written envoy reports to try to address some of it that are on indefinite hold.
An actual alliance mechanic system could also be leveraged to share earnings from events.
I like the idea of this, but not sure how this would work for things like villages and flares. I think I or someone else suggested at one time the idea of making it harder to capture villages the more you have, with the idea that no one likes huge empires.
Yep! That was a report we put forward in the last report cycle.
Other options include things like: An organization doesn't claim a village / flare, but an alliance does. Thus, everyone in the alliance gets some of the commodities / power / output, etc. Make things really a group effort in which everyone is rewarded. If you focus on and nab one, then you all prosper.
Eh, but that sounds like it would force alliances to be static. If one side is always going to be winning, I'm not sure this would help. I don't remember the details of the report, but I agree with the spirit of it.
It would be quite dependent upon alliances that are roughly equal in participation-interest, yes. It's not so great a solution Right Now, but one would hope that someday things will be somewhat less divided. It also suffers from cementing the "us v. them" divide because it's likely to be exactly 2 sides, unless it gets capped at only letting 2 orgs be in an alliance at once (which comes with its own downsides / issues).
Either way, that's definitely a very Long Term discussion.
Just working on the snowball effect in the short term would be a good place to start, and theoretically a whole lot easier.
PS: The relevant report is REPORT 169. It was a shot at trying to chip away at the overall process. Best solution? Possibly not, but at least it would be an improvement over what we've got now.
Not to get further offtopic here, I see report 183 which doesn't make any mention of sharing wins.
Yeah, that one was a completely different thing which had no bearing on game balance in any way. Didn't seem necessary to formally mechanize something like that, imo.
When it has basically caused a large part of Shadowlight's side to no longer trust Orael or the choices he makes are for the best for the game it just is going to turn into this. Morale being shot and one side basically giving up completely and no longer interested in conflict.
Comments
Admin being involved in this sorta thing has been a recipe for drama here. Some times it's fine, other times people get really annoyed at the admin because the players don't want to change things or worse, if an admin pushed for a change and it went bad.
At the same time, I feel like we've kinda seen what happens when you just leave it up to players to take care of. It's the current method and why the game keeps having this same situation.
Which is why I tend to end up at mechanics really. Different mechanics in place can radically reshape player behavior in a game. If you make it better to regularly change alliances then players will do so, you can use mechanics to make it rewarding and to try to mitigate the potential risk while also providing IC justification for the regular swapping.
I came back after so actually not 100%. But aren't we here right now basically because things happened, alliances shuffled, and it didn't work out?
We could shuffle to try to fix it and it might fix things for a while, or it could fall over and we're in the same situation just with different orgs and the top 3, in that case, might not want to risk another roll of the dice.
Ex: Morbo's master plan for Mag, Seren, Halli to split to force Glom/Gaudi/Celest to all split up that backfired the moment Seren voted to side with the Halli plan.
The tide always turns, especially post-ascension however it was a bit more of a dramatic shift this time. Granted there was plenty of engagements pre-ascension where we would be vastly outnumbered but our unit coherence won the day. (I remember an almost 3:1 advantage to Shadowlight in a Rikenfriez revolt that we swept them out multiple times while a lone Seren did all the influencing as that's all that was online until Sondy showed up).
I hear a lot of complaints about the lack of team understanding/workability from the other side. I'm not saying people aren't being team players for Shadowlight, I just mean that you guys don't have a solid number of strong leaders/teachers to the degree we have. You have a few that try very hard to lead and train, but it seems like if one of them isn't around you guys fall apart. That used to be a severe Mag issue after Akyaevin's Ascension when all our old guard quit for most of the next year. Hell, I quit playing during my first stint as a Vernal Ascendant just because I was the ONLY one leading combat for Mag for months and people would always bombard me with hatred for not waking up at 3:43am to defend a Domoth Absolve. So I know that pain.
I think one of the big issues, in my mind, is that the conflict avenues we have do not generate a lot of worth. Outside of Wildnodes which typically sees a lot of back and forth more often than not. Revolts/Flares are always a toss up on timing, they can literally pop at the worst or best time for one side, and very rarely at an even playing field time. Timequakes are all but pointless at this point, how many guilds are actually not at level 5 with years worth of surplus in reserve? I think Society is a few bits behind, and maybe Serenwilde has a guild or two not max? Not sure about Shadowlight guilds.
Domoths tend to be mostly evenly spread out, but thats the nature of how the opposing system works, and I hate to say it given how much I hate the Domoth structure, but Domoth's seem to be about the only fair and balanced system these days.
I think if we had more conflict routes it would go a long way to encourage people to be active and do things. Because honestly, for those of us who enjoy PK, Quakes are our only outlet especially since theres no xp loss. And lets also be honest amongst ourselves, those of us who were hardcore raiding all day every day (Myself, Ruiku, Melech) have mostly stopped that outside of very random bits of boredom. I mean really, aside from maybe Rastamutti, Mag doesn't live in peoples territories like we used to/are still able to. We did take a sort of unspoken gentleman's agreement to slack off a LOT. But there is an extent to what we as players can do outside of just not playing the game. That is not a solution at all. Admin force breaking alliances and making it a forces 1v1 1v1 1v1 between all 6 orgs is also not a solution. That right there would drive more players off in my opinion.
tldr: conflict sucks, don't know what to do to help
@Nelras, there are rp justifications for orgs choosing to break off from more powerful ones. Yes it might also be good for the game, but that doesn't make it bad rp. Plenty of people in real life choose to root for the underdog, whoever that may be.
I am not saying that there aren't potential RP justifications, only that they were not being considered in the post I was replying to. My point is not that it cannot be good RP just because it is good for the game, it is that ignoring the RP consequences of any decision made is bad for the game.
Furthermore, said post seemed to advocate for frequently changing alliances, for which there are fewer reasons. Yes, you might break off from a more powerful alliance. Would you do it every time you got too powerful though?
The post that I was responding to wasn't about making it easier to change alliances, it was about having the admin intervene to force them to change regularly, which would eventually end up feeling artificial (because it would be). Making it easier to change alliances wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, given how difficult it usually is both IC and OOC. But with that comes the OOC expectation to do so regularly and, with that repetition, it becomes harder and harder to justify IC.
I don't think that making treaties only cover combat events would work. There is more to an alliance than setting the teams for combat, and it would probably lead to increased drama as there is no way to deal with other situations that might arise.
And there are a number of problems to putting this all off on admin to fix. If that means enforcing alliances or breaking up alliances altogether, that's a hard pass for me. There's also plenty else they could be doing with their time, that players have repeatedly said is "the most important thing". That is not to say that some adjustment in mechanics or altering the incentives of combat events wouldn't work towards fixing the imbalance. But give specific ideas HOW, don't just say "it's broke, so fix it."
Also, while it is not on players to fix, some of us like the potential of rp solutions to these problems - a potential completely eliminated by enforced alliances. Saying to just wait for admin to come up with a solution that no one's offering apparently also means that people aren't allowed to rp and advocate for a preferred alliance change? Just because it's not on me, personally, to fix the fact that combat isn't fun for me doesn't mean that I don't want to try.
Of course there's ways to deal with other situations that might arise. Negotiations, verbal agreements, or taking it up with city leaders. The avoidance of drama isn't necessarily a good thing, if the alternative is the situation we have now. I realize that a lot of people are used to having every possible circumstance covered by the treaties, and that this makes handling conflict simpler. That doesn't mean it's beneficial, or that it's impossible to make it work any other way.
That fights end up being one-sided to the point that it's not worth the effort to even try?
What exactly do you all think we can do to fix that besides continue to work on improving the game and making it something people want to play?
Here's a few things we have done to fix it to encourage participation and encourage people to play. Every decision we've made it to encourage the participation of players.
1) We've added in alternative conflict events and removed xp-loss (timequakes and death-karma)
2) We've put in a lot of work to making each side feel like they can compete with the skillsets they have (I'm not seeing any complaints about one side being so OP here, mechanically speaking)
3) We've directed volunteer effort to improving orgs and org outlooks. Celest in particular has had a lot of work put into it to encourage players to play and participate. Those volunteers have done a fantastic job. We have other things here in the works as well.
4) We've been open and transparent about the decisions we've made and why we made them.
Personally, I don't know that there is an administrative or mechanical solution that wouldn't make this or some other problem worse. There's a lot of orgs for the population we have, which means a lot of pressure for people to keep logging in during conflict events. If you don't, you might be letting down your people. That's good in terms of keeping people playing. But if all you login to is another loss, it's demotivating. At some point it will be even for the winners. And yeah, as Thalkros says these things go back and forth. But the time in waiting for that to happen or waiting for those few times when numbers+ability are equal is incredibly frustrating and exhausting.
But the only solution I can think of to that problem is to delete orgs. Which I don't think most people want, including me. All I can say is here is this problem, can someone think of a way to fix it?
It is unfortunate that admitting to a fault and trying our best to rectify it while taking nothing away from anyone led to people quitting the game. Maybe we could have done something better, but I believe we did the best we could.
I'm not interested in debating this further here though. If you have ideas on how to move forward, I'm all ears.
PS (I'm also not interested in seeing people defend this decision further either, it's done, we're moving forward).
Unfortunately either its hosted manually by admin (time intensive for them) or its an automated system which is both coding resources and would probably just end up just getting gamed.
- Make it so you have to compete in wargames against non-allied orgs
- Randomize teams and distribute points based on whoever is alive at the end
- Limit the number of times you can challenge another org(ie, two orgs can only compete against each other once per year, for orgpoints)
As some thoughts.
It's the same topic. It's this topic. The morale of your players is shot, and thus the participation in conflict events is skewed.
Yeah, that one was a completely different thing which had no bearing on game balance in any way. Didn't seem necessary to formally mechanize something like that, imo.
When it has basically caused a large part of Shadowlight's side to no longer trust Orael or the choices he makes are for the best for the game it just is going to turn into this. Morale being shot and one side basically giving up completely and no longer interested in conflict.