Mending fences now is, to me, sitting down to rethink the future and direction of conflict in this game. We're in this place now. What can be done to shake it up and rebuild what we've lost? That's what I am looking for in terms of a talk, and an outcome.
You've written at length about how you feel regarding what was done at the time.
What does this look like, right now? Again, is this thread not enough? What exactly will be enough? What, specifically, do you want to see?
Big old skype call? Solicited feedback forum post? Discord chat? You've used the words "sitting down" countless times now, what does it look like?
I have also stated:
1) The forums are not an appropriate place, because they are frequented by a small subset of the game's players,
2) It is probably better as an in-game thing because that is where the players are, and
3) Used the word town-hall (Orael even repeated it!). It doesn't necessarily need to be town-hall style, but it would preferably be far more inclusive than here.
1. That was never the purpose of my thread that you're admitting to have hijacked for your own purposes.
2. You could have sent an email/issue instead or
3. Not participated.
What it comes down to is that you only want to air the opinions you like. I'd call that toxic.
I am airing the opinions important to me. You're airing the opinions important to you. That's kind of how a discussion works. Of the two of us, you're the only one who has flatly told the other to stop talking, stop participating, and go away.
I'd call that toxic.
You've repeatedly said this thread shouldn't exist at all. That's telling everyone who did participate and offer suggestions to stop talking. This isn't even a pot/kettle thing, I was perfectly willing to listen to GENUINE suggestions from you.
"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."
Mending fences now is, to me, sitting down to rethink the future and direction of conflict in this game. We're in this place now. What can be done to shake it up and rebuild what we've lost? That's what I am looking for in terms of a talk, and an outcome.
You've written at length about how you feel regarding what was done at the time.
What does this look like, right now? Again, is this thread not enough? What exactly will be enough? What, specifically, do you want to see?
Big old skype call? Solicited feedback forum post? Discord chat? You've used the words "sitting down" countless times now, what does it look like?
I have also stated:
1) The forums are not an appropriate place, because they are frequented by a small subset of the game's players,
2) It is probably better as an in-game thing because that is where the players are, and
3) Used the word town-hall (Orael even repeated it!). It doesn't necessarily need to be town-hall style, but it would preferably be far more inclusive than here.
1. That was never the purpose of my thread that you're admitting to have hijacked for your own purposes.
2. You could have sent an email/issue instead or
3. Not participated.
What it comes down to is that you only want to air the opinions you like. I'd call that toxic.
I am airing the opinions important to me. You're airing the opinions important to you. That's kind of how a discussion works. Of the two of us, you're the only one who has flatly told the other to stop talking, stop participating, and go away.
I'd call that toxic.
You've repeatedly said this thread shouldn't exist at all. That's telling everyone who did participate and offer suggestions to stop talking. This isn't even a pot/kettle thing, I was perfectly willing to listen to GENUINE suggestions from you.
Okay, I think I see your confusion- I am not in any way saying that this thread shouldn't exist. In fact, I think it's good that it does exist. My point about the forums not being an appropriate place is not saying that this thread is inappropriate for the forums, but that a more extensive dialogue with the administration needs to happen in a place that is not so... secluded. Forums are a dying medium these days; they're still good for letting some of us old die-hards hash things out, but you're missing a lot of people and we need them to be part of this process too.
So let me reiterate: This thread *absolutely should exist*. Things that people come up with in this thread can be worth building out and discussing. Final decisions should not be made based on this thread, however- bring good things over and let the game at large discuss it. Get some buy-in, and bring everyone together on a path forward, because we have a lot of divisions here and the more people involved, the better, to me.
It isn't accomplishing anything. I'm reading things but I'm processing and thinking about things, so I'm likely not going to have many responses at the moment. Lets try to keep it civil.
I've always been a proponent of trying to listen to everyone. It's no different here, you may disagree with opinions being shared, but we don't need to throw around terms like toxic etc. That isn't helping anything.
I'm actually going to go a step further than my last post: I thought I was clear on what I meant (as I was replying to Kaikazu).
Maybe I wasn't as clear as I thought. So, I will apologize for in any
way making you think that I'm trying to shut down your thread, because
I'm absolutely not. I intentionally did not reply to Vexacion's first
post here because my doing so would have broken Orael's stated rules and
gotten us shut down fast. I want this thread active, though I do think
that we can do without the flinging of the word "toxicity" around
repeatedly because in the end we all want the same thing. A strong,
healthy game.
I am sorry for making you feel like I don't want you to post your own thoughts, Kethaera, because that is not at all true. I don't mind disagreeing with someone (I do so often!), but I've long held the position that I think it's better to talk than to not.
Edit: I did this as a separate post because of how long it was since the original, and Orael snuck one in before me. I don't think this qualifies as the stated back-and-forth though, so I'll leave it as-is!
I think a town hall to help come up with ideas would be helpful to at least get the ball rolling, I would just like to see those who have stopped playing recently to also be invited. My issue with them is everything gets very chaotic, very quickly and I cannot keep up. So maybe introduce slow mode speaking wise, and kindly ask anyone who isn't providing anything helpful to leave.
Or even, because helpful can be a very very vague word, muting people for however long who use key words, toxic for example. These players could still use thinks to provide feedback and could in turn "earn" the right to be unmuted.
My issue with town halls is that they never seem to happen at a time when i can log in (like every competition ever ). At least a static forum allows people to peruse and post in their own time. i guess there is no one simple way to discuss and perhaps a one-off conversation is also not perfect, multiple mediums seems helpful.
My issue with town halls is that they never seem to happen at a time when i can log in (like every competition ever ). At least a static forum allows people to peruse and post in their own time. i guess there is no one simple way to discuss and perhaps a one-off conversation is also not perfect, multiple mediums seems helpful.
As an Australian, I feel this keenly. So many events I never managed to participate in because I wasn't aware of them ahead of time and therefore couldn't be on out of my TZ.
I hesitate to presuppose the Admin have the time and inclination to do it - but if they did, I'd make time as long as the time were announced in advance for me to do so.
Or, yeah. Put a forum link in the PROMOTION ingame text box or something. Drive players from wherever they are to whichever medium would actually function best for this purpose.
In terms of actually staying on topic, I reckon it'd be awesome for TQs to be shorter, and have anomaly releasing be shorter. Short enough for a weaker group with delaying tactics to steal one.
Disclaimer: haven't really been back playing Lusternia long enough to know if this would actually work, only that it'd be cool to see
After removing my rather lengthy post I was going to write, I wanted to point out that it's very hard to contribute to this community on this forum because people's tempers flare too easily and I kind of don't feel like I can openly state my personal opinion without garnering a lot of backlash. This is nothing new to this thread, just general observation of how this community has been since I know it.
I wanted however say, that I hope we can find a way foward together, as one playerbase in the hope that we might come to something where conflict is fun to participate in again.
i honestly feel tempers will flare just the same in discord, in any real-time discussion, just as much as here. The nature of disagreeing with people and being passionate about your subject.
My issue with town halls is that they never seem to happen at a time when i can log in (like every competition ever ). At least a static forum allows people to peruse and post in their own time. i guess there is no one simple way to discuss and perhaps a one-off conversation is also not perfect, multiple mediums seems helpful.
As an Australian, I feel this keenly. So many events I never managed to participate in because I wasn't aware of them ahead of time and therefore couldn't be on out of my TZ.
I hesitate to presuppose the Admin have the time and inclination to do it - but if they did, I'd make time as long as the time were announced in advance for me to do so.
Or, yeah. Put a forum link in the PROMOTION ingame text box or something. Drive players from wherever they are to whichever medium would actually function best for this purpose.
Just to second/third this.
The last Town Hall I'm seeing was at 7pm pst on a Monday (23/09/2019)? Which translates to midday on a Tuesday in Sydney for me, 2pm in Auckland, and London would be like 3am. That's a lot of people at work/school/sleeping/etc. Despite issues, the forums are realistically more inclusive for a world-wide player base than a real-time meeting which can exclude people who can't be there and potentially even people present who just don't get the air time to speak.
Personally, surveys can work well. They're not time-dependent, you can get some responses to targetted questions, have some space for people to write out walls of text, etc. Stuff isn't being posted for others to pick at, people can just say what they're feeling. The only thing is that it'd probably need a field for registration email to compare and ensure it's one response per registration unless it's somehow created in-game. But people also can't really respond to points other people are making which can be good and bad.
Those players that stopped playing have left a void and the players currently playing are having a hard time filling it and trying to step in, which results in frustration on their end?
Does that sum it up?
As someone whos is currently trying to fill the void, it is next to impossible. One thing is time zone is an issue. It is unfair to think anyone can make up the years of experience, arties, and coding that IHC has on SL as well as the raw numbers during American evenings. If we can get 5v6 then IHC will have many reinforcements because IHC has more players that love combat, so they will want to participate when it happens. This is not their issue. I feel the same way, and it is way I made a character on SL.
Basically, my takeaway from the last few pages is that the current situation isn't really because of anything mechanical (though mechanical issues likely exist). It isn't because there is a lack of things to do. It really boils down to two general decisions that we made that caused people to leave.
This is a lack of mechanic issue. When population imbalance happens during a certain time zone, combat is unbalanced. No one wants to be glorified bashing denizens for the other side.
In general, IHC has more combatants that rank their desire for combat high on the reasons they play the game while SL seems to have more that focus on other aspects of the game. There is nothing wrong with this, but the imbalance of combat-focused, heavily artied characters is making combat non-existent at least during the times I can play.
Something caught my eye a few pages ago, and this pertains to the culture of the game overall. Ayisdra was talking about how it's frustrating in flares that Magnagora camps docks and makes it impossible to get orgpoints.
Complete denial of resources is something that worked into the culture more or less beginning at timequake release (to this degree). Some of the people that are directly responsible for instituting this vicious way of playing the game have now quit. People like Snald and Tarken essentially built up this toxic back and forth and now they've left their side high and dry because Ixion got a fancy name change and some extra power weight, and faster domoth speed.
So ridiculous. I know it seems petty to blame the "losers" (not losers at all, see Parhelion), but Glomdoring spent several years pissing off most of the playerbase and now that behavior is coming back to roost.
The worst part being that Glomdoring has a completely different culture and playerbase now. They're being punished for the sins of people that decided to jump ship before they could get their just desserts.
We can also make adjustments to timequakes, make them shorter etc. That's all relatively easy to do. Would it change things though? A lot of the other suggestions just are not possible at the moment, as they would be too much of a time investment.
Shorter TQs would only make it easier for the majority to not tire of controlling every TQ. It would actually add fuel to the fire of the current issues. It is hard to go sit in a TQ and twiddle your thumbs. The point of TQs was to create combat. If people get bored and tired of sitting in a TQ without resistance then that will cause the number of constant combatants to dwindle allowing the other side to eventually have more even numbers. I am completely against making TQs shorter. This is what lead me to alt on SL in order to try to have combat during my available play times.
Combat isn't not happening in TQs because of the length of the TQ. It is not happening because a majority of the time the quality/quantity of combatants that are willing to oppose the other side makes it almost impossible to successfully challenge. For example, SL normally has such a majority on American Saturday mornings that IHC doesn't have the force to oppose. Making a TQ shorter will not resolve the issue, but it will make it easier to recruit a bigger force to ensure the other side doesn't have a chance of opposition.
Something caught my eye a few pages ago, and this pertains to the culture of the game overall. Ayisdra was talking about how it's frustrating in flares that Magnagora camps docks and makes it impossible to get orgpoints.
Complete denial of resources is something that worked into the culture more or less beginning at timequake release (to this degree). Some of the people that are directly responsible for instituting this vicious way of playing the game have now quit. People like Snald and Tarken essentially built up this toxic back and forth and now they've left their side high and dry because Ixion got a fancy name change and some extra power weight, and faster domoth speed.
So ridiculous. I know it seems petty to blame the "losers" (not losers at all, see Parhelion), but Glomdoring spent several years pissing off most of the playerbase and now that behavior is coming back to roost.
The worst part being that Glomdoring has a completely different culture and playerbase now. They're being punished for the sins of people that decided to jump ship before they could get their just desserts.
So... just to comment on this, why is this considered toxic, exactly? I view it as one option for how to approach conflict (and orgcredits are part of conflict). As frustrating as Glom's denial efforts were, getting around them taught me a lot about my skills and strategies I could try to get in, survive, and escape. Maybe not everyone will be motivated to do this, but I'd like to think that every org could find *one* person who might, if given encouragement and/or training.
I dunno man, it's a little strange to say that the current players deserve to be treated in a way you consider to be toxic because some other players did the same. Personally I just think struggle is good for everyone. And that even "non-comms" should know a little bit about their skills and defenses.
"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."
Also, Melech said it earlier, and I think the admin do have plans to address Ascension,
but man do we need to abolish Ascension in its current state. Brings out the worst in people, brings out the most cheesy strats, encourages players to play as dirty as possible to get the best possible outcome: nobody on the other side gets any Seals, ideally, then politic your way into getting your org to be the one with the TA. Lends itself into scorched earth, nobody gets anything but me attitudes. Winner takes all.
Speaking of cheesy strats, anyone who has ever known me knows that I have never, ever approved of rewarding braindead strategy like I saw during this last Ascension. It's a complete farce to me that people think they should be pat on the back for laying on their Wyrdenwood Creeping alias. You should be absolutely ecstatic with Parhelion being ascended, full stop, because in any other game something at the level of ridiculous as Creeping would've been patched a long time ago, and you'd have had to think of something else to try and get your win.
It's just shameful to me that people really thought they'd get away with that, and when they didn't, they decided to qq. That's really the point of my post. If you (general you) want to play the blame game, put it on the people that have left after trying to break combat and spoil the competition and not the admin.
----
More constructive comments here:
The only way for Celest/Glomdoring/Hallifax to get out of its slump is to get more players, and then anyone who even shows an inkling of interest in PK, they need to be supported. If you guys want to effect change, there'd better not be any of that defeatist "why bother" crap in IC or even OOC clans, because then those PK oriented people will leave.
Lean on the fact that Hallifax now has one of the most cohesive org synergies in the game, as well as Glomdoring. You guys have the tools, you just need to -use- them. The people that say "oh, non-com activity is what's sustaining me, I've sworn off PK"...they're not wrong, and they're not invalid, but PK is the lifeblood of any org. Looking at POLITICS and POLITICS ASPACE is what gets interest generated in your org. When you have a solid PK base, your non-coms will come into their own as well. But as it stands, the whole thing is really uncomfortable.
So yeah. Option 1 is to trick yourself into being motivated, if only to create the illusion for your newbies.
Option 2 is hope the winning side gets bored and people start qq'ing, and numbers equalize (but at the cost of losing players). From what I've seen, the winning side isn't getting bored. Nor are they showing any sort of self-restraint when it comes to throwing around their larger numbers. And I can't blame them, because if the tables were turned, the culture is that the "other side" would be doing the exact same thing. I remember when Glomdoring was ascendant a few years ago and they just choked the life out of Celest, and then Magnagora. Those wounds have only relatively recently begun to heal.
The onus is on the players to be better towards each other, not for the admin to start drawing artificial boundaries. One day, some day, someone's going to have to be the bigger person and ease off on the utter domination/complete denial of resources tradition, EVEN IF IT CONTRADICTS THEIR RP OR THEIR ORG'S RP, if only to allow the other side to recuperate numbers and morale. I suspect IHC may become the first, given the dire straits the game's in right now (it's never been this bad since I started playing, re: PK participation), but it needs to actually happen. In other words, I don't agree with the "it's unfair to ask the winning side to chill out/send less people/be more merciful" rhetoric. You all know better. Make wise decisions, for the good of the game.
So... just to comment on this, why is this considered toxic, exactly? I view it as one option for how to approach conflict (and orgcredits are part of conflict). As frustrating as Glom's denial efforts were, getting around them taught me a lot about my skills and strategies I could try to get in, survive, and escape. Maybe not everyone will be motivated to do this, but I'd like to think that every org could find *one* person who might, if given encouragement and/or training.
I dunno man, it's a little strange to say that the current players deserve to be treated in a way you consider to be toxic because some other players did the same. Personally I just think struggle is good for everyone. And that even "non-comms" should know a little bit about their skills and defenses.
I think I probably answered this in my last post, but I think I'll address the question here anyway. I think, right now, in this current state of Lusternia, we can't afford to behave this way. In games with much higher populations, it doesn't matter if one or two people get burned off by getting absolutely denied, having people ravenously attempt to stifle anything they do. Here, now, we can't afford burning off any players. I don't want to walk on eggshells around my opponents, and I don't want to treat them like they're precious and untouchable, believe me, but I mean...at least for now, this mindset (however valid it is in competitive games) needs to take a beat so we can go back to murdering each other happily a few months down the road. Because right now, there's barely PK to be had.
So... just to comment on this, why is this considered toxic, exactly? I view it as one option for how to approach conflict (and orgcredits are part of conflict). As frustrating as Glom's denial efforts were, getting around them taught me a lot about my skills and strategies I could try to get in, survive, and escape. Maybe not everyone will be motivated to do this, but I'd like to think that every org could find *one* person who might, if given encouragement and/or training.
I dunno man, it's a little strange to say that the current players deserve to be treated in a way you consider to be toxic because some other players did the same. Personally I just think struggle is good for everyone. And that even "non-comms" should know a little bit about their skills and defenses.
I think I probably answered this in my last post, but I think I'll address the question here anyway. I think, right now, in this current state of Lusternia, we can't afford to behave this way. In games with much higher populations, it doesn't matter if one or two people get burned off by getting absolutely denied, having people ravenously attempt to stifle anything they do. Here, now, we can't afford burning off any players. I don't want to walk on eggshells around my opponents, and I don't want to treat them like they're precious and untouchable, believe me, but I mean...at least for now, this mindset (however valid it is in competitive games) needs to take a beat so we can go back to murdering each other happily a few months down the road. Because right now, there's barely PK to be had.
Alright, in context I can agree with this. But I don't believe that this method of conflict is any more likely to drive people off generally than behavior I would actually call toxic - the way players are treated oocly by each other, among other things.
"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 personally am very saddened that people just dismiss all the effort and work we have put into pre ascension because there's one skill that may or may not be overpowered ( as I said countless times before, I don't know it enough to judge it ) and apparently because someone in the past did the other side wrong, we need to suffer in hell for it? People, this is a game and we play it with each other. Please stop, this is really making me sad to read. I think I'll take some absence from this thread.
Mechanics are how the problem tends to manifest, and as a result the exact specific mechanics aren't the problem per-se and solely changing the mechanics can only accidentally solve issues without an understanding of the fundamental problem.
With this ["conflict mechanics"] and also the economic problems, I think that the fundamental problem is the underlying philosophy that prioritizes direct, zero sum, adversarial competition as the most valuable/virtuous activity, the best. Tweaking the ways in which that conflict plays out won't really fix the problem that is the spirit of that conflict.
The mechanical bonus of a TA is not anything to actually write home about. The emotional response to the raising of Ixion was not related to the mechanics as to what he received, but rather the perception of what that bonus means. There really is not going to be anyway for an admin to solve that issue, the perceptive value of what a TA brings to their side greatly outweighs mechanically what they are able to do. In this particular instance, Zagreus as the Chaos TA is underwhelming because the Chaos powers that he got for free are mostly useless. So no, a TA isn't a weapon, the only thing it does is speed up Domoth claims, so no, IHC didn't receive anything because Ixion with Death Seal is more useful than Zagreus as Chaos Ascendant.
Lusternia mechanics have never been balanced. As someone that has been here for many different eras of combat, it has yet to be balanced and will hopefully never be balanced. Balanced is boring. A balanced game is a single player Mario game where still they find tricks years after release.
A game like this needs to be treated more like a community, as we are a small group of people that have converged together. If you want your community to grow, you have to put in the work to do so. It has been brought up before, but if everyone knew beforehand that Ascension was going to be a problem, that some skills would only make things worse, then why did you design your strategy around that? Yes all your hard work Pre-Ascension should be thrown away if it was designed around making the community worse for people because you abused a skill. Where are all these people that abused Creeping since then? How come there have been no Creeping bombs in any way like you used before? How come everyone classflexed to new classes once Ascension ended?
Because they knew the skill was broken and still used it, and haven't done anything about it since then. People are not using Creeping because they want it to still be good for the next Ascension. And to squash the comment of "Oh what can I do? Envoy reports haven't been reopened yet?"
Here is my personal anecdote of taking responsibility for the community. I am the one that got Climax nerfed, I saw that it was easily abused, I made a log and I sent it to Orael. I recognized something was broken, I knew that it was too easy too abuse and then I classflexed out of Dramaturgy until it was fixed. Climax was changed to its previous form in 2018, I returned July 4th 2020. It was nerfed by September. We have previous combat history and skills to draw from, using room wide attacks that stack and stun from a distance has never been okay since the beginning of the game, even more so during lag. This type of skill was solved years ago when Boulderblast got nerfed into dust and should've never been allowed to be remade. Don't listen to those defending Creeping, they don't know how combat works.
I saw some talk about IHC needing to tone it down and apply self-restraint.
Yes, like you don't want us to raid Celestia? Check, we really don't outside of an occasional crafting Fain angel cloaks.
We haven't killed any of the Avatars or Supernals, even after we easily did it and only did it that once.
Some of us have even made alts in Shadowlight to help you out.
I even self-nerfed my own class for Shadowlight.
After SL had ran from the combat field, we went to the next best battlefield in Orgcredits, and you guys have ran from that too.
You were not defeated by the mechanics or an admin decision, you defeated yourselves.
2014/04/19 01:38:01 - Leolamins drained 2000000 power to raise Silvanus as a Vernal Ascendant.
2014/07/23 05:01:29 - Silvanus drained 2000000 power to raise Munsia as a Vernal Ascendant.
2015/05/24 06:03:07 - Silvanus drained 2000000 power to raise Arimisia as a Vernal Ascendant.
2015/05/24 06:03:58 - Silvanus drained 2000000 power to raise Lavinya as a Vernal Ascendant.
Because they knew the skill was broken and still used it, and haven't done anything about it since then. People are not using Creeping because they want it to still be good for the next Ascension. And to squash the comment of "Oh what can I do? Envoy reports haven't been reopened yet?"
Here is my personal anecdote of taking responsibility for the community. I am the one that got Climax nerfed, I saw that it was easily abused, I made a log and I sent it to Orael. I recognized something was broken, I knew that it was too easy too abuse and then I classflexed out of Dramaturgy until it was fixed. Climax was changed to its previous form in 2018, I returned July 4th 2020. It was nerfed by September. We have previous combat history and skills to draw from, using room wide attacks that stack and stun from a distance has never been okay since the beginning of the game, even more so during lag. This type of skill was solved years ago when Boulderblast got nerfed into dust and should've never been allowed to be remade. Don't listen to those defending Creeping, they don't know how combat works.
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)
I saw some talk about IHC needing to tone it down and apply self-restraint.
After SL had ran from the combat field, we went to the next best battlefield in Orgcredits, and you guys have ran from that too.
You were not defeated by the mechanics or an admin decision, you defeated yourselves.
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.
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.
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.
So there is a skill that was known to only be great in lag, the lag that only comes around once a year, the players warned the admins that it would be a problem, that skill was used over and over again during that lag, and people are still upset that their actions had consequences? :shocked pickachu face:
Bombs are very easily envoyable, only one bomb per area at a time, similar to how Pollute/Maelstrom/Cyclone/Fury or any of the other Mage tertiary works. This also allows the skill itself to possibly receive upgrades since it isn't an issue in group combat. And also Ayisdra, if an Org maxed out Plays, Books, Designs and won in Psychodrama, they would've came in 3rd place last year without any timequake, revolt or flare points.
2014/04/19 01:38:01 - Leolamins drained 2000000 power to raise Silvanus as a Vernal Ascendant.
2014/07/23 05:01:29 - Silvanus drained 2000000 power to raise Munsia as a Vernal Ascendant.
2015/05/24 06:03:07 - Silvanus drained 2000000 power to raise Arimisia as a Vernal Ascendant.
2015/05/24 06:03:58 - Silvanus drained 2000000 power to raise Lavinya as a Vernal Ascendant.
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.
I would love to recognize the everloving crap out of the other side in fights. Big +1 from me.
A slight mechanical reward, and will help to pervade an atmosphere of sportsmanship rather than the silent shutout I'm sure a lot of people feel when they get shut down by larger numbers.
The side with fewer players will see those individual players more likely to get recognized, and in greater amounts each, so it's even got an anti-snowball effect.
Just spitballing, maybe even remove the automatic TQ dailycredits and instead give the player a timequake recognize to hand those dailycredits off to an enemy combatant or something.
Ahh, but I'm rambling a bit, and I'm sure it's open to abuse. And it's not a simple thing. But I really, really like the concept.
Even just opening up the recognize requirements to allow PK justification, I suppose, would allow this in effect. But one of the things I like most about it is that regardless of how small this change would be, it's something the Admin could let the players do to move the needle just a little bit on a regular basis, make things just a little more palatable, etc.
I personally am very saddened that people just dismiss all the effort and work we have put into pre ascension because there's one skill that may or may not be overpowered ( as I said countless times before, I don't know it enough to judge it ) and apparently because someone in the past did the other side wrong, we need to suffer in hell for it? People, this is a game and we play it with each other. Please stop, this is really making me sad to read. I think I'll take some absence from this thread.
This is...not at all what was being said. In fact, people (like Maligorn, for example) are saying that the current playerbase of Glomdoring (and SL at large) should not suffer the consequences of the actions of those before them.
The former lead combatants of SL gambled hard on exploiting wyrdenwood creeping. This did not pay off in the long run. We're now left to pick up the pieces to ensure that 1. the current SL orgs are revitalized, and 2. conflict systems in the game stop encouraging the "winner-take-all" philosophy.
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).
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.
Comments
It isn't accomplishing anything. I'm reading things but I'm processing and thinking about things, so I'm likely not going to have many responses at the moment. Lets try to keep it civil.
I've always been a proponent of trying to listen to everyone. It's no different here, you may disagree with opinions being shared, but we don't need to throw around terms like toxic etc. That isn't helping anything.
The last Town Hall I'm seeing was at 7pm pst on a Monday (23/09/2019)? Which translates to midday on a Tuesday in Sydney for me, 2pm in Auckland, and London would be like 3am. That's a lot of people at work/school/sleeping/etc. Despite issues, the forums are realistically more inclusive for a world-wide player base than a real-time meeting which can exclude people who can't be there and potentially even people present who just don't get the air time to speak.
Personally, surveys can work well.
They're not time-dependent, you can get some responses to targetted questions, have some space for people to write out walls of text, etc. Stuff isn't being posted for others to pick at, people can just say what they're feeling. The only thing is that it'd probably need a field for registration email to compare and ensure it's one response per registration unless it's somehow created in-game. But people also can't really respond to points other people are making which can be good and bad.
This is a lack of mechanic issue. When population imbalance happens during a certain time zone, combat is unbalanced. No one wants to be glorified bashing denizens for the other side.
In general, IHC has more combatants that rank their desire for combat high on the reasons they play the game while SL seems to have more that focus on other aspects of the game. There is nothing wrong with this, but the imbalance of combat-focused, heavily artied characters is making combat non-existent at least during the times I can play.
Complete denial of resources is something that worked into the culture more or less beginning at timequake release (to this degree). Some of the people that are directly responsible for instituting this vicious way of playing the game have now quit. People like Snald and Tarken essentially built up this toxic back and forth and now they've left their side high and dry because Ixion got a fancy name change and some extra power weight, and faster domoth speed.
So ridiculous. I know it seems petty to blame the "losers" (not losers at all, see Parhelion), but Glomdoring spent several years pissing off most of the playerbase and now that behavior is coming back to roost.
The worst part being that Glomdoring has a completely different culture and playerbase now. They're being punished for the sins of people that decided to jump ship before they could get their just desserts.
Shorter TQs would only make it easier for the majority to not tire of controlling every TQ. It would actually add fuel to the fire of the current issues. It is hard to go sit in a TQ and twiddle your thumbs. The point of TQs was to create combat. If people get bored and tired of sitting in a TQ without resistance then that will cause the number of constant combatants to dwindle allowing the other side to eventually have more even numbers. I am completely against making TQs shorter. This is what lead me to alt on SL in order to try to have combat during my available play times.
Combat isn't not happening in TQs because of the length of the TQ. It is not happening because a majority of the time the quality/quantity of combatants that are willing to oppose the other side makes it almost impossible to successfully challenge. For example, SL normally has such a majority on American Saturday mornings that IHC doesn't have the force to oppose. Making a TQ shorter will not resolve the issue, but it will make it easier to recruit a bigger force to ensure the other side doesn't have a chance of opposition.
I dunno man, it's a little strange to say that the current players deserve to be treated in a way you consider to be toxic because some other players did the same. Personally I just think struggle is good for everyone. And that even "non-comms" should know a little bit about their skills and defenses.
I think I probably answered this in my last post, but I think I'll address the question here anyway. I think, right now, in this current state of Lusternia, we can't afford to behave this way. In games with much higher populations, it doesn't matter if one or two people get burned off by getting absolutely denied, having people ravenously attempt to stifle anything they do. Here, now, we can't afford burning off any players. I don't want to walk on eggshells around my opponents, and I don't want to treat them like they're precious and untouchable, believe me, but I mean...at least for now, this mindset (however valid it is in competitive games) needs to take a beat so we can go back to murdering each other happily a few months down the road. Because right now, there's barely PK to be had.
With this ["conflict mechanics"] and also the economic problems, I think that the fundamental problem is the underlying philosophy that prioritizes direct, zero sum, adversarial competition as the most valuable/virtuous activity, the best. Tweaking the ways in which that conflict plays out won't really fix the problem that is the spirit of that conflict.
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.
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.
The former lead combatants of SL gambled hard on exploiting wyrdenwood creeping. This did not pay off in the long run. We're now left to pick up the pieces to ensure that 1. the current SL orgs are revitalized, and 2. conflict systems in the game stop encouraging the "winner-take-all" philosophy.
Explorer (80%), Achiever (53%), Socializer (53%), Killer (13%)
Bartle Taxonomy
(test yourself)
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.
Explorer (80%), Achiever (53%), Socializer (53%), Killer (13%)
Bartle Taxonomy
(test yourself)