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Could lusternian lore benefit from being codified and made accessible to new players?
The allure of lusternia is that you get to write your story into the game. The problem is it's hard to do that when 95% of its player generated content is held in the hands of its long time players who were at those events and had the logs to prove it. If they stop playing, it all vanishes. Lusternia will loses and is essentially reset back to what ever is on the official forums, website and in the library system. - It's fragmented and lacking the context needed to understand it.
The only way to learn about it is to go ask an older player and hope that they are not busy or are in the mood. (they usually are) or to read the events post in the news system IG. The news posts state what happens, without any of the context needed to understand these events. It's not a pleasant experience to marathon a huge bout of reading, on a mudclient IG. Anyone who plays lusternia, is by default a bookworm.
I suggest that players would be rewarded on at the organization and character level for filing cleaned up admin approved, logs of player run events. Rewards could be dailycredits or a boost to daily credits, and credit bonuses across the org for players who wish to buy credits or credit rewards to the organization. By default, these logs can only be viewed by the members of that organization only; unless an admin + org leader agrees to make it public. Public logs are put on the small subsection of the official website, to give new players a taste of what the game is like now. (i.e motivate to play! My stuff made it into the game and will remain there for all time, until it is taken down).
Lusternian science makes no sense. I mean we can answer complex questions about god/commune/city motivations but we can't answer questions like "what does Hallifax run on?" or simple ones like "Do we have magnets?" or ones like "what kind of tech or gnomish weapons?"
Designers are going to have an easier time of figuring out what's permitted and what's not. Admins don't have to keep fielding questions of what's
permitted and what's not.
Then on a meta level - why can't we remove the taint IG?
Obviously, the producers don't have to reveal everything, but there should be internal consistancy.
(I don't want to have to do a massive research project just to come up with a nuanced character that does not default to the lusterian/IRE standard of "crazy brain dead snugglebunny with no parents, who humps offscreen" or 'Crazy blood thirsty combat warrior with no parents". or "I hate the opposing org because ...PATRIOTISM!" or if you get a new new player who is playing his/her/their first mud we're going to get a character that is "um...taint is bad" or "the light is good?" while asking basic questions like "How do I operate this game?" and then quitting because no one wants to engage, and it's no much to read. Figuring out possible philosophical angles for your character is going to be easier if you've got access to how lusternia works on a meta and physical level. )
Guys please discuss!
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(c) Iron Realms Entertainment 2012.
Comments
Typically, we grab that info along with other lore we've got and extrapolate.
Some of that other lore is stuff like the Nature wars, for example, which has only really been communicated through snatches of visions. We've got a kinda outline of what happened but it's not quite to the same level as the Taint or Elder wars where we have relatively lengthy stories covering those periods.
With that in mind, I think a good launching point could be to have stuff on the website to introduce those story threads, potentially also a help file and somehow linked in character creation.
You could lay out plot hooks, character considerations, faqs, etc to kinda provide a broader overview of things you could use to ground your character's identity in.
Seren might have some stuff about Moon and Hart, maybe one of the faqs is about the Ancestors (i.e yes they are ghosts serens varyingly summon, talk to, or otherwise work with), maybe there's another about if Serenwilde are the "good forest", etc.
In that you could lay out breadcrumbs that can then point you off in the direction of different things you might want to look at or stuff that your character might like to focus on and learn about.
Yes.
Like... one of the questions circling around right now is around the nature of undead with regards to divinus/excorable weakness/resistance because all four possible combinations exist in examples with no connection to the taint.
A newbie getting started doesn't really need access to that, something about the Immanidivinus and Excoroperditio being two kinda cosmic level forces maybe but not super in-depth.
We have several ways of recording history and events within the game itself already, from quests to books to newspost.
Additionally, part of the fun is discovering all the lore and digging deep into where it's available.
Codifying it, as is being proposed seems like just another addition that takes work to curate and maintain when we already have systems designed to really take care of it.
Also lots of player-run events aren't necessarily relevant to the playerbase as a whole like world events are. i'm curious what sort of stuff you think should be recorded that isn't currently being recorded? But i still repeat, org newsposts in particular, awesome idea to utilize.
One thing I've considered previously is actually a wordpress.
By having everything a post or page, you can use related content stuff to explore and link things dynamically, there's even ways to set it up to make it tag news posts.