On the mechanics of raiding - reflections and brainstorming

Aeldra · July 2018

This post has been sitting in the back of my mind for a while and has nothing, in priority, to do with any recent raids whatsoever. I know tension is a little high right now, but I would ask people to focus in this hopefully fruitful discussion on the -mechanical- aspects of the raid mechanic in lusternia and how it could be improved to make less cumbersome and tedious. Please leave any personal animosities out of it.

Now to the topic and problem at hand, as to how I see it at the moment. Maybe I'll use something fictional to display the Problem.

Let us enter Joe the Cookie Jar Raider. Joe's a member of the licorice dynasty and regularly attacks the hidden settlement of the cookies.

Whenever Joe feels like going to look whether there's not more cookies to be had, he has the following advantages at his side:

- He has complete control over when he will raid, being able to choose easily a situation that will undoubtly favorable to him, including choosing times when his licorice group has superior numbers.

- As death does not really mean anything to joe, all he is going to lose is a little essence and he'll back to life in no time, he doesn't need to fear any defenders as well.

- Joe has a sizable artifact pile, he's also rather skilled and knows when to retreat, further reducing any risk that is involved in being a raider. Joe knows that cookie ville has only a few spots where any guards may be in the way and can easily avoid them.

- Joe can either just focus on the loyals of cookieville, his knowledge and skill as well as the artifact pile he has allows him to easily avoid or endure any attacks long enough to get the loyals he want slain. Furthermore, if he's looking to fight other players, he can possibly snatch a few favorable situations where he'll score a good kill or two, or even inspire an entertaining battle.

- Shoud joe still be slain, he can rejoin the battle moments later, either being resurrected by his allies or by phoenixing and buffing back up, netting him a small power loss if anything.

Lets look at the people associated with cookie ville now:

- The defendants of cookieville have two choices. They either can ignore what Joe is up to, or they can not. If they ignore, caring about their characters, they have to admit their characters are cowards and unable to defend their cookie ville from raiders or find some RP way around the fact that they're not responding. For some of them that leaves a bad taste in their mouth while others can simply look past it, CONFIG LOYALSAYS is a thing for cookie ville members after all and their loyals will be back in a little while.

- Or, they can choose to defend, which forces them to drop everything they are currently doing, untangling from RP, talking to godmin, hunting, influencing, whatever to respond to the possible thread of Joe, who may just be after their loyals and who may actually be looking after a fight.

- in this case, they don't have much to lose aside of their loyals. Death means little to them as well.

- They however do have no win condition, unlike Joe. They either have to defend till their loyals are dead, joe has lost interest, or the tire of dying, Killing Joe or chasing after him.

- Some of the defenders to get enjoyment out of tackling Joe and his possible accomplices and if a battle arrises of it, most people will enjoy it. However, if Joe is only after their loyals and will disappear as soon as someone is up to challenge him, most residents of cookieville will eventually tire.

Summing the above up, the defendants are in a disadvantaged position in terms of raiding. Cookie Ville members have only the choice to either ignore or comply and have no clear win condition.

If neccessary, for the following conclusions I have drawn for myself from observation, compare this setup with any other conflict event that lusternia has and the most glaring thing that you'll notice that unlike in other conflict setups, in raiding, one side has no 'win' condition.

This nets me to the main point of making this post. I have observed, both for myself and others, that not having a clear win condition, a clear condition when you're done and you've either lost or won and the event is just done and you can focus on other things again, that is just missing. If joe so wants, he can keep hitting Cookie Ville for as long as he can play, forcing the inhabitants to make choice after choice on whether they'll ignore him or not. From what I have heard of the many conversations that were had on this topic over the years, a good percentage of people are worn out by this, demoralized and eventually find themselves in a state of lethargy. And this is not from one org, mind you. Aside of the fictional Cookie Ville, I've heard from people of Serenwilde, Gaudiguch, Glomdoring, Magnagora, Hallifax. I'm not sure I heard it from anyone in Celest, but then celest hasn't been hit often in the last year or so.

Which now leads me up to the TL;DR on my wall of text: Having no win/lose condition on raiding is detrimental for each orgs health and willingness to engage in conflict. i would like to find some sort of win/lose condition for defenders that would allow them to actually walk away from a defense after a certain amount of time feeling like "yay, we've been them off." or "They've beaten us for now, but we've done well and we know where we need to improve." I would like to brainstorm ideas as to how such a solution could look like.

One last thing, I know a certain percentage of the playerbase is not able to relate to such reasonings, because they are driving by a different kind of thought construct as to what they get out of the game. I ask you people, please contribute as well, maybe we can find a solution together that we could present to admin.

Sadly, my own ideas so far felt really inadequate. Raising death penalities and introducing artificial cooldowns feel like they're not going to encourage a healthy conflict situation and would rather just turn people away. I'm curious to hear your thoughts and I apologize in advance for the wall of text!

Synl · July 2018

Good game design should not be about punishing players, but rather rewarding them. Or punishing them in a 'no, but' manner. So not only against raising death penalties, but would be ok with just removing loss on death altogether. There's a reason non-Mud PvP games don't have exp loss on death... it's dumb, it's ancient game design.

RP excuses asides, because the game is super RP light from I observed in my time returned, I think players need a certain amount of maturity to just go 'Hey, it's a game, I'm not going to partake in this thing I do not enjoy.' Like I refuse to engage in the (horribly designed imo) aetherbubble battles because sitting there spamming two different commands for an hour is not fun. The RP of the character is hurt, I guess, but considering the character spends hours standing still in a single spot while his player chats on OOC channels, uh... let's be a little more real when we talk about 'but my rp!!' please. Every player regularly bends their RP to fit whatever it is they want to do. This is just one more instance of that.

That rant aside, why not have it where if you die in enemy territory x times, you are unable to enter that territory for y amount of time? Is that something the game code can support?

Jolanthe · July 2018

Adding conditions/restrictions probably won't help much. It will either annoy people, or create set windows where only X or Y can occur. I feel like this is more of an issue of playstyles not meshing well, which is always going to have some issues in an environment where conflict is meant to be open and welcome at any time.

Most conflict is off-plane, on Ethereal/Elemental/Cosmic, and rarely on Astral outside of wild nodes. What all do you have to do in these places? Apart from gathering fae, essence for power, or draining power nodes, not too much.

I think it'd be better to just have more stuff to do there.

Make a quest item that you can drop in your territory to have a permanent, self-resetting pit trap for an hour. Dress them with org-specific flavour if you like.

Let people gather materials to make trinkets or vessels that allow wandering demons/angels/whatever to be temporarily invincible - so long as the duration is a good chunk shorter than the cooldown on the quest, it should A) Not make people give up on raiding entirely

Force more strategy on where and when you get said trinkets, and not make it feel like it is a chore that must be done -every- time in order to maintain perpetual invuln (since that'd be impossible).

Those archways on Ethereal? What if there was a way to tune them to make entry for different people slower, or entangle/stun whatever on entry?

Make acquiring and gathering all these sorts of things exclusive to being off-plane. Make more neutral elemental/cosmic territory as necessary to help facilitate this.

We need more things to do off-prime either way, and adding more risk/reward incentives to being in pk-free zones should help make the game more interesting and exciting for everyone.

Maybe it'd be cool if power-discretionaries were removed entirely, or the cost bumped up in place of having the option to quest for the same effect for "free".

Sorry if this feels like a hijack, but I feel like a lot of raiding ultimately comes from when PK-heavy folk feel like they have nothing else to pursue/thwart otherwise. Then this bleeds over to ew-PK folks feeling beset and like they are required to go deal with these things in their territories with no other outlet.

If they had things to do/pursue in pk-free zones that didn't involve stepping directly into someone else's "territory", and was more meaningful than just draining power off of a node (ala astral), I think that'd be a fantastic step in the right direction.

Karlach · July 2018

The solutions proposed would be fine if the majority of raids didn't occur after the other side's fighters had mostly logged off.

Not pointing fingers as every org and alliance is historically guilty of doing it, but these aren't PK fights, they're glorified PvE bashes with very little risk attached.

Synl · July 2018

Karlach said:

The solutions proposed would be fine if the majority of raids didn't occur after the other side's fighters had mostly logged off.

Not pointing fingers as every org and alliance is historically guilty of doing it, but these aren't PK fights, they're glorified PvE bashes with very little risk attached.

What about a system where to enter enemy territory, you need x amount of players belonging to that org online. So, say for every 1.5 people online, one enemy can enter the territory. 3 Glom citizens online means 2 Glom enemies can enter Glom territory. This makes smobs kill impossible under current balancing, but we could just rebalance the actual mobs and defensive abilities around the new system. This would only affect who could enter the territory, not kick them out afterwards - so once those two enemies are in your territory, until they leave or are expelled, you can't just log off to prevent their shenanigans. Even if we do get people logging off to prevent larger raids, that's fine - assuming the purpose of a raid is to engage in PvP.

Aramel · July 2018

Synl said:

Even if we do get people logging off to prevent larger raids, that's fine - assuming the purpose of a raid is to engage in PvP.

I can see a situation in which newbies and/or non-com RPers are pressured by orgmates to log off in this instance - probably a perverse incentive tbh, given how low population is already.

Karlach · July 2018

Synl said:

Karlach said:

The solutions proposed would be fine if the majority of raids didn't occur after the other side's fighters had mostly logged off.

Not pointing fingers as every org and alliance is historically guilty of doing it, but these aren't PK fights, they're glorified PvE bashes with very little risk attached.

What about a system where to enter enemy territory, you need x amount of players belonging to that org online. So, say for every 1.5 people online, one enemy can enter the territory. 3 Glom citizens online means 2 Glom enemies can enter Glom territory. This makes smobs kill impossible under current balancing, but we could just rebalance the actual mobs and defensive abilities around the new system. This would only affect who could enter the territory, not kick them out afterwards - so once those two enemies are in your territory, until they leave or are expelled, you can't just log off to prevent their shenanigans. Even if we do get people logging off to prevent larger raids, that's fine - assuming the purpose of a raid is to engage in PvP.

Again, there's a large part of the game that isn't either interested in PvP or struggles to get involved and understand what is happening, especially when most of the time the people raiding are the 1% who are decked to the nines in artifacts and wonder items. They essentially become the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.

All you would see is a group wait till the majority of people around are an easy fight , then strike. All this would accomplish is the feeling of those who can't fight, to log out as they're causing their org problems by merely existing.

Synl · July 2018

If the problem is a mindset one, then players just need to readjust their priorities and realize the game is a game. Not much else I can say on the matter, but I'm very much the lusternia is a game crowd, and understand that, as a recent poll indicated, that for others it is a way of life.

Aeldra · July 2018

Synl said:

If the problem is a mindset one, then players just need to readjust their priorities and realize the game is a game. Not much else I can say on the matter, but I'm very much the lusternia is a game crowd, and understand that, as a recent poll indicated, that for others it is a way of life.

That is not what does happen though. What happens is that people are leaving. deciding, because the game is a game, they don't want to be subject to mechanics that they have no control / counter over and need to simply suffer them.. Its not that they change their mindset to ignore those mechanics, they find something thats more fun to play. And its been happening for a while now, the populace hasn't exactly increased.

The issue with raiding is one that, aside my personal views, I hear at least brought up once a week, maybe once every two weeks at the worst. It is an issue that is present and that bothers people. Telling people to just change their mindset, I'm sorry, won't fix anything. We can of course chose to ignore those people, which will lead to either them arranging themselves somehow with the situation or they'll leave and go to a game where such things are not pestering them at a constant rate. As someone who does enjoy the majority of this game a lot, I much rather make an attempt to find a solution that works then watch people get frustrated and leave.

edit: corrected spelling , clarified slightly what I meant with 'in control'

Synl · July 2018

The issue of raiding was being brought up 10 years ago, too. But the game still exists. So I remain unconvinced that it is a problem. Perhaps it is simply an issue of perception? If the population is being lost, then it is clearly at a rate slow enough to not really matter, no?

Aeldra · July 2018

Synl said:

The issue of raiding was being brought up 10 years ago, too. But the game still exists. So I remain unconvinced that it is a problem. Perhaps it is simply an issue of perception? If the population is being lost, then it is clearly at a rate slow enough to not really matter, no?

As I said, some people view the game from a different perspective and understanding why it irks others does not seem to be easy for them. I don't expect everyone to get it, but I'll not continue to try to explain to you something that is not valid from your perspective. Your opinion is valid, yet I find it a little sad that you do not seem to want to try to understand the points offered.

I have a mindset where I say if someone has a valid complaint about a mechanic, I would try to see whether I could relate to their point and see if there's a solution for them (and the others affected by it) to try to allow them to enjoy the game alongside me.

Really, what is there to lose to try to adjust a mechanic in a way that encourage to engage? Wouldn't it be better for everyone if people would actually enjoy defending their territory instead of utterly hating it? Personally I've chosen to never raid simply because the mechanic, in my opinion, is that bad and I don't want to push those bad feelings to other people. You'd see me raid a good fair bit of time, if the mechanics were more rewarding for defenders. As is, I feel I'd simply be hitting people in the gut who don't deserve to be.

Enya · July 2018

I agree that a core problem with raids is that there is no lose condition for raiders, however there IS a win condition for defenders: the raiders get bored. Often times, even if you end up killing off raider groups they just come back and back and back until the excitement of raiding doesn't outweigh the utter boredom of bashing anymore: congrats you've outbored the enemy!

There have been umpteen threads about this, and there's always someone coming in to say "Why should we change anything, the game still exists right? Just log off!". I put this forward: the game would be better if the primary method for dispelling raids wasn't to make the raiders bored enough to go away.

Versalean · July 2018

I just wonder if we're underestimating just how quick and easy it is for Sir Raidsalot and Lord Hatesaraid to use any hard-coded raiding mechanic in a way that wasn't intended to either frustrate the attackers or the defenders. MKO came up against just such a problem (i.e., uneven numbers and unequal attacker-versus-defender reward structure) and had a few stabs at addressing it. None of them was particularly effective, and MKO has now passed away. Honestly, I'm not saying there's no solution, but I am saying that it will take infinitely more effort to find a solution than it will for people to find solutions to the solutions.

One small point I'll make is that if we could sort out classes we might have a smaller issue with raids. When That Person is raiding Glomdoring at 0800 GMT and my choices are to either go and fight him solo as a Wyrdenwood or pretend that I don't care, it's difficult to find the fun in the situation. Give me a viable kill strat and I'll have a go, and what is presently a one-sided situation could turn into an enjoyable exchange. To be clear, this isn't a stab at That Person. I'd be doing exactly the same thing if I had a decent kit and/or didn't suck at pvp.

Enya · July 2018

In the scenario where you 1v1 fight the raider and kill him, at what point does he go away, letting you get back to whatever you were doing before?

Aeldra · July 2018

Versalean said:

One small point I'll make is that if we could sort out classes we might have a smaller issue with raids. When That Person is raiding Glomdoring at 0800 GMT and my choices are to either go and fight him solo as a Wyrdenwood or pretend that I don't care, it's difficult to find the fun in the situation. Give me a viable kill strat and I'll have a go, and what is presently a one-sided situation could turn into an enjoyable exchange. To be clear, this isn't a stab at That Person. I'd be doing exactly the same thing if I had a decent kit and/or didn't suck at pvp.

I'll easily say that getting things sorted out in general in terms of classes and class drawbacks and cross-org imbalances will lessen the problem somewhat for some people, sure. However, even if you score 20 kills on your Sir Raidsalot, he'll simply come back a 21th. time. @Enya has put it in a very concise and sumemd up way; your only way right now as a defender is to outbore the enemy.

Enya · July 2018

Raids need a lose condition, and if you win or lose a raid you should be forced to go away for a while. That way, even if you stomp through you win and stop monopolizing defender's time. If they're interested in still fighting they can come fight you on neutral ground but it's no longer unilaterally decided.

Karlach · July 2018

Would help some if Nexus Guardians weren't so awful.

I'd be happier to see them have a series of conditions where they can be invoked, possibly for a raised cost, but being far more effective.

Ultimately the issue is there's no tangible loss condition for the aggressor, if their deaths came with a risk to their org, people may think twice before engaging.

Or.. just encourage more attacking when no one else is around to defend in any capacity.

Enya · July 2018

That would be neat, but it's an intervention that doesn't change any of the underlying decisions: the core calculation is the same, there's just more factors in the con side of the table. We've been through swings of that, where there were NO raids because there were a bunch of con factors, and extreme raids because there were too few. IMO just sliding back and forth on that spectrum has failed to work for a long time.

Part of that is that a lot of the ways it has been calibrated are indirect, like adding essence costs assuming that the raiders *care* about essence and assuming a baseline rate of generating essence. If the goal with the mechanics is to have a cooldown period on raids, as is presumably the goal of the current stacking essence penalties, just institute a direct penalty IMO.

Synl · July 2018

Aeldra said:

Synl said:

The issue of raiding was being brought up 10 years ago, too. But the game still exists. So I remain unconvinced that it is a problem. Perhaps it is simply an issue of perception? If the population is being lost, then it is clearly at a rate slow enough to not really matter, no?

As I said, some people view the game from a different perspective and understanding why it irks others does not seem to be easy for them. I don't expect everyone to get it, but I'll not continue to try to explain to you something that is not valid from your perspective. Your opinion is valid, yet I find it a little sad that you do not seem to want to try to understand the points offered.

I have a mindset where I say if someone has a valid complaint about a mechanic, I would try to see whether I could relate to their point and see if there's a solution for them (and the others affected by it) to try to allow them to enjoy the game alongside me.

Really, what is there to lose to try to adjust a mechanic in a way that encourage to engage? Wouldn't it be better for everyone if people would actually enjoy defending their territory instead of utterly hating it? Personally I've chosen to never raid simply because the mechanic, in my opinion, is that bad and I don't want to push those bad feelings to other people. You'd see me raid a good fair bit of time, if the mechanics were more rewarding for defenders. As is, I feel I'd simply be hitting people in the gut who don't deserve to be.

Except you haven't tried to understand my point of view at all? You've simply said 'Your opinion is valid. I don't get it, but it is'. Whoop de doo, I did the exact same thing. I also proposed two separate solutions to two separate problems in this very thread, and you haven't addressed either of them.

Problem: Raiding needs a wincon for defenders.
Solution: If you die in enemy territory x times, you are unable to enter for y time.
Problem with the solution: ???

Problem: People who are raiding are not doing so for some noble PvP cause and are instead just doing it because it is easy for them.
Solution: Game should disallow entering enemy territory unless some condition is met. Ie. population is similar, or retire value is similar across attackers vs defenders.
Problem with the solution: People who are non-combatants would feel bad because they would be costing their org by adding to the population count (though that is why I now propose retire-value) without adding to combat ability.
Counterpoint: People who want to feel bad will feel bad. The above is an extremely unhealthy attitude to have, and you need to take care of yourself. You are not responsible for the happiness of others before your own. This is a bad mindset to be in, and there are bigger problems at stake here than Lusternia.

I maintain that if a problem isn't actually causing a game harm, it is a problem of perception and vocalization. Population complaints happen in every single PvP game there is, or any niche competitive game (MTG, Overwatch, Warhammer, what have you), and until the numbers match up with the complaints, that's all they are: complaints.

Ejderha · July 2018

Synl said:

The issue of raiding was being brought up 10 years ago, too. But the game still exists. So I remain unconvinced that it is a problem. Perhaps it is simply an issue of perception? If the population is being lost, then it is clearly at a rate slow enough to not really matter, no?

My grandmother was diagnosed with cancer 10 years ago, but she is still hanging on. Therefore, by your logic, I should conclude cancer is not a problem, just a matter of perception.

Enya · July 2018

Locking people out of a territory is a decent partial solution, though attaching that to dying doesn't necessarily work perfectly. It's something that I've advocated in different forms, however...

You actually haven't put forwards that it's not causing the game harm, you've just pointed out that the game still exists and that therefore it's not an issue. If your core contribution is to come into the thread and say that everyone is a complainer and that this isn't a real problem because it's not an existential problem on a RL level please go [away]!

Guardians are an interesting side-project. I don't think that improving them will really address the core issue of raids, but their point is to give noncoms and new players a means by which to engage with raids, which is cool. I think they haven't really been touched in forever because engaging in defensive raids is a chore and why would you want to pull new players into that..

Versalean · July 2018

I think we can quite safely say that raiding mechanics are a real problem in Lusternia, and not a matter of 'perception and vocalization'.

Synl · July 2018

Ejderha said:

Synl said:

The issue of raiding was being brought up 10 years ago, too. But the game still exists. So I remain unconvinced that it is a problem. Perhaps it is simply an issue of perception? If the population is being lost, then it is clearly at a rate slow enough to not really matter, no?

My grandmother was diagnosed with cancer 10 years ago, but she is still hanging on. Therefore, by your logic, I should conclude cancer is not a problem, just a matter of perception.

Except there are those with cancer who do not exist any longer. Perhaps cancer is not a problem for your grandmother, that would be the more apt logical analysis here. But it is also not too far from Godwin's law - is there one that exists for cancer yet? Come on man, let's be real here.

Nelras · July 2018

Synl said:

Ejderha said:

Synl said:

The issue of raiding was being brought up 10 years ago, too. But the game still exists. So I remain unconvinced that it is a problem. Perhaps it is simply an issue of perception? If the population is being lost, then it is clearly at a rate slow enough to not really matter, no?

My grandmother was diagnosed with cancer 10 years ago, but she is still hanging on. Therefore, by your logic, I should conclude cancer is not a problem, just a matter of perception.

Except there are those with cancer who do not exist any longer. Perhaps cancer is not a problem for your grandmother, that would be the more apt logical analysis here. But it is also not too far from Godwin's law - is there one that exists for cancer yet? Come on man, let's be real here.

So what you are saying is that if it doesn't (kill you/make you leave the game), it isn't a problem at all and should just be ignored? That and that it is not a problem because (other people are alive/the game still exists), it doesn't matter even when it is a problem?

Moi · July 2018

Stupid suggestion: after the first time a raider kills a given org-loyal mob, their name is added to a list for that mob for X time. On future respawns, that mob will run away and hide rather than engaging the raider, denying them anything to raid until X time. (This doesn't prevent kick raids, but a separate solution is can be introduced for that problem.) The raider now has a completion condition (kill everything) and will presumably leave after that is completed rather than sit around and wait for respawns that they can't kill.

E: Note that this is already in the game for supermobs. Once you kill the Demon Lords, you can't kill them again for like two IRL weeks. Implementing this with a one day timer for regular raiding mobs wouldn't be too big of a stretch, I think.

Enya · July 2018

While I'm really [not] enjoying this derail...

Shaddus · July 2018

I'm not going to lie, I didn't read the OP. After about two or three lines, my eyes started to unfocus. No offense

I think a lot of peoples' problems is that they care too much. Can't beat the raiders? Shrug and come back to rebuild when they aren't around. If someone calls you a coward, snub them and go about your business. You aren't here in Lusternia for them, you're here for yourself. If people are kicking ladies/lords/daughters/whatevers, just ignore them. They aren't actually after those mobs, they're either after some easy pk to make their imaginary e-peen swell, or they're poking a wasp nest because of the same reason but don't actually want to fight. Don't let them piss you off, that's what they want to do.

Steingrim and I were actually chatting about this yesterday. It does take entirely too long to rebuild (add motes) to each org's shield once it's put back up. I'd like to suggest that if a shield is under....maybe 20% of max, adding motes to it does double or triple the amount until it's over that 20% of max.

Nelras · July 2018

Trying to get this back on topic, what would pvpers/people who engage in raiding think of any of the following ideas? What about people who only defend (/because they feel they have to)

NPC defenders of varying numbers/strengths depending on how many defenders are online/active.
Explicit time limits on raids/ smob raids.
Having different conditions in place for smob raids/having to declare smob raids somehow and them having a fail state.
Increasing damage/maluses over time for attackers based on how long they have spent on the enemy plane recently.
Increased death timers/ not being able to enter enemy planes for a time after dying.
Increasing smob strength depending on how many active defenders there are.

Just a few random ideas that came into my head. If the answer is that they are terrible, that is also perfectly valid feedback. It would be nice to know why though.

Aeldra · July 2018

Shaddus said:

I'm not going to lie, I didn't read the OP. After about two or three lines, my eyes started to unfocus. No offense

I think a lot of peoples' problems is that they care too much. Can't beat the raiders? Shrug and come back to rebuild when they aren't around. If someone calls you a coward, snub them and go about your business. You aren't here in Lusternia for them, you're here for yourself. If people are kicking ladies/lords/daughters/whatevers, just ignore them. They aren't actually after those mobs, they're either after some easy pk to make their imaginary e-peen swell, or they're poking a wasp nest because of the same reason but don't actually want to fight. Don't let them piss you off, that's what they want to do.

I'll easily admit that I am not good in formating things, I have groaned a few times at rereading. Sorry about that.

While in principle what you're saying is the 'to go solution' in the game and what I suppose everyone who's still around and does care has adapted, it isn't something that I find neccessarly good. For me personally the problem is not that raids are happening, I do enjoy my share of pk here and there. The main problem for me is: I have five people, three of them newbies/half newbs. Facing two or three people out to raid. We -want- to engage them, give them a fight and drive them off. Can we? Only through boring them. And that is the issue that I have with raids.

Enya · July 2018

I don't think it supports a very cohesive roleplay environment when the key intervention for dealing with raiders is to ignore them or pretend they dont exist. Sure, that will always be a thing to some extent, particularly for insults etc., the kind of stuff it makes sense to just ignore, but the game itself shouldn't support trolls .

Shaddus · July 2018

Aeldra said:

Shaddus said:

I'm not going to lie, I didn't read the OP. After about two or three lines, my eyes started to unfocus. No offense

I think a lot of peoples' problems is that they care too much. Can't beat the raiders? Shrug and come back to rebuild when they aren't around. If someone calls you a coward, snub them and go about your business. You aren't here in Lusternia for them, you're here for yourself. If people are kicking ladies/lords/daughters/whatevers, just ignore them. They aren't actually after those mobs, they're either after some easy pk to make their imaginary e-peen swell, or they're poking a wasp nest because of the same reason but don't actually want to fight. Don't let them piss you off, that's what they want to do.

I'll easily admit that I am not good in formating things, I have groaned a few times at rereading. Sorry about that.

While in principle what you're saying is the 'to go solution' in the game and what I suppose everyone who's still around and does care has adapted, it isn't something that I find neccessarly good. For me personally the problem is not that raids are happening, I do enjoy my share of pk here and there. The main problem for me is: I have five people, three of them newbies/half newbs. Facing two or three people out to raid. We -want- to engage them, give them a fight and drive them off. Can we? Only through boring them. And that is the issue that I have with raids.

I'm the same way. I hope you didn't see my post as a jab at you

No, I get it. You want to be able to drive people off, not just as RP but to give yourself and your allies peace of mind. I'm not saying you shouldn't want those things so much as saying that sometimes you just can't win, and that's ok. You aren't lessened as a commune leader or guild leader or "go-to person" because you aren't as coordinated or artifacted as the people raiding you. You aren't less of a player, or less "invested" just because someone else heavily invests in PVP and you don't.

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On the mechanics of raiding - reflections and brainstorming

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