Since this seems to cyclically come up, lets get a guage on where you'd like to see things go. The conflict quests were designed as a mechanism to give goals that impact the world. If players would prefer not to have these quests, we can certainly consider removing them. This would entail:

* Making all Supernals, Demon Lords and Nature Avatars permanently invincible.
* Disabling the Emperor/Marilynth quest.
* Disabling the Moon/Night quest.
* Disabling the Stag/Crow quest (though its disabled now, we were eventually going to reinstate it).
* Removing calls for help from villages.
* Removing quests to gain essence from fae, angels and demons.
* Disabling the village influencing system.

I'm rather loathe to consider disabling village influencing but we'll consider it if there's an enormous demand to do so.

I do not approve at all. It's these conflict quests that add flavor to Lusternia. I don't want this game becoming another Achaea.

Why not just make the realm completely peaced, and have us all compete for the best tea sets? Because essentially this is whats going to end up happening. You are destroying everything that has conflict. Pking on prime leads to curses , village influencing is going more peaceful, you want to remove conflict quests, you want to make it pointless to even raid Celestia or basically ANYWHERE off prime...Honestly, where do you draw the line?

Personally, I think we need to go back to square one. Get rid of all the little fixes that have been made to things and rebuild conflict situations from the ground up.

First, get rid of Karma, blessings, and curses. Go back to the original avenger system. Get rid of all the 'little fixes' that Gwylifar mentioned in his post, that sort of thing.

With everything stripped down to its bare essentials you can better evaluate what went wrong and how to progress again.

As for how to achieve that, I'm unsure. If we removed conflict entirely the game would be hideously boring. If we toned it down too much it wouldn't really even matter. It will take some serious work.

Honestly, Estarra, I understand the stress you and other admins are experiencing, it's hard to please everyone.

That said, I don't think you should lessen conflict-based quests in Lusternia, really, what will we do then?

I don't think taking things out is the answer. I don't think there's really anything -wrong- with the quests. In fact, I think they're great. I even love the new influencing system. I just think that because the cities/communes aren't anywhere near being equal to each other (or are they? Who knows. I guess it depends on OOC times and stuff), that's what makes it seem like it's the quests that are the problem.

If it's becoming this much of a problem, maybe Magnagora just should lighten up. But maybe we should have it due to something in game, so that way we have a reason to do it. :/.

I don't want any of them removed. I want them to be more three-dimensional and more possible for the players to shape the directions they go. It's nigh-impossible to have any relationship between any pair of organizations other than complete alliance (guilds to their nations, for instance) or complete opposition (every nation to every other nation) and players are largely unable to affect this because every effort goes so against the grain of the world that any intermediate relationship is inherently untenable and cannot last. To put it in a nutshell, I want us to be allowed and made able to choose our relationships and our conflicts just a little more than we can now. (As with all of these suggestions, I am pushing towards balance, not towards the opposite extreme.)

My vote was for adjustments. Subtract it out if you like, since as someone who's already packing, my vote probably shouldn't count anymore.

Well it's a difficult decision, and I have no idea how I'd vote on that. I'll cast the vote in the morning when I'm more conscious.

The quests however, add a great deal of coolness and flavour to the game itself. The idea that you can interact with the dead Emperor who sprung the taint on the world, that you can tilt things in the world itself and have them matter for your city/commune.

The problem with having these opposing quests is the huge amount of conflict it draws in... and the side that has the most power will clearly win them much of the time, unless it happens to conveniently occur at a time when the dominant side was 'asleep', at a lucky moment of inactivity. Orgs in Lusternia tend to keep a very dominant grasp on things at all times. Celest might have got it's Kingdom, but that was mostly down to luck on the people we had and the people Mag didn't. It was no true reflection of our actual power at any point.

The problem is that the powerful orgs tend to remain powerful while the weaker ones stay weaker. Something more dynamic and fluid needs to happen. Mag slays a Supernal, that means we have to put a lot of time into hunting the required essence - and that's not exactly so fun. We raise Marilynth, they have to spend time trying to weaken and subdue her. These quests ideally need to be more 'fun' than sitting around waiting for respawns - which is what most of them come down to I'm afraid.

I don't want to see Magnagora divinely slapped for doing well, they didn't get there by cheating, they worked hard for it, and they won, Celest is crippled and mostly beaten. All of the systems that promote conflict in the game need to have a look at to make them more dynamic, more fluid, allow the underdogs chances to get back.

The main problem I see though which can't be touched at all, Magnagora has a powerful team of players who put a lot into the game. They have a lot of credit buying players, lots of players who will put in the time required to get something done. They have more of these player types than most people. You can't ask people to move around because they're too powerful, it's up to their choice where they play... and it's always hard to make the 'weaker' sides look appealing.

Thanks for reading the post... I should have perhaps babbled less, but I hope it helps..

Personally... the conflicts add a LOT of flavour to Lusternia, they do give those goals to work for, etc. However, when it's just something that happens repeatedly, it becomes another "Oh no, not this again..." or constant warfare in an attempt to "teach the other side a lesson." A lot of this has to do with players who get so into the roleplay that they take these quests very seriously, not wanting certain things to happen (as they should!), but then going far out of their way to try and enforce that outcome, to the detriment of all else involved.

For this reason, I am voting for "keep them, with some changes," but I would like to point out that my "some changes" is a lot more than a bandaid patch. Gwylifar has a lot of good ideas in this area. Some that I don't agree with, more that I do, but definitely worth listening to nonetheless.

Is this one of the hearts of the problem? Magnagora really has nothing else to do so they go beat up a few shiny angels? Some artisan needs to come up with a dartboard pattern or something...

I don't the problem lies with the quests or pk-conflicts at all. I think the problem lies with the players themeselves. Removing the quests will do nothing except to send WAY more people packing from here from shear boredom of having nothing to do. The quests are an intrical part of what makes Lusternia good. Having these conflicts that we can or have to partcipate in periodically makes for a break in what can become quite mundane during peacable times.

If you want to make Lusternia a chat room, then just shut it down and leave up these forums, because removing any pvp conflicts will do just that.

I have an idea!

Why not, say have celest fall from within, as in really fall, and the city becomes destroyed (aquamancers wire it up with their powers and they destroy the citys foundations, as they don't want it to fall into enemy hands)

top it off with a bit of seiging on magnagora's part, and then when celest falls, have hallifax or gaudiguch open (or both), which will attract new players to the game, and draw some out of magnagora then hallifax or gaudiguch will have some interesting RP.

Basically, in my mind Celest is "tainted" as in, it will always be seen as the underdog.

I find conflict quests to be one of the best aspects of Lusternia. Whereas it does suck to lose, everything eventually turns around. You and your faction will be up at some point and down at others.

The only problem that I see is that in response to bitching by unhappy persons, the administration is continually upgrading defenses against raiding. While this may be effective in the short term to quiet down the masses, it has created a situation where only a very few elite persons can successfully raid and participate in certain conflict quests like the dwarven villages. I can certainly understand the frustration when 99% of the general population has zero chance of participating in them. However, everyone is forced to deal with the consequences.

I would like to suggest more ways to participate in raids, primarily nonviolent means. For example, let's take the current Celestia topic. I think it would be neat if at an expense of time and energy, Celestians (who possess far less combatants than say Magnagora) could quest (something tedious but rewarding none-the-less) to help their Supernal allies. This could be done in a couple of ways from simply helping empower their lesser angel allies like the cherubs, a quest that would make archangels temporarily gain more afflictions and health, etc.

This way when someone tried to slaughter Celestia, Celestians could say... well, "we should have worked harder to empower the angels instead of sitting on our bums" instead of "I cannot fight a single person up there. Furthermore, if I walk into that room while they are attacking a Supernal, the room attack will probably kill me anyways. I am useless and can be of no help. I hate this."

I've heard a lot of people complain about the "treadmill" quests that they feel have to be done over and over. Wouldn't that add to it?

I voted to leave them be, because I truly enjoy the quests and all they offer to the game. It would be a shame to see them disappear from the game entirely.

Have PvP combatative conflicts become the only thing you can do in Lusternia other than chat or describe pretty clothes? Is that not a far more pressing concern than how this quest is balanced or how much damage that attack does?

Edit: If I was going to vote, I would choose 'Make conflict quests more peripheral to other forms of player-initiated organizational conflict.'

A point I've heard brought up before is that the similar quests SUPPOSEDLY available to novices and so on (stealing sheep/furrikin!) are pretty much impossible because they get enemied and nailed by statues/guards. That means no alternatives for them. That means they get left out unless they join the lemming rush when Alger decides to attack Faethorn. That means they don't enjoy things as much.

I think, anyway.

Feel free to point them out to me. I really don't have the time or stamina to read all forum posts so don't assume there's ideas out there that I've read and ignored. Chances are I've never seen them.

Novices can do any of the village comm quests, there are lots of power quests availible to them in their city/communes. I don't really see where the problem with them not being able to do a couple of quests is, and if they're stealthy about it and have a little bit of help they can even do those furrikin/sheep quests without getting caught. You just have to spend the time teaching your novices how do to it right.

As far as novices helping in pvp conflicts, I'd say honestly it's up to the individual novice as to whether they want to join in those or not. I've seen some pretty gung-ho novices that are perfectly willing to join in and die a lot to help their city achieve a goal. Why deprive them of this learning experience?

Maybe but even that best actions have some drawbacks. However, if this quest had some fringe benefits, I think it would fine. For example, I was able to level my aquamancer alt to like level 20 collecting sands and doing that Star of Celest power quest. Thus, this aquamancer could help himself and his city at one time. I'm not trying to say we put the most rewarding quests up on Celestia or Nil. However, if a little bit of coin, karma, and such could be gained, I think people would be glad to do them because it benefits them and their faction.

I think the biggest thing would be that it wouldn't be one quest, but maybe like 5+ where each was different enough to attract different people and add variation. For example, one of these could involve influencing. Another could involve a hunt and collection for items. Maybe one of those Supernals needs his or her sword empowered or something... a nice honours quest that would beef that crap out of him/her for a couple days. It would also be something to scramble before if say another Supernal was already down. Each Supernal could also have a certain quest that only a person who pledged to him or her first could do as well.

Anyhoo, I know this would be a lot of work and couldn't happen over night. I really hope people can understand that regardless of what happens, we need to focus on long term. And of course, my ideas so far are about Supernals... maybe for the dwarven villages there could be a way to charm one of those mindless slaves out of the mines so you could kill it and such. It might only be one miner at a time, but given that it wouldn't involve a 40-50 guard run like I had to do when I raided Angkrag, I think more people would be willing to participate.