I believe that influencing was better in the past after Sanctuary and Crusade were added, because they made revolts a mix of everything in Lusternia, and allowed everyone to help in some way.

I believe that debating is a terrible system. If an alternative to violence is created, it should be at least as interesting as violence. Debating is FAR too simple, and though not based entirely on luck, based too much on luck and not enough on skill.

I enjoy violent influencing, but find peaceful influencing to be tedious and boring. I would feel differently if Debating wasn't such a simple and boring system.


What are other people's opinions on this?

We've had these kinda of threads plenty of times, I'm sure the admins are aware that many people are wanting more from the village influence system. They're probably busy on other things.

Ok, the flip side of wanting changes is that you have to be able to state explicitly what you want. We know that an overhaul of debating is unlikely. What mild tweaks or new features might be added to make the system complex without becoming convoluted?

I like a lot of things about influencing, but a major issueI have with influencing is the situation we just witnessed in Estelbar.

Magnagora was dominating the last couple rounds before Seren 'won' the village, and we had the majority of named mobs and several farmers at the point when they did win. Yes we had acknor, though I don't really see how they won it. Glom had almost as many as them, and early on Celest was doing very well. ARGH.

We had a LOT of the village near the beginning...then Celest did, then Mag, and only a little bit for Serenwilde right at the end.

That's how I followed it.

At the end we had the majority of named mobs and several farmers, and definately more than Seren did.

In the last hour, Serenwilde was dominating compared to Magnagora. Not sure about the hours before that though, since I wasn't awake.

EDIT: Magnagora did NOT have more than Serenwilde, I was watching that carefully at the time.

We usually do, Ixion, but the fact that we hold Acknor puts us at a severe disadvantage in Estelbar. Though village feelings are disabled, limitations that existed even before feelings were implemented still affect it.

Serenwilde was doing a bit better than the other orgs when I left (an hour into the influencing).

One thing I notice is you all seem to think holding the most mobs for a couple rounds means you are dominating.
You forget that Magnagora came in late and was way behind, although they did manage to come in close to winning. However, they were never dominating in that influence.
Celest in fact was dominating and Serenwilde barely turned it around for the win.

edit: And I was there for the whole thing, because I wanted to see how it turned out. So I know exactly who was dominating through it all.

Exactly how close was Magnagora to winning? 'Close' is a pretty vague term.

Thanks for the info Charune.

If Magnagora had been there a little sooner I would have put my money on them winning.

Remember that the whole thing's cummulative. The longer it goes on the more everyone involved has been influencing and, I think I remember this said before, the less of a difference needed to win. And that was certainly long.

And it was long because they disabled village feelings which would've made it short because of complaints at how short it was.

I like influencing. I like peaceful influencing where I can actually influence and only have to worry about debating. Debating has it's random factor which is less fun, but at least it's not incredibly complicated like combat.

Peaceful influencing seems to get the most complaints when it's a long revolt. And short revolts are complained about regardless. But so are long revolts!

Edit: Oi, so ninja'd ... that'll teach me to get distracted after I start making a post.

I'm quite surprised at the number of people who are happy with things as they are.

I guess those of us who loathe the current system aren't in as much of a majority as I thought.

Debating's quite fun.

It's just the length of influencing (and occasional apparent randomness) that gets to me.

I thought I saw something saying that when someone uses divert now it takes 50% of the ego to do it? Is that the case? I saw so much diversion going on, it seems like the 50% ego part had little or no effect on the influencing? Or was I dreaming when I saw that report?

I can't believe that many people enjoy debating.

The violent ones are really fun, but I think itd be great if you couldnt kill denizens because they arent swayed to your City/Commune.

Yeah, I was amazed too.

I actually like debating and influencing as it is now but only if it doesn't drag on for hours and hours because I lose attention very quickly