Just wondering but would this work:

1) Seren comes up with a play. I'll make sure to only have Serens as audience and pay them to give the play top votes. Thus it generates lots of power for 2 years.

2) We submitted a play to the world stage but it wasn't the best ( the one with the highest ranking). Thus I purchase lots of tickets to the world stage and view the best one repeatedly and give it crappy rankings. After a while, my own play will become best and gain us bonus power or whatever.


Yes I know my mind is screwed. But those are the first two things that came to mind after reading that announce. >_<

I admit it does seem somewhat abusable. People who just hate the Seren but aren't enemies can just come in, pay for replay, rate 1 star. :/

Lendren ftw, anyways. (hint hint)

Ah, I didn't think about any of those things. I just thought it sounded like the bard version of the library system.


It's certainly good to try and iron out the kinks before someone exploits them though.

Actually it seems to say that submitted plays can be viewed at the World Stage, which I assume is on neutral ground. So enemies too can give low rates to dump the power gain of a good play and up their gain of a bad play (for example).

booo this is exploitable, because we know that bias, propaganda and favoritism is not IC.. the same with corruption and cheating.. this is not like the Real World at all

Well considering that our cultural activity is based on a similar system and we haven't heard of any problems (aka our librarians actually review the books fairly), I say this could work.

Actually there is no such thing as positive reviewing as far as the library is concerned, what's published is published unless it is criticised and it can only be criticised IF the Divine Scholars deem the criticism as valid (if they do not, they lower the credibility of the criticising librarian).

Thus the system is entirely different and taking someone down is overseen by Immortals. In the case of those plays... I also thought of possible abuse automatically.

the actual cost of tickets could offset this. If they were priced just right so as to be cheap enough that people will pay for them, but not so cheap that people would buy a crapload of them to screw the system, then it might work

Well yes and no. If you write a totally crappy book and publish it in your org's library but make sure it's grammatically correct then it can't be critiqued negatively.

The prestige winners are reviewed by the divine so you can't get those through cheating like that. But you -can- gain power with crappy books.

If the plays that are submitted to the World Stage are reviewed by the divine as well it would be less expoitable but it didn't say so in the announce. Also, you can still change the rating of a play afterwards and this would probably influence power gain.. I likely wouldn't bother dumping other people's plays but giving our own top ratings for power.. it'd be stupid not to do so even if it is abuse (and that's generally speaking. I'd -expect- everyone to do that.).

True, although let's not overlook the entertainment value of really horrible works.

Basin, keep your eyes peeled for Xinemus' seminal play: The Lonely Druide, The Angrye Harpye, and the Viale of Absinthe - A Tale in One Parte of Divers Romantic Misunderstandinges.

I'll expect those Glom tickets to pour in.

I'd pay to see that, if only to watch you try to keep your spelling consistent.

Writing a long enough book with proper spelling and grammar to make a real difference in how much power we gain either is going to be obvious nonsense or take you a fair amount of effort, in which case you probably probably should be awarded the amount of power you get for one book.

Writing a crappy book is harder than writing a good one, from my perspective.

I will be intensely surprised to see anything other than "one" or "five" stars rated, unless there's some kind of oversight to enforce honest ratings, because even the people who would be inclined to give fair ratings are still likely to go "well, my fair rating isn't going to have any impact, I might as well give it a 5/1 because everyone else will do it."

I wish there was Immortal choosing for this the way there was for Prestige, which was what I thought this was when I got all excited.

Though, I'm pretty sure that you can only rate a play once, so whoever suggested buying 100 tickets for their own org's play can't do that. Still, even with one vote per person, it's still kind of a population/numbers game instead of a quality game -- at least, that's what I'm afraid it could turn into. And since I really enjoy writing my performances (even if I wouldn't call them plays), it makes me a little sad how little faith I have that any response I get back from the World Stage (which would otherwise be awesome and exciting and I'd be thrilled that I have "real" encouragement to write stuff for the stage as much as I do for writing stuff in books) will be "honest" review about the piece that Arel and I worked so hard on.

But, I guess we'll have to see it in action.

I think you guys are worried a little too much. The same concerns occurred when Libraries were released and minor tweaks happened. Originally people got mad at libraries because it "encouraged conflict". But it seems to have settled down.

I think the cost to watch a play is like 1000 gold or something, that what I believe I paid when I watched Lendren's play in the Serenwilde. Something tells me that cost might be prohibitive to rate a play. 100 people with 1000 gold would cost 100,000 gold.

Plays can be long too! So I think that alone might prohibit people from going "just to rate them". I think Lendren's play was an hour of time to watch at normal speed.

Vionne and I's first performance was 8 minutes. Kinda lame if ours beat out Lendren's play (not that ours isn't good too!) because it was much shorter and the ticket price is only 400gp. It should really be about quality, not length and price of ticket.

I think it's sad that people seem to think that everyone will do nothing but try to metagame and abuse the process.

Not everyone is as nice as you. It's not hard for someone to say "Well, even if this play sucks, it would be against my characters RP to not vote for it as awesome to get my org more power!" and vice versa.

Voting for your character's org's play isn't metagaming any more than using essence for power is. It's common freaking sense. It's biased, of course, but the very nature of the game encourages that kind of bias. It's not that I don't have faith in people's decency, it's that I have faith in people's loyalty to their org.

I'm not saying that I don't think that the World Stage won't be tweaked and fixed -- I'm saying that I think it needs to be.

EDIT -- nevermind, I read the silly thing wrong.

EDIT 2 -- even if people aren't unfair and vote to get the power, people from Glomdoring are going to like a play about glomdoring more than they're going to like one glorifying the power of Magnagora. =P. There's no way that this is objective.

Yeah, the current setup is just open to abuse. It should probably be a Divine-review thing like the Prestige works.

When Amarysse rates performances (and she will, because she's going to sit there and watch them all as she's done in local theatres already), a 1 will be rare, and a 5 rarer still. I also don't have to feel guilty about rating a performance highly, or very poorly, because she's not supposed to be biased toward any particular city/commune anyway. She's only there to see the show- gaining power for someone wouldn't even cross her mind.

I truly hope it's used as it was intended, and not abused. It's too great an idea to have it taken away.

But you must realise, you are part of the tiny Lusternian population who is rogue and doesn't even have any city/commune preferences.