This poll is in no way intended to insult or degrade the work of the Administrators of Lusternia. I am thoroughly impressed with the work they do. However, I have heard a number of reports lately that players would be happy if the Administrators would cease adding new content for a short period of time, and instead focus on fixing/tweaking previously added content so that it's as perfect as can be, before continuing. This includes things such as the gruelling nature of the Undervault quest, bugged quests in general, the Dark Nest being unraidable, certain poisons being hidden in org territory, hibernation/peak months of herbs, etc.

So I'm just curious what you think, ideally, should be done! Should they take a little break to address a lot of the concerns of current players, or should they continue their work on adding new things to Lusternia so that it continues to grow as it has been?

P.S., if the poll is leaning towards option 1, I will probably consolidate all the points made and post a new thread containing the summary of all queries raised in the hopes the Admin will read it. Don't post quest bugs or solutions in this thread.

* If you pick option 1, could you please either post or PM me a brief summary of just why you picked it? Ie, what things you think could do with tweaking in Lusternia before new changes are made.

Fix plz.

Also, envoys generally deal with skill issues, bugs / tweaks / quest etc balance does not fall into their territory (I think they aren't even allowed to do those things).

You do realize though that it would take longer than two weeks? They can't just 'fix' things like that. Nothing makes everyone happy.

I'm well aware it would take longer than 2 weeks. However, if they started with a very precise, concise list of what to change/tweak then it would save a lot of time. I think a good number of changes could be made, and even if the more indepth ones couldn't, they could be worked on at a later date.

Alongside that fact, if this was a success it is always possible that it could be scheduled into the calendar once a year, in which case it very well might prove to be the solution.

It would definitely be a start. There are plenty other issues that may take more time too and as Lusternia grows and changes more and more issues will arise again. Personally I'd say that putting in a few 'fix weeks' is more like an ongoing thing, but not something that should be expected to be done alongside developing new features as it may very well fall on the short side of those.

The votes are all well and good, but it'd be great if you could post just what it is that's made you select an option! If it's option 1 and you don't want to post, can you atleast message me a brief summary so I can know to raise it if I make a new thread in general summarising the result? Else I'll just be posting "The forum users would love for the Admin to take a break and fix the problems with Lusternia, but we can't think of any!"

I voted that they devote some time to bug fixes. I am pretty sick tired of all the new changes to various skillsets. It's constant. When will things stabilize? It's just change after change, while persistent bugs seem to linger.

What I'd like to know is how feasible this is. I get the feeling that if it were an option, the admin would have taken it or at least asked us before. It might be the case that they have people working on bugs and such things all the time as-is, but that putting more people on it wouldn't help any more than it already does.

What I'd really like to see is consideration for past things to be taken into account when new things are being done. The last envoy change is a great example of this. Envoys gave druids ground sap because of a screwy elevation change. Then they changed the elevation change again, but didn't change ground sap. This kind of thing happens all the time. We have maaany factors that affect villages and their revolting. But for some bizarre reason, whenever a new one gets added, the old ones aren't even looked at, much less changed to compensate. Example: villages revolt faster when they get raided (supposedly, I don't even know if this works.) But since that was added, the admin added the villages-revolting-in-pairs mechanic. Nothing else was changed. Why? These things aren't being treated as consistent systems with a point, things are applied like plasters to a bruise. They kind of work in the short term, but often we just end up with this hacky system where half the features don't work as originally intended (or are counterproductive/unnecessary with the new features, but still exist.)

If this kind of thing were addressed I think we'd see a lot less imbalance issues to begin with - though it obviously wouldn't help with bugs. For that I think we need a more open bug system where people know when the hell things AREN'T bugged. We have an ideas thread for that particular issue though, so I won't go on about it.

Sorry about the double-post, but that last one took way too long to write so you ninja'd me.

I disagree. Things stabilise -too much-. They almost stagnate. Swathes of the game go unused or unusable because new stuff is applied in a patchwork fashion without the old stuff being updated and altered to compensate as appropriate. It's like if for some coding or game-related reason the mana formula was tweaked so that everyone had half of what they have now, mana-reducing skills would remain unchanged for months and after ages of not knowing what to do about it (is it bugged? Is this supposed to be balanced now? WTF?) the envoys would finally struggle to get it changed. In fact, this kind of situation happened just now with DMP and stat-changes, but no racial rebalancing (and mugwumps/faelings/aslaran are all still OP)!

"Stabilising" in the sense you mean it is something we need less of, not more.

That's essentially what I mean, Shiri. I hardly find what you described to be stable. It sounds really chaotic and sloppy.

Hmm. Maybe I misinterpreted you then. In my case it's more that I don't mind things changing, but I think the old things the new things are meant to integrate with should change to compensate. If that's what you meant too then np!

Interesting. 100% say the Admins fix bugs.

Fix bugs, tweak and balance skills, look into the quests. Period

Edit: Add a few words

Tweaking and balancing skills would never be accomplished in such a short time period. I think it would be best to leave this to the work of the Envoys, though perhaps it's coming up to time to have another 'big' Envoy report submitted -- I don't know exactly when the last was, though.

I'm not asking them to fix them ASAP and have it done tomorrow, just well... fix the things that are broken right now before they add new content right?

Edit: fixed a few things

I voted for the first (though I don't think these options were very good), however I recognize the fact that even doing this would not solve every bug, and more bugs will just arise over time again.

I DO think, however, that as the admins are developing they do need to pay more attention than they have been to the blatantly apparent bugs and broken quests, even if they are low priority. It is unfortunate many things go unused because they are broken, and I don't think simply putting aside a week or two will do much good overall.

I vote for the first option. Though I cannot believe that any programming group does not put aside time to weed out bugs, which are often harder to find, than to programme new things completely. Going by the announce post, I do believe the current Lusternia coding team, does try to work on bugfixes. Perhaps more time is needed to fix more. We certainly do not need or expect a spanking new ability, skill, class etc, every single month. So, I agree with the above posts. :S I'll stop rambling now.

As a side note, it would probably be helpful if we, as players, actually described the things we think they've been ignoring, rather than doing our typical "change it..fix it!"

/agree Veonira.

Please say what it is you want changed! I've noted down everything I've heard so far, but I certainly haven't gone one suggestion per vote.

I imagine if all the coders went through the BUG queue the best they could in that two weeks, I'd be very happy. Bards have a couple bugged skills that I bugged months ago, and I even told Morgfyre directly they were broken over the envoy channel. He fixed one (the most important), but the other two are still unchanged. I've never understood why bugged skills stay bugged for so long, it seems like they'd be an easy fix and a quick way to keep the playerbase (especially the credit buying ones!) happy. Not to mention some of these bugs are ridiculously abusable.

Also, part of the reason I never do quests is that I have no way of knowing if they're bugged or not, because I'm always hearing people say 'Quest x is broken, it can't be done' and there's no way to tell if it gets fixed because a lot of the bug fixes go unannounced. I don't know which quests people think are broken, but I'd guess there is a nice list in the BUG queue.

Speaking of unannounced bug fixes, it would be nice if the admins posted stuff they change that affects us so we don't discover these things like... mid combat... and have no idea if they're a bug or if they're supposed to work like that. Ninja changes and not knowing if a bug is fixed are both quite irritating, but I suppose that's not really relevant to the thread.