These are things that have been slowly pushing me away from Lusternia and in search of other games.
Admin wise:
1. The weird way avenger works. If you attack someone you should become free game, even if that person is enemied to the area. Also Avenger protection in conflict quest areas is bizarre.
2. Vortex' design. It is widely accepted to be the worst design possible and up to date you have done nothing to change that. RP is not an excuse to keep it this way.
3. Use of Flesh and Crystals. These seem to be made to annoy players for the sake of RP. The original 'instead of powercost' really goes out of the door as crystals/flesh provides no combat balance whatsoever and only increase the cost of fighting.
4. The extremely slow response rate to emails to artifacts and support. Just sending a 'we got your message and will get back to you as soon as possible' is better than a week without replies
5. The fact Gaudiguch still does not have an arena even though it has been purchased in september/october (or even before that). It is outright sad.
6. The fact Hallifax and Gaudiguch still do not have access to Bard and Monk guards, it is bad enough these organisations are neutered combat wise by not having those orgs but their guards should have been made available (as people have asked before)
7. The fact one can use a bardic winner for prestige and theatre contests. Since they are pretty much the same jury people nolonger take a chance when submitting it for a slot.
8. The apparent need to solve certain core problems through constructs and also solutions that annoy legit players more than the rulebreaking ones you are trying to reach (eg slivven).
9. Envoy system.

Player wise:
- Players have absolutely no restrained and prefer picking on smaller orgs (hallifax and gaudiguch) rather than orgs of equal strength, there is part a mechanical reason for this (spheres and fleshpots are easier to kill) but often it just seems like they oocly want to burn an org in to the ground (opinion formed from ooc conversations with some of the people)
- OOCness on things like ship tells, and even in says in public areas these days.
- People going through their messengers, facebook etc to get people to log in for a raid or domoth battle. If I'm not online that means I don't want to be kthx.

Since this was all very negative here are some possitive things:
- There are some really nice players and admins out there who were well worth meeting
- eastereggs in certain areas and quests
- trying to push conflict to things like domoths and aetherbubbles, unlike raid defense if you are outnumbered this ends in a reasonable timeframe.
- mini events, even though I haven't been part of them for a while
- family system overhaul

No comment on anything else in the post (or on transmology, since I've no experience with it), but the use of crystals by the Institute is pretty awesome, and (in my experience), doesn't really add much of anything to the cost of combat.

Maybe I just like spinny shiny things that kill people. <.<

You could still have the crystal entities without the entire gem harvesting I see no added benefit to the skills that use gems/flesh over the ones used by Celestines/Nihilists and that bothers me on a design level.

Edit: Anisu clarified privately her issue with flesh/crystals, which I'd misunderstood.

Do cosmic lords dying still prevent the use of related bonds/deepbonds? I can't remember if that was changed or not - I do remember people had to redo quests to deep bond every time a cosmic lord died and were not able to use a good portion of their skills until they were raised again. No clue if that's still the case or not, but I assume fleshpots/crystals do not need the sphere/pot to be alive to use their related skills so long as you sufficiently stocked up ahead of time though. Do fleshpots/crystals dying reset the count of facets/flesh on them?

That all said, I've no real opinion on if they should be changed or not. And there are some valid complaints in there - avenger weirdness, smaller orgs getting picked on, lack of bard guards.

Yes, but you get it back when they're revived. Flesh/crystals can be used while the Fleshpots/Spheres are dead. Fleshpot/Sphere deaths reset facet/petal counts.

Point of interest: the theater contest is not judged at all, save by the actual activity associated with it. However, for library, I can see your point. (Notwithstanding that, back when I still felt motivated to write, there were a number of times something won in one and didn't even show up in the other.)

Just want to add to the player side of things:

♪Theeeee leaders of the orgs go 'clique, clique, clique'...♫

These ones have been getting to me recently.

I'm still very, very annoyed by the attempt to "fix" Viscanti... by giving everyone in Magnagora a sip bonus. And then not giving anyone in any other organization anything even remotely similar in terms of practical application; sip bonus affects bashing, it affects PvP, it affects influencing... pretty much any of the main ways to get experience and compete with other players are all given a boost, even on races that don't need a sip bonus and for which it is excessive.

Then you have things like the end-of-game demi system, which we've posted and asked for reviews on any number of times, and just goes ignored. Random doubling of comm costs across the board (especially for high-end forged items, making them really difficult to purchase for newer players) also gets to me, when it was intended to make the cheaper stuff less easily able to 'flood the market'; nobody was flooding the game with 5000 masterworks.

Emails used to be a pretty good way to get in touch, but recently they also have been ignored. Last one I sent in was two, three months ago. Still haven't received a response.

That said, I'm greatly appreciative that they did go into and examine one of the problem areas (family system) and are addressing it. It's good to see and it does give some hope that they will continue on to re-examining other problem areas in the game. Thank you, keep it up (and some of the areas I'd like to see addressed next are in this post!)

I am also very grateful to those of the admin who try their hardest to give a positive experience to their (and other) players. You know who you are. You're the folks who get raves for all the little things you do.
Like Shikari. Shikari. Even if I can't do anything like that in-game without getting my head torn off.

It's all fun and games until someone gets drunk and citizens Munsia

I agree with a great deal of Anisu's post. At first, I wanted to go through it piece by piece, but honestly, I'll instead make an effort to summarize and be concise (edit: It seems I failed), because even thinking it through I felt a rant brewing.

I don't know if it is the general "hands off" approach the administration takes here that is to blame in the end, or, as in my more paranoid moments, some other factor that isn't really a factor but is in my head, but there have been, over the past year and some, situations that really make me roll my eyes and wonder.

Xenthos points out the Magnagoran sip bonus. He goes in to detail, so I won't repeat. BUT, for the sake of argumentive balance? Choke is still the ultmate group skill. I still see combat clans spammed with "choking so and so now", reliably followed by so and so getting blown away extremely soon thereafter. I don't mind saying, a big part of me wanting to get in to combat again had a lot to do with me not having to SPAM a re-enemy alias to deal with gloomtide, and not having to get incurable aeoned to the face against an opponent who's skills naturally synergize with that.

So, my point is, some imbalanced situations go both ways. They're never FUN, but they're what they are.

But my real annoyance, and the thing I have to be careful of not to get too ranty with here, was the meat-grinder treatment Gaudiguch's skills got at the hands of the broken envoy system. Its been gone over before, and I've been out of that org for a while (and happier for it- the wound still stings on principle rather than any actual impact on me!). But pyromancy was hurled under the bus, and then backed over a few times just to be sure- with NO representative that actually had the skillset present to even attempt to defend it.

I mean, when that went through, we even got an apology from a Mag envoy for what happened to pyromancy.

What if the Admin said "ok, Serenwilde and Magnagora, we would like you to overhaul the entire Night skillset. Glom, and even Celest? Sorry, you don't get to have any input."

This is essentially what happened to pyromancy. That is not ok. That is never ok. The Admin should have wound the clock back and done it again when it became apparent that the result was purile garbage. Instead, they threw it to the envoy system. Except when a skillset gets to that stage, no combatants want to touch it any more, and so you never get solid envoying. As I understand it, its still bad, but at least some of the basic elements of a demesne work now? I wouldn't know. When I look at a report list I roll my eyes in digust with makes it really hard to read them.

Same deal with Badluck. The overcorrection was insane. It needed a haircut. Instead, its skull was caved in by a tire iron. Several people suggested nerfs, and its like they decided to go with ALL of them. I had combatants (real ones, not people like me) who at one point thought they might want to come to Gaudi bail out. The power cost should be removed again, and leave it with the reduced proc rate. Instead, it got made in to crap. For the love of balance, ROLL IT BACK, and go back in and make little changes.

Because as much as we talk about cliques and community, the mechanical crap MATTERS. And when one org winds up particularly strong in mechanics, or one is seen as being on the wrong end of the corrupt envoy steam roller, it impacts decisions. And that becomes a feedback loop where it gets bad, it stays bad, and you can't even get envoy equivalence to try and defend, let alone repair, the damage.

Here is my cliche-sounding thank you to the admin. That's not sarcastic, I mean, the Celest pantheon has been freaking awesome. But whenever I see one of these at the end of the rant I ususally feel a little cynical about it. Not that the person doesn't MEAN it, I mean, they do, and I do, but its presence there seems more to be about "look I'm not a completely insane raving lunatic please take me a little seriously." than the thanks itself. I mean, the admin here obviously put in long hours and a lot of work, and I hope they don't take it personally when someone snaps, and then a few of us afflicted with the "omg rant" disease snap in sympathy. I'm not unhappy with the game. But the above is a bit of a festering wound for me. Again, at this point, its as much a wound on principle and emotion more than anything practical.

I have found it somewhat irritating that Gaudiguch and Hallifax are the only people getting raided.

I shall bite this proverbial bullet.

You know our policy on rant threads - particularly geared towards the administration.

If you feel something is broken, mechanics-wise, particularly something such as the Envoy system, you are welcome to e-mail support and detail why you feel that way.

If Support isn't answering your e-mails, there's a large likelihood it's getting caught in a spam-filter or being lost in transmission. If you don't get a reply in a week or two at most, you can always send a second e-mail, e-mail Estarra (who is always willing to look into such matters), or file an issue (which has no spam filters).

Threads like this really don't achieve anything except frustration and fanning flames.