I totally agree.
Life in Lusternia seems to consist only of open conflict and influencing. Even now, when the war is over, there's no peace at all. There's always someone causing trouble in one of the villages and people need to go there and fight. Calling for help of all citizens possible, even when many of them have no idea how to fight, doesn't help at all. I mean, you can probably just ignore that because it's not official 'call to battle', but it feels bad anyway if there's so much disturbance and you're just trying to keep a low profile and stay quiet not to be asked to go. My guess is some people just log off to avoid that. There's just always something going on, duties duties duties. Make spikes, make commodities quest, help to protect villages, help to protect city and cosmic plane, participate in raid cause you really -should-. It helps the city, but when it's forced upon you constantly, it's not fun, and when you don't do it, there's not much more you could actually do.
If that is all Lusternia have to offer, only pure PK-ers gonna be satisfied. The game has a lot of advantages and cool features, but something must be done about what's being discussed in that thread.

Oh, this is an opinion of a common Magnagoran, little cog-wheel of the great machine

Sorry if it's incoherent but I'm really tired.

I"m 90% sure the only time you'll be "forced" to raid is if we're trying to do something in particular.. like kill White Hart or the Moon Avatars.

That said, what's not fun about using cosmic fire/swing/point staff/cast blast over and over again?

Well, true, official orders for dropping whatever you're doing immediately and gathering to fight, which only Daevos can give out I believe, only happened few times and was justified, but it happens that the issue, although important, doesn't require threatening everyone who doesn't come with death from the hands of city leaders.

Then again, Magnagora is that kind of a city, from IC point of view...

And it's not that I'm forced around all the time. It's that I feel like I should be doing things for the city all the time, there's this unpleasant pressure that so many things need to be done.


Believe me, not everyone finds it amusing.
Especially when you're getting enemied to the rest of the world really fast for that

Maybe there's too small playerbase and that's where the pressure is coming from. There's a lot of things that need to be done repeatedly and not enough players to share that duties.

I agree with the thesis brought in this thread, that's the point.

Well, at the very least if you've got nothing else to do you should be out doing comm quests in acknor and angkrag.

Sarcasm its why I intended to bash to somewhere in the vicinity of level 70 and stop.

I don't mean the spike quest needs upgrades, I mean that it shouldn't be a requirement or the city is in trouble. Not everyone is viscanti either. The point I want to make is that requirements aren't entertaining and Lusternia would be better if its features were bonuses, not reqs.

Its natural for people to burn out from a roleplaying game, and roleplaying in general. I've never met a roleplayer who doesn't burn out with a game they play almost every day.

I'm burned from attempting to fight serenguard, hartstone and paladins.... I can't fight any knight/warrior and hartstone just is awefull with the demesne/aeon thing

eh I'm tired. Sorry, I meant to add, Sooooo..I just don't fight those guilds..

I'm writing, and Lusternia takes too much time away from my writing time.

I think it goes beyond just general burnout though. You don't really find threads of people complaining of "burnout" on the forums of imperian or aetolia, even though they have less to offer than lusternia. Lusternia needs to mellow out basically and direct limitations on pk (like the sanctuary skill) is addressing a symptom I think rather than the source of the problem.

After thinking about it, I've come to the following conclusion.

Roleplaying is fun, but these things we have to do are not roleplaying. At first, yes, they're roleplaying, and it's really exciting and you want to do whatever you can to help your city/guild/whatever else. But then...you realize you -have- to do those things. I feel like there are two many things going on at once. Granted, some of it is due to players, such as Celest vs. Magnagora, but even those things are implied and stem from the history. I think I snapped because added on to all of that, I'm also trying to work on being an Administrator. I can't fight and quest and bash while working on things :/!

i like the spike quest , the way it is.. it teaches modesty to those supa' high ranked people and above all to those who tempted to be overzealous in their work.

It teaches them that they can't be magnagora or celest .. alone.

It's not a sprint, it's a marathon.

Some people think that to deserve a cityfavour , one has to throw itself at Godzilla, save the world from destruction or that kinda shit... when all it's needed is a good team spirit, and the fact that someone else continue your city work.

The point is not to have the australians to be supa' bright and genius, accomplishing incredible stuff and that's it. The point is to have the australian getting to know the japanese, those japanese getting to know the chinese who will have to know the europeans players who'll have to know the .american. and so and so.. and all of this in an IC context. hmm.. i hope i got the right sense for the rotation of the Earth.. i'm quite not sure.

Though the decaying rate of the spike needs some work.

I'm not burnt out, oddly enough. But yeah, much as I enjoyed the war, even on the losing side of it - when these things HAVE to happen, it gets a bit too much like landmarking on Achaea...you know how THAT went. Meh.

A lot of the things like this were put in because people in the other games complained about stagnancy, and not having enough day-to-day things to do other than bashing. I understand some of your concerns, but trying to balance these kind of things, especially when a lot of it is designed to still be exciting with a bigger playerbase, which, as has been brought up, we don't have yet.

I suppose all I can say at this point is that we are listening to you and we are trying to make the game better however we can.

I fizzled out a while ago. Even manses and Auseklis opening his order just aren't enough to make me NOT drift back over to Aetolia anymore. It just reminds me of Aetolia Prime, during the server switch, when you could kill whoever the hell you wanted to kill.

I'm going to go back to the spike quest at a moment, and agree with Jello. You've got people like Malevius, who, except for his recent break, does almost nothing BUT spike. You've got people who do it when they've a little time. And you've got people who do it once or twice and then forget about it. People like Malevius are the reason Magnagora isnt in a whole lot of trouble thanks to the Necromentate - constant dilligence. I know there are one or two others who do things like he does, I just cant think of them. He shouldnt - well, all of us shouldnt - have to burn all his time away on the quest. Even if the rate of the decay on the spikes, soups, flasks and spectre corpses was lower, it'd be good. I was doing a run today, ended up with 11 flasks, fairly standard. Upon walking from Seritul to Tunika, I had 9. After handing out soups to beggars (A process which took about two minutes) I was down to seven. I managed to get down to five putting spikes in one monument on the way to the Necromentate, and eventually crammed those in the Brain. Tone it down or something, please. Perhaps make it so both us and Celest can jam a maximum amount of Spikes/Equivalents into whatever, have them last a while, but every few RL days, start having the Necromentate gobble spikes, causing it to continue until brought above a certain amount, or something similar.

Yeah, I'm done now. Sorry 'bout that.

Yes, spiking is..extremely frustrating. People have been working persistently on it for over a week, and I know Malevius especially which is why I had someone city favour him. But the thing is, we've only added a net total of 100 spikes. -100 spikes-. People are non stop working at this, but the rate of decrease is, in my opinion, a bit steep. It's fine for when there's a higher number, but when it's low, you really need more people working on it constantly.

I'd like to address Lisaera, as her comment is more or less how I expected they formulated the current plan for the working of the world.

Because like to feel as though they have the opportunity to do things on a daily basis, should they so choose. Lusternia does provide this, I don't think anyone would question that. The problem, however, is not that you lack these things, but rather that they exist in such a way as to make it less of an opportunity, and more of a necessity.

As Jelaludin originally pointed out, people do not desire to feel as though they are being forced into things. It's why the Landmarks have always been a point of contention in any of the games they have been present. Sure, it's fun the first few times, but after a while people stop thinking of it as roleplaying, at which point it just becomes a chore.

Lusternia is built around the central concept of Power. Everyone knows this, and so having more power than anyone else is a pretty important thing. So people will go out and do the power quests, do the spike quest, the sands, essence collecting, whatever. But they don't usually do it for any sense of enjoyment. They do it out of a sense of duty. And people generally play games like this to escape that sort of feeling.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying no one should feel a sense of duty to their guilds and their cities, because if they didn't the world would just cease to function. Rather, it's the excess that I am concerned with. Certainly the lack of an enormous playerbase is a concern, but the quests should have been initially structures to be scalable as the playerbase changed. Otherwise you get situations like we have now, where people feel stretched just to get the bare minimum of work in the realm done just to feel safe.

One thing that does not help matters is the persistent PK atmosphere. I understand that PK was never intended to be a major part of the economic and political structure on the Prime Plane, but I find it almost absurd to think that you didn't predict it WOULD be based upon the setup you've created. We are entirely dependent economically on the villages we have under our control. Everyone from fighters to merchants depends directly upon them, for both their power input and their commodities. So the fact that people will go out of their way to harass and kill anyone even considering to mess with their controlled villages is hardly surprising. Likewise, influencing still feels like a sidenote to the combat going on in the background. The only time I've felt like village influencing was working the way I always hoped it would was when I was running around influencing Delport while pacified, and everyone from Magnagora had PK status on me and so were unwilling to attack me. I hardly think we should need depend on the (flawed) Avenger system to create an atmosphere that is cohesive enough to promote strategic influencing.

The Avenger system, as I have oft bemused, is yet another aspect of the realm which has caused consternation for myself and many others. On the one hand, we see a world design that seems specifically intended to promote massive playerkilling efforts. On the other hand, we have an Avenger system that makes metagaming the system far more important than actually playing -within- it. Examples of this include individuals intentionally getting Vengeance on someone and using their Vengeance to pacify someone during key events, such as village influencing, as well as threats made by individuals to use the Avenger on someone they have Vengeance on in an attempt at blackmail. Neither of these things are good for the game, and yet they are bound to happen in the greater system that you've implemented.

The Planar structure is nice, but aside from the Cosmic and Ethereal planes, they are really of little consequence. Astral is a glorified Moghedu, basically a bashing ground with little other purpose (save perhaps to skit over to a Cosmic plane without going through the Elemental, or to drain Nodes) and the Elemental planes are more of the same, except, woo, the mobs drop essence. Hoo ray. I think more emphasis needs to be made on creating purpose to the Astral and Elemental planes, as currently they feel more like frill than the extremely important parts of the world that they should be.

Now, getting back to the original point. I believe that Lisaera had at some point intended to qualify her statement about trying to balance the desire for less stagnancy without creating a sense of necessity, though because it's missing I'll assume she meant to say that it was difficult. Well, this is true, certainly. But you are ultimately the machine of your own demise. Overstructuring the world is as bad as understructuring it, and I think the former is the point we are at now. We have too much meaningful mechanics, and not enough fun. But I don't think this was what you were having a problem balancing to begin with. Rather, the balancing problem should be restructured, and thought should be put into making less of the realm dependent upon micromanagement.

I used to play the Sim City games with some regularity. But when I started having to set the pay for school bus drivers and hire my own contractors manually...I got the same feeling of burnout that I get from Lusternia. I want to feel as though the world can go on just fine without my being there, and a lot of the time I genuinely don't feel that way. There is no sense of comfort within the realm, even sitting in my own city I'm always extremely tense, waiting for the next problem to crop up (as it inevitably always does) and trying to assuage the fears of my allies, who have been instilled with a paranoia rivaling abductees.

So the ultimate solution to the Lusternia problem, as clearly by the drop in player numbers and TMS ranking exists, I feel lies in providing the players with a higher capacity for automation. No one has the willpower to keep up with the current level of stress that the Lusternian worldview creates forever, but toning it down some would definitely be a plus. I have my own ideas as to how this could be done, but it is, again, your machine.

We are but cogs.

One thing I'll say that post doesn't apply to though, Rhysus, is power. It's TOO automated. Apart from two-hour periods every just-over-a-week or whatever it is, where influencing allows new bars to be set, power is completely automated by villages/totems/Star/Necromentate. I'd actually like to see people's input on that one MATTER. Because one essence per time, or ten from a node (which is ridiculous for Moondancers, still viable though I suppose) is just not worth it. So that's an example of how automation can go wrong. It just makes the elements glorified Moghedus, as you say.

I agree somewhat. I've spoken to Roark about this problem specifically. I don't mind the automation the villages provide. But it's the dependence that's the problem, not the automation. If the villages provided less power, and the power quests were actually able to provide power on the same level as the villages do, I'd be happier.

If they make the power LESS automated, you'll find even more pressure on your character, cause now if you don't work for it your city will get low on power, but still have plenty, but if it gets less automated, your nexus will drop below 0 REALLY fast, if you don't have a team constantly working on it.

I really don't need that kind of pressure. Constantly having quest and bash for spikes, recapture miners and kill farmers for hemp is tiresome enough, fun, but really frustrating and tiresome if it has to be done constantly, especially if that rate would even get higher due to unautomating more power.