And Morik I dont see that as a fair comparison. Reason landmarking was so horrible is because it was heavily reliant upon numbers alone, which one side always had the numbers and the other said always had naught. Conflict required to reach goals is fine it just requires the added element of the Divine having to tweak and adjust the event or battleground or what have you until it has all its kinks out and doesnt become horribly slanted. We suffer this because as players we all basically become beta testers for anything new, Glomdoring is new, fighting for Faethorn is new, it was bound to have pitfalls.



Edit: On that note I also have to say landmarking sucked because Achaean divine has still truly never made the necessary steps toward creating a more balanced environment. Achaea being as old as it is still has some -hefty- pitfalls that havent been addressed in the literal timeframe of years. Atleast Estarra saw a problem, tackled it, and is attempting to tweak and adjust.

I still get incredible annoyed by the whole wisp into guards thing. I don't care who is doing it.

The only bug abuse I've seen is spam tackle, where it doesn't take equilibrium if it is resisted/fails.

This only works inside their territory, and does not work if you use monoliths. You shouldn't be raiding if you don't want to deal with guards, eh? (And yes, I've been wisped into guards TWICE while killing Night...daughter...things.)

Wisp, flow, its all the same thing.. instant teleportation which equals death with nothing you can do once it happens.

...if you flow into guards, that's just stupid, and you can't flow someone ELSE.

(I flowed to Syrienne at the Ravenwood with a totem and 5 guards. Got away though. Damn things.)

Tackle sucks anyway, you have to factor in defenses like Malkuth and Roots, sizes and such. Gust is far more reliable and is un-resistable whatsoever.

People on both sides are expressing the same exact weariness of the endless, unescapable battle. Can we please try to stop throwing stones and blame across the border at each other? Any chance we have of persuading the administration that there's a problem is undermined by that. Right, I get it, Munsia kicked your puppy once... let's move on already and talk about something else. Not everything is about how much you hate Gregori, or Stangmar, or Visaeris, or me, or whoever.

It's not the losing levels people are tired of, it's the fact that there's nothing else but fighting, and that's just as wearying when you're winning. If you play a character that cares about things (the alternative may be fun for some people, but you're missing out on most of the roleplay that comes from being engaged in the world around you), you have no choice but to defend those things, and the way things are set up now, that means endless fighting. No one has time to roleplay, to do guild stuff, to quest, to explore, to hunt, to engage in trades, to have friends or family, to build, or do any of the other things in Lusternia that separate "a PK MUD" from "a MUD with PK".

It's easy to blame the administration for this because they created the Faethorn battle and set it up so it has no end, they made Ethereal the way it is, they even gave us some of the direction that puts us on this path. And there's something in that blame, too. A lot of people predicted all this precisely as it's happened back when Glomdoring Commune was a gleam in Rowena's eye. Before that, the world's power balance was distressingly stable. Magnagora had been more powerful than the rest of the world put together since about day 2, and the power balance forces in the game tend towards static equilibrium -- gaining power gives you more advantages than disadvantages, so the more lead you have, the harder it is to change anything. Villages rarely changed hands and there was really no way the power balance could change significantly, short of a miracle or administrative intervention.

Along comes a new commune, a chance to change things, maybe give the power balance struggle a fresh start, and what do they do? They make a commune whose very structure siphons most of its players from Serenwilde, poses an eternal enemy to Serenwilde, and practically gets built in Magnagora's bed, to save them the trouble of hopping in it later. Then they threw a few curves to shift it away from that (mostly in the form of Viravain's rantings) from which they almost immediately retreated. Net result: the power balance is exactly like it was before, only more so, and even more impossible to change. I don't know if that wasted opportunity is ever coming back... Gaudiguch, Hallifax, Ackleberry? No, no, and no, I'd say.

But in the end the administration can't be saddled with that much of the blame because it's mortal actions that have really made this course actually play out. The problem there is simple: "mortal actions" don't reflect the desires of the majority of players by any means. And not just because we're constrainted by our RP, either. The real clincher that haunts every PvP game is that five people who want more aggression and conflict can trump five hundred who don't, just by attacking. Given that in an infinite-resurrection world you can't really stop them by killing them, even if you had the killer instinct it takes to beat them (and if you did, you'd probably have been one of them in the first place), those five people get to set the tone for the whole world. Unless the administration counters them somehow, such as with PK rules... or with the Avenger and karma. Remember those? They were nice while they lasted, but the "move all conflict off Prime" thing means we essentially took all the work invested in them and flushed it.

Now there's no check on those five people. We've got endless bloody war to look forward to, and no path out of it we can see except to hope that the other side gets so tired they abandon their RP so we don't have to. All of us who came here to roleplay in a gloriously well-developed background are the ones who who are saying, "Ummmm, why am I logging in again?" I hate to complain again when we've just finished getting the envoy report stuff which was so wonderful, but I'm sorry, I can't help it. Personally, I was just getting excited again -- a new role as Guildmaster giving me lots of opportunities for interesting guild RP, more involvement in the aslaran clan, a new personal relationship that provided great RP opportunities, new strategic possibilities from new skills... and I have been able to spend almost exactly no time on any of them and don't see me getting to any time soon. How fragile a thing hope can be.

Here here, Gwylifar. (And that was very long...)


Something should definently be done about wearing us out. I stayed up until 4 AM last night and got 5 hours of sleep for some reason. Whoopee.

Loved the post...and wish some folks would read it and understand, not read and rant. (Cause I KNOW it's coming *Sigh*)

Roleplay...you know that thing where you interact with people without using blades/flails/curses all the time...where you get to know your commune/citymates as people, not just as "useful tools".....I miss those days *sigh*

There will always be people from every side wanting to stir up troubles. Why? Because they like the conflict. Take Magnagorans for example, they can give all the rp reasons they want for sticking their heads in Ethereal but in the end it's the conflict that draws them. Ethereal in the past few days has been like one continuous FFA for them. And most of the Magnagoran fighters want a piece of it.

Then there are Serenwilders and Glomdoringers who enjoy the conflict. Like Visaeris, who likes to raid, annoy and jump people then cry/whine/issue whenever he gets killed. Or Munsia from the other side, who attacks fighters or novices alike with every opportunity she gets.

Then there are those who are non-fighters but are drawn in by people like Visaeris or Munsia because they feel that they should do something to protect their commune. And these are the ones who are hurt most by the non-stop fighting.

Either the mechanics of Ethereal conflict needs to be changed, or the commune leaders should work out some deal to diffuse the situation.

Agreed with what Gwylifar and Icarus have said. Some of us enjoy a little conflict here and there since no actions whatsoever makes the game very boring. But with the Magnagorans that constantly raid Faethorn just because they want a piece of the actions, or those that just want to kill just for the heck of things, they ruin the event for others. I've only been able to fight once or twice in these battles due to time constraint but if this was similar to the Mag/Celest wars before, I can see why so many people are frustrated.

So Mag should just stay out of it!

Tackle doesn't cost balance when it fails, so you can just tackle 10 times simultaneously to get a sure chance of success, and gust CAN be resisted..

Icarus' post is of course just a load of hypocritic bull, since Glomdoring asked Magnagora to come help them, while Serenwilde is getting help from Celest just the same, and it's not just Amaru.

I'm not sure what you mean by "a chance to change things". An organization that is cut off from all conflict (i.e., some nebulous 'neutral' organization)? We'll probably never go the route. An organization specifically aimed to setback Magnagora? While Magnagora may be waxing right now, that won't always be the case. In the longterm, we want a foil to Serenwilde and I don't think it should have been any surprise that Glomdoring was always meant to be set up that way. Nothing will ever be truly 'neutral' in Lusternia!

I don't think it's fair to say Glomdoring was "built in Magnagora's bed". The baseline RP was that Glomdoring wasn't a "taint" organization, as it didn't recognize the taint as such and isn't their focus like Magnagora. It's still a nature commune. I believe Viravain has definitely set a don't-follow-Magnagora attitude but I'm not sure what you mean by the admin "almost immediately retreated". As far as I know, Viravain pushed for peace with Serenwilde, began her reign by withdrawing from Faethorn, antagonized Magnagora, placed a mix leadership in power, and set a tone of isolationism. If this is 'almost immediately retreating', I'm not sure what more one could expect. If you browse through some of the forum threads, you'll note she took a lot of heat for her stances.

There is absolutely no reason why in the face of dominance by one organization that other organizations can't set aside their differences. Serenwilde and Glomdoring may not be simpatico communes but they're still communes. There is enough common ground in their love of nature and distrust of cities (in an RP sense) where they might at times work against those cities. But, yes, they also have RP conflict between them, which only makes such short-term alliances all that more challenging and rewarding. Without those conflicts, we might as well have just added a commune called Serenwilde II because there never would be a reason for them not to work together.

Going back to Faethorn, I'm open to suggestions. This is obviously a power quest between communes where they compete for fae. We could sunder Faethorn from Glomdoring and Serenwilde, make it more difficult to attack from Faethorn to either of the commune's ethereal bases. We could have the fae disappear when there's no struggle between Night and Moon (though that would make the power quests disappear except for short periods). Ideas?

Is this unquestionably the only power quest we're going to see? that is, will the power quest, regardless of what form it might take after some sort of changes, it'll still revolve around converting Fae to Moon/Night?

Of course, but Celest is still allowed to help you..

But what came first? The CHICKEN....


....or the egg?

Since Serenwilde and Celest existed long before Glomdoring did, definately the chicken.