Some ideas to help. They make sense to me, but might not to anyone else, and since I'm at work, I'm going try and not take too long explaining them.

1. Downgrade the emphasis on villiages. Aetolia nerfed landmarking, let's put less emphasis on villiages and more on, I dunno, everything else. I'm not sure exactly how to do this.

2. Make it, somehow, so that everything does not have a polar opposite, or throw in a wild card, or... something. The politics are too balanced, with not enougn oppurtunity for new scenarios.

3. Throw in some stuff outside of the Basin, off continent, maybe even put a villiage there. I can't remember why this would help, other than to make the game bigger, and spread things out.

4. More quests. Hey, you asked! This will put more emphasis on questing than fighting. *shrug*

5. More manse customization! While this sounds like "Richter wants something" it will surely make it so that people will spend more time in the aetherways than idling around prime, looking for something/one to kill.

Basically, things to draw people's attention away from beating each other into a pulp.

I think this was suggested some time ago but most people felt that removing combat would ruin the conflict. Anyway, the sanctuary skill was to address that.

The sanctuary skill cannot address that until you can project it into adjacent rooms. (Amongst other things.) Demesnes make things horrible too.

And to fix demesnes...

Make it so that mages can only keep thier city/commune/plane demesne'd with them not there. If a mage sets up a demesne, say, on spectre isle, or a villiage, and moves more than ten or so rooms away, his ability to keep a hold on that land crumbles. None of this "I'm attacking you from across the world" nonsense.

I just fixed the villiage problem!

So many good points made in this thread and so many of them I was going to echo myself in my post. What's more (pleasantly) surprising is that every seems to be saying the same kinds of things.

Fighting should be toned down a little... more the way that the org quests are handled, since it always empowers one at the expense of another. The Inner Sea quest is a prime example. Annoys the hell out of the opposition and ends up with lots of killing. Influencing ends up with killing. Leaving demesne ends in safe rooms so they can't be dissolved... There's a lot that needs to be looked into.

The pk system seems a little off right now. Most people use pk careful so don't ever get vengeanced. The curses aren't always protecting the weak against the strong. Curses are so easy to get rid of for some (much of Magnagora seems to hunt for essence for a cursed comrade from what I hear). That makes this less of a punishment for killing someone. I don't want to see a system introduced that's silly and screws all pk entirely... even if I'm not a pker.

Eh, I'm just rambling. I can kep pointing at the problems and can't think of answers right now... I'll just leave it there, heh.

Maybe there could be a few more quests that exclusively improved your own commune or city, rather than the majority of worldwide quests, which annoy the hell out of other commune/cities.

Like supplicants/feathers/spikes/pixies(?)! On a larger scale, though. Something that would take the attention of the entire commune, and have a reward only the commune would enjoy...Dunno.

At one point when conflict was really high, I had even considered peacing the entire prime plane. Many people objected to that consideration. But now, thinking about it again, what if the prime was peaced two seasons out of the year (say spring and autumn)? This gives time of peace for those that like it and times of conflict for others.

(Again, just throwing out ideas as they come to me.)

I wouldn't mind that...actually, I'd like it a lot. But other people would go nuts, I can tell.

This is one of those suggestions that would just further reduce Lusternia to "game" status when we should be pushing towards being a "world." It's a simple, effective solution, but it's not going to make the realm any more fun. All it will do is make it feel artificial, and decrease the immersion of the playerbase.

Really, I think an informative query you should be making is whether there are any discrepancies in the general feelings of player populations from different organizations in the realm. I would wager, for instance, that players with characters in Magnagora are, on the whole, far less concerned with their character death, because the type of player their culture attracts views their experience as a gaming experience more than a community experience to begin with, which is not something I would say is true for either Celest or the Serenwilde. I can't accurately say for the Glomdoring, given its relatively mishmash population.

It is rather difficult to put a pinpoint on everything.. Exp loss is definatly a major hinderence as has been raised before. Losing 40-60% everytime you die, even at the higher levels, is like a kick in the gut. It takes hours to regain that experience just for a few seconds of action.. at that rate I think people become frustrated quickly. There has to some other means of investigating a way for people to work around atleast -some- of this experience loss.. perhaps implement some kind of World of Warcraft like system where when you die and are a soul if you can get back your corpse you recover a large chunk of your experience. Offplane would be and really should be more difficult but leave some sort of option open there.. like.. a more steeper exp loss for using up your souls power to transverse planes to retrieve your corpse, something like that.. I'm not sure.


As far the balance of things power wise.. Magnagora deserves the power it has.. they didnt get it by skills or anything anyone else couldnt do, Celest fails because they lack discipline and organization, Serenwilde is beginning to pull its act more and more together but they still havent quite hit Magnagora level of precision. What it becomes is Celest/Seren vs Mag and using throwing masses at them in hopes of stopping them.. such as the use of novice style fighter JUST to spam web.

I think village raiding and raiding in general is a big problem because its frustrating beyond belief that not that our guards die so easily its that people walk by them so easily.. plus in light of people becoming SO tanky I do think in guards in general could use a boost.. needing 40 guards to stop Narsrim, Amaru, Tuek people like that is kind of nuts.. in the general bit of reality no man could handle 40 at once.. 10 at once possibly if he was a very skilled warrior who fought intelligently.. but 40.. no he was to smothered. So I think it'd be more accurate to say 10 should be very difficult, 40 definatly impossible. But at the same time if you upgrade the power of guards the power cost should raise also because I dont like the idea of people stacking 40-50 now supercharged guards up either.. then raiding goes completely off the map even with a good group behind you.

That sounds like a nice idea Estarra... a few seasons of peace would help for a lot of things... and it sure would make influencing in those times pretty extreme.

Oh, on demesnes... I don't like the idea of nerfing them entirely... but they DO affect influencing far too much. During influencing times smaller demesnes might work, as mentioned... but I'm thinking only 5-6 rooms. Extremely small I know... but it might help. Demesnes also should not work in sanctuaried rooms.... and should allow them to be removed from sanctuaried rooms as well... hmm... just typing as I'm thinking and it seems a lot of effort.. perhaps best to stop demesnes altogether, who knows.

Peacing prime would be a terrible idea. It wouldn't make sense. Anyway, I'm not sure how to balance the conflict or whatever, but I can give an idea that could somewhat diminish international conflict.

Like Etanru, suggested, it would be great if there were more "quests" or threats rather coming from neutral/npc entities. Each of this threats completely concentrated in a single commune/city, with the purpose to keep said places busy trying to save themselves or improve themselves rather than having their complete attention on seeing how to invade the other party. I dunno, this threats could probably happen simultanously throughout the Basin to prevent sides taking advantage of attacking their enemy while distracted/busy.

It would also be nice, if things weren't so black and white. I mean, some things seem to be too extreme that in the end the only result seems to be conflict. Conflict between Celest-Magnagora, Glomdoring-Serenwilde, Celest/Seren-Glomdoring/Magnagora. Of course, in the end is the players that influence the amount of conflict that will occur between parties, but it would be interesting if said conflict could actually find a middle ground, rather than having things constructed in a way where it seems like war is inevitable. I don't know, I'm just really rambling, but it would be nice if conflict inside of Lusternia went beyond physical... which is the aspect I notice more, because things like battles of influence and such -always- seem to end in war. There seems to be little room for diplomacy, everyone just decide to unsheathe the sword (which to some that can't fight at all, the severe lack of ability in contrast to some with very effective and complex systems makes it very detriminal to even think engaging in conflict, which as said tends to be more physical than not).

Also, I'm not really sure whether Magnagora is the problem or not. One important factor for the reason that Magnagora is so powerful, as already stated, is that it is very organized. In fact, it was the place to first become organized from the begining of the game. Also, it was the place that seemed to attract a lot of fighters(fighters are like... I don't know, it's an arms race in here, so fighters play a pivotal role). So what I am saying is, that Magnagora is powerful thanks to the people that inhabit it, and their mastery of their skills along with their organization. Probably if Daevos, Murphy, among others were living in Celest, probably the story would be very different.

By the way, I'd also diminsh the expansion of demesne. It's kind of scary traveling half of the Basin to encounter yourself standing in the same demesne you were on five mins ago. Also, if demesne are so crucial for village influencing, I'd suggest for demesne to instantly disappear when villages go neutral, demesne degrade rapidly when a village is neutral (influencing period). This would make things a lot better, I believe.

Anyway, my rambling is ended.

Edit: By the way, so far I've kept to myself so I don't go raiding places and such... So I haven't even bothered to test how effective guards are here. But I must say that many times I've felt tempted to slash at an Ur'Guard Grand Marshal to see what would things be like. Though, if some folks do complain how ineffective guards are in actually protecting a place, mayhaps they should be upgraded a tad?

Edit: One last thing, is exp loss in the outer places lower than dying in Prime? Ayway, if one of the administration's focus is to take conflict outside of Prime... I'd suggest to actually make some of the outer planes of greater importance than they are. Currently, I'd say that the outer planes (Elementals) are nothing more than bashing grounds. Perhaps the implementation of more important things to protect in every outer plane would attract higher conflict outside of prime. Perhaps if Elemental cities were errected and people suddenly had the duty to spend more time out of prime things would be different. The thing is, Prime is on the spotlight, but conflict wise Prime is supposed to be sitting in the corner... Makes little sense to me, find ways to promote more conflict outside of Prime, and things would be good. Also, again, this conflicts could deviate from international conflict. It could be commune/city exclusive things, or things involving only questing/bashing or something with the capacity to make the inevitable physical battle to gradually grow into happening rather than completely burst instantly.

Peacing things would seem to much like a punishment to some people in my opinion. Forced peace is not really playing into player ran world in my opinion, its more like the Gods doing the running. One thing I suggested in the past is that villages be 'upgradeable'. What do I mean by this.. well certain things could be bought, using power, for your village.. suchas.. cobblestone streets that prevent burrowing.. upgraded barriers to stop flow/catacombs things like that.. Town Guard upgrade to make guards in the village better outfitted and thus more potent.. things like this. I think you should be able to directly affect your villages level of 'technology' if you will, if a village is being ruled over by Magnagora this huge Empire whos bound to be technology rich the villages should prosper from such affects.. whereas Serenwilde being a large commune could affect it in other ways perhaps.. give them some basic upgrades that're universal then some unique to each community.. sort of like influencing itself having special city skills.

Well, mages/druids still could affect as many single rooms as they wanted with their skills, they just wouldnt' be able to meld them.

The problem with tanky and guards though, is that people can be damned good fighters without being tanky. Making something too powerful to deal with a tanky person then disadvantages the less tanky prson even though they might have vasty superior offence. Guards need to take a lesson in not doing straight damage if it's not working and instead go for afflictions... perhaps. We needed guards in huge groups in Celest to stop the tanky fighters like Valek and Daevos when they raided our city of old, and even then they could take them out. The game currently promotes and encourages tankiness more than I feel it should.

That's not a problem because those could just be broken without even having to force or worry about adjacent rooms. And some of the skills don't work in unmelded rooms.

What of a (hard) quest that peaces the world for a game month? And an opposing quest to take it down?

(BTW, talking about 'adding quests' is a lot easier said than done.)

EDIT: Or for that matter a hard quest to peace the prime UNTIL an equally hard quest is done to take it down.

What IS definitely biased about the politics system is that Angkrag and Acknor are tainted, and it would be bad roleplay for Celest or Serenwilde to take them.

Peacing the world is just a stupid idea for a game that runs off conflict. Most of the fun comes from it, for me at least.

Adding a quest isn't a good idea either. It just seems so artifical and makes it seem like much less of a coherent world, as Rhysus said. There isn't really too much conflict or PK at this point.

One problem you'll find in any system of power is that the powerful become more powerful. It's difficult to put constraints on them, but you need to somehow associate a cost with this power. You can acquire all the power you wish, but you'll need to hold up the weight it adds to your shoulders.

The balance needs to take into account the number of people in that city/commune, the number of villages they have influence, etc. Unfortunate as it is, there are more people who change sides to be on the winning team than those who would join the losing team to help balance things out.