Sorry, yeah. It's tough trying to extrapolate beyond the theoretical, work in my lab, and hold this sanctuary in simultaneity.

What if you believe compromising comes at the expense of sacrificing every thing you believe in? I mean, the roles are built around things that seem rather static and aiming at a goal. I can't even imagine the Moondancers becoming friendly with the Shadowdancers after their many battles over faethorn, and their different views of things. I mean, yes, the USSR did ally with USA and the other allies... but why? The NEED was completely evident. If in Lusternia like Magnagora suddenly assuming the role of Hitler, and Celest that of Japan, and slashing/hacking at everything in sight trying to bring the dominance of civilzation throught the Basin... then an alliance between Glomdoring and Serenwilde would be feasible. At the moment, I'm sure people take too seriously the role of acolyte of the Moon and Nightslayer to even consider it. Of course, this is coming from a third person perspective, because I'm not really involved into politics to even know what's going on up there.

Edit: Regarding upgradable villages, how come if a village's performance and loyalty were influence on how upgraded they are? The better the villages feel, the more loyal they can be... like if a town reaches the maximum level of upgrade, they can remain loyal for more time than a regular village. Also, upgrades could remain there, but every time a village goes free, upgrades begin to downgrade, or something... I dunno, if it were up to me, I'd invest into village upgrade for sure.

I used nexus distort every single time we got raided..isn't that a common habit? It's absolutely necessary to even have a chance catching raiders.

Building upgrades, as in machinery that anyone can manipulate to help fend off raiders (catapults, balistas, gas, burning oil) without needing a whole army, would be a very nice idea.

i thnk the problem with village raiding isn't that people do it. Its that the guards and statues make it even more of a pain in the rear to do. People can't even do the non-killing quests to bring famers between estelbar and acknor without being enemied. Its a novice-level quest, but novices can't easily do it more than once.

Try to relax the restrictions on raiding southgard/rockholm/angkrag, so us non-ghost people can get in without massive preparation. I don't mind Mags coming in and raiding rockholm. I do mind that they get a massive advantage with lich and ghost to avoid a lot of the pain and suffering.

Hrm, well, this is the first time I've heard the opinion that raiding is too difficult.

A lot of us mortals on various sides were pushing very hard for that back when Glomdoring was nascent, and got put down pretty hard by the Divine and by NPCs. I know that technically, if every mortal simultaneously agreed "to hell with what They say" we could still do it, but when you say "there's nothing to stop" it, I think that's a pretty meaningless thing to say if all it really means is that we're not physically prevented by anything short of every bit of roleplay in the entire game and pretty much direct orders from our own Patrons.

I've spoken many times on the forum about how I think Lusternia pushes us way too hard into conflict. There are three reasons for this.

First: If you look at somewhere like Achaea you see the paradox. Jillions of people sitting around saying "we want to be protected from PK and conflict" out of one side of their mouths, and "I'm bored!" out of the other side. People don't always know what they want and you have to nudge them into it. Lusternia came to us with a great way for us to regulate our own conflict levels -- Avechna -- instead of the dumb PK-rules lawyer system. With that, we were finding a good conflict level, but it feels like the admin kept thinking with Achaean sensibilities, "we need to give them conflict or they'll get bored" and just kept throwing out the conflict at us. We can make enough of our own with what we had.

Second: Avechna was a great thing. Over on my poll of "what made you pick Lusternia" it was my choice and the choice of a number of people (not the majority or anything, but a significant chunk). Then we all grew up and found that staying on Prime was not much of an option. Communefolk have to live on Ethereal to defend it -- and griefers love that they can always get a fight by going up there. Astral is the only viable hunting ground above level 65 or so, possibly excepting Magnagora's Shallach playground. Manifestations and all sources of essence are off-Prime, so most of your power gathering methods are off-Prime. Lots of herbs and poisons are off-Prime. And so on. Staying on Prime gets less viable every day, but all PK is supposed to be off-Prime, and what that means is the best way to let us manage our own conflict, Avechna, has been neutered.

Third: Get a dozen people in a room. Two of them want conflict, the other ten don't. The two always win at the cost of the ten, because they just have to start fighting, and the ten can't not have conflict -- best they can do is run away, which is just another form of conflict. Since the first two points have taken away our ways of countering this factor, this is what rules.

How to fix it? I'd say start by simply stopping at all efforts to foist more conflict on us. We have tons of quests, the villages, and our own innate drives doing that. If we want to negotiate something, stop stopping us. We have a hard enough time convincing ourselves and each other without having to convince the gods too. Then I'd say we should re-examine the balance of Prime and off-Prime. Maybe it's time Avechna spent a few lessons in Planar, or something. Perhaps add a quest that lets you go bring something to Avechna to gain his protection even off-Prime for a month? Maybe just spend some more of your building time making it so some of the things you currently have to go off-Prime to do, you don't have to go off-Prime to do anymore (though I think it'd be a bad idea to deprecate planar travel just for that). Maybe even throw us a few things to make us have to cooperate again -- remember the end of the Tainted Fae event? Remember the adders quest? Give us stuff that benefits us to cooperate, since we already have stuff that harms us to cooperate, to balance things a bit.

Don't know if anyone really said anything, didn't see it for a few pages, so I came back to it - by removing Demesnes, you destroy a mage's entire skillset. By removing powercosts, you're weakening guardians/wicca. If their angel is killed, they have to leave to resummon. Same with Fae. As well, Resurgem covens won't work anymore, and lich would have to be set up outside the villages.

So, you'ld basically nullify Druidry/Geomancy/Aquamancy, and severely injure Celestialism/Wicca/Nihilism - given they all take power to summon their creatures, and many of their more useful feats take power, too.

The only real injury to Knights is, what, no haymaker? Woo. So they can't lich in the village. Shadowdancers will be unable to choke, draw shadows into their cauldron, makes the advantage of having Longnight useless, Ressurect, a Sacraments ability is now useless, unless you manage to escape with the corpses (and since you can't tele, hermit/spores are your only option, especially if someone has the surrounding area demesned). I'm unfamiliar with Hart/Moon skillsets, and Crow as well - but I imagine they will likewise be hurt, lacking AncestralCurse/DarkMoon. These abilities are what give Guardians, mages, wicca their EDGE against Knights. Knights get boosts from Knightkiss and Drawdown, from facepaints from Crow and Stag... Buut, really, those don't come down inside the village, or don't need to be re-used. Taking away Chasm can seriously hurt what little offense is left to a Geomancer, without their demesne. They're left throwing stones or sleeping. Same with Aquamancers, although their staffpoint does more damage - Druids, however, will just be screwed. Cudgel is very cruddy vs Player, although they'll do nice at clearing influenced mobs and ents, I doubt many are willing to do that.

Knights, with their army and overwhelming tankiness, and a fully operation *main* skillset, will just obliterate the opposition. =\\

1. Combat in Lusternia is all about the groups. A few players are good enough to fight on thier own and take on groups, which makes getting into a group without one of those players "stressfull" I don't think there is anything wrong with the way this works, Its one aspect of conflict in Lusternia that I like.


2. Influecning, when a village is not in play, is not a viable option to anyone who wants to min/max thier charachters gold/exp improvement. Also, the Races that people would pick thinking they could influence are not infact the best races for influecing. This makes all the 'big' players the ones that kill things, and I think adds to the overall feeling that you need violence to solve conflicts and not politics. So I think Influencing needs to be fixed, to have the subtle side affect of making conflict more dynamic with a more dynamic player base of people who resolve larger conflicts.

3. Ethereal realm. I think this is the biggest source of stressfull conflict, in its concept. I think the best way to fix this, is not to reduce Ethereal realm but to make gateways from Earth to Water and from Nil to Celestia, thus basically bringing all conflict up onto the other Planes and leaving conflict on Prime for the Village influecne seasons, which if you alter the way your saying, might be able to be more focused on Influencing and less focused on Mage Demenses. Remember, Sanctuary is only an option if it would actually stop Demense affects, and allow you to break a demense outside of the sanctuary room.

Just my few thoughts.

I'm all for the concept of instead of fixing the symptom try to find the cause and alter that so that down the line the symptom goes away. An Economic Game theory of sorts.

well, you should create a mortal and try. There's a lot of quests that people just don't like you doing. Nice quests, statues and guards just make it painful.

Resurgem doesn't take power.

I've written a statement similar to below before about how demesnes could be changed to balance them out. I personally would love more powerful active abilities in place of the enormous demesne sizes we are capable of producing at the moment. Anyhow, here is what my suggestion is on how to help with the demesne problem that contributes to the over all conflict problems in Lusternia:

The maximum size of a demesne should be reduced to around 20 rooms. I do not agree that demesne effects are overpowered, with the possible exception of demesne wide hunger. I would not be adverse to the number of demesne effects hitting or cycle time of the effects extending the further away from the mage/druid’s location the enemies are. Say 1 to 5 rooms out, normal effects. 6 to 10 rooms out the effects are diminished in power or frequency by 25%. 11-15 rooms out the effects are diminished in power or frequency by 50%. 15-20 rooms out the effects are diminished in power or frequency by 75%. If the demesne is still allowed to be larger than 20 rooms, the only abilities possible in the demesne beyond 20 rooms are demesne summon, travel, sense, center, and demesne watch.

For the village upgrades idea, to get around the fact that villages change hands, make the villagers riot for a while when a village switches loyalty, and tear it all down. That's a good way to explain statues being desecrated and guards being dispatched, too.

Also, the upgrades would have to look different for every city/commune. I want to see the five-pointed star banner flying above Delport.

Really? Well that's lame. Okay, so, Serenwilde can resurgem, Glom's without anything, Celest has to drag the corpses out, and Magnagora just has to run out as a soul, wait for power to come back, lich, lichseed, and jump back into the fray.

I like a lot of the ideas thrown out there - personally, a quest to peace prime would be awesome, something to go through the Seal of Peace... And something to bring it down through the Seal of War. I'm a big fan of large, involved quests, so..

Wouldn't that make demesnes very easy to break, though, on places like Faethorn, where defending it is often very important? =\\

Eh, I guess. I've always thought all a mage was really is a demesne-machine, so.. Shrug. I've seen knights brainbash in a matter of rounds, so why shouldn't a mage be likewise powerful?

Wasn't the five-pointed star Auseklis? o.O Or is that some Celest thing?

Erion, that was three pointless posts in a row.

Edit: And Auseklis is four-pointed, five-pointed is the Supernals.

I hate being a demesne, and maybe a bit of extra damage in a group.

The mage/druid has his full powers up to 5 rooms away. Really, that is good enough. The mage will just have to learn to move around more in his demesne to place the radius of his full power into the area of the conflict. If more areas need to have an active demesne running, then more mages/druids need to be present with their own demesnes to accomplish that.

* A more well thought out idea is to actually have the effects based around the center of the demesne instead of the location of the mage. The mage could keep the location where his full power is in place separate from where his physical presence is. That would then allow the mage to protect one area with his full demesne power while supporting another area with his full active abilities.

Sanctuary is the biggest problem I ever had in any village influencing. Its not being used to avoid PK, its being used to protect people as their demesne kills others, and its being used to protect corners of demesnes. And its being used, in the middle of a fight, if one team is losing, just to sanctuary right away, or move one room away and sanctuary.

Sanctuaries shouldn't protect from destroying demesnes, and they shouldn't allow a demesne user to sit in them and have the effects continue to work. Other than that they are fine.