Some wonderful ideas so far.

My suggestions:
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o I would like to see broader organizational conflict quests dependent on -both- combat and noncombat actions, and very, very few of them that actually require a direct attack against the beings that lead the organization, or result in their destruction.

I wouldn't mind if Magnagora quested to weaken the influence of the Avatars over the Forest, but it is awfully depressing when they are actually hunted down and killed. The same goes for the Aspects, Supernals, Demon Lords, Tide Lords, Earth lords and so on. It's somewhat of a cosmetic change, but I think removing some of the emotional impact of the conflict quests would help stop the perceived griefing, personal insult and frustration.

Example: Glomdoring has a ritual that binds the Aspects of Hart into the Dreaming, so they won't be able to store any sands and the Last Hallow is hidden from all but Hartstone. To accomplish this, they need the three colts, four starving deer (if there are that many), a few miscellaneous items gathered from small quests about the Basin. They can only conduct the ritual on a night where the moon is less than half full. If they accomplish this, the Serenwilde will need to call on Nintoba and the White Hart to help them find a way to release the binding magic and free the Hallow and the Aspects within.

o I would like the karma system either removed entirely, or massively toned down. At the moment, it seems to be most used by those who least need it, and the blessings add an unstabilising influence to racial and class balancing.

With Avenger and the new rule about a certain number of suspects (I would go higher than five, but that's just me), I don't believe we need a powerful karma system.

As an example, I would suggest that karma be redefined as a quantity you gain for being peaceful. It could regenerate slowly, but that rate can be influenced by how many places you are enemied to, how many suspects you have, and how many times you have visited enemy territory that month. I don't think karma should be gained by bashing, as it is simply too easy a resource for the powerful to obtain. Questing, sure.

Blessings would be removed entirely, or perhaps simply high karma would have a general effect in and of itself. That is, if you are close to 100% karma you might have damage reduced very slightly and a slight experience gain. Karma however would give no offensive advantages like it does now.

o I would like to see more avenues for both combat and non-combat activities other than hurting another nation.

This is a tough one, but I think there are not enough things to -do- that don't involve detracting from an enemy organization. As has been mentioned a few times, the only real use for combat is raiding and this seems to be heavily discouraged. Village influence sessions are quite good for this reason, but they are rare and often quite heated because of their importance. Maybe some new areas could open up like the catacombs, but with two fundamental differences - they actively appeal directly to more than one nation to encourage interaction, and they are not easily dominated or controlled by a single nation. Then conflict could arise over certain quests in these areas that are not really going to be nation vs nation. For instance, the Aslaran/Krokani battle in the grey moors is a nice example of a conflict that could be fought over and influenced by groups that are not necessarily one org against another. I don't mean a single quest that one person can do, but rather, perhaps a group can mechanically pledge allegiance to one side or the other, and then engage in larger scale conflicts such as occasionally kidnapping one member of the opposing group of denizens for torture, or setting fire to their headquarters, etc.

In essence, while nation vs nation conflict should never be diluted or lessened, I think it would be helpful to have other conflicts going on that can be both meaningful in their own right, and provide an outlet for action that isn't going to affect any that don't want to be involved.

Edit: One more!
o More truly neutral areas for bashing/influencing and exploring.

I think this one speaks for itself, but it seems like most of the best bashing areas (with the exception of the gorgog caves) appear to be weighted towards one organization or another. That may not be intentional, or drastic, but it is usually there. For instance, most commune characters have a very difficult time getting to the Astral plane. The catacombs can be easily claimed by one organization, and protected as such. The Elemental planes are also relatively easily hoarded by the organizations to which they are affiliated. The sewers are (a little poxy now and) again obviously weighted towards one of the two cities.

Rather than having these sort of areas that can be made exclusive, why not have more truly objective hunting grounds that are both as easily accessed for all organizations, and by their design act against attempts to claim and defend them for one organization.

PK areas (catacombs) should be more distinct from bashing areas (astral).

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Anyway, just my thoughts.

I'd also like some general combat abilities redesigned slightly to make them more enjoyable to fight with and against - such as demesnes, summoning (WISP), and warrior afflictions, but I don't think I know enough to make any good suggestions there.

I'd like to see all PK handled by Avenger - one system covering everything.

And karma changed - how about this:
- remove blessing and curses.
- you can trade off karma points for:
1. special protection from Avenger (for example 5 karma = 1 hour) - one death in neutral territory grants you revenge. PK careful would work of course. I suppose that would be an exception to the "Avenger covering all" rule...
2. Power reserves (let's say 1:1)
That way, without yet another buffs which are too many already, there's still a point to karma.

I'd definitely like to see more Commune vs. City quests. Maybe have it so Magnagora wants to expand some, and tries to 'cultivate' a portion of the Glomdoring, or maybe they want to experiment with the forest. And maybe Celest wants to build in the Northern Serenwilde, or something. Maybe they want to uproot trees, purify them in the Pool of Stars and then drain the nasty out of the sea of despair or something. I REALLY liked those ideas where the cities would try to gather up Fae, and change them. Maybe we could have it so the communes could try to nab them back or something. I think this would add awesome dynamic to the whole alliances thing. You'd really have to pick your battles. And it could lead (in the way future) to a break up of powers, having a 1/1 enemy ratio, or even switching to a City v. Commune (Which I personally would love.)

Novices come into celest and immediately ask "how can I help?"

Well, there's not much they can do to work towards a short-term goal - there's scholars, and there's supplicants, but these don't help amongst the current wash of "Why doesn't celest have any power?" "Why doesn't celest have any villages?"

Create some on-going conflict. I hate these semi-random, short time period massive runs of conflict. Things should be low-level, ongoing conflict. Something that planning and timing can achieve, not just luck and addicted/insomniac players can.

Villages pop up once every few weeks in a little cluster. There's far too much time in between, time which the winning sides benefits, time which the losing sides get used to being the losing sides.

Conflict in Lusternia needs to involve these novices somewhat. There were quests which novices /could/ do to affect village production - but this firstly assumes you have a village, and it secondly requires that city/communes don't enforce things with overpowering military might (like the farmer quests between Acknor and Estelbar.) One side starts killing/enemying anyone who does the quest rather than just doing the quest back, and soon after the other side feels they "have to" do the same. You've just taken out a quest which you could send your novices in to do. Sigh.

Make people want to fight off-plane and toward certain goals. Random killing where you feel you have no control over the situation is your greatest fear. Make it so people who are there and participating in said goal are obvious, and the rest of the people up there "bashers, harvesters" are just 'risky'. Wild nodes is a great example of this - why not make it an ongoing thing? The scores are some ongoing moving average thing, rather than reset periodically like scholars. The nodes "wander" from time to time, so one place with a locked down demesne can't just 'own' everything. Cubix ownership really does massively screw with the balance of this game, but the game would be a start.

Admin, you've created this wonderful world with plenty of possibility, but you've created a situation where the gap between the weak and the strong is overwhelming. Things devolve into fighting because those who are the strong really can kick the rear ends of everyone else who tries to participate. Things take "too long" and this demoralises the losing side. People need to feel that their actions in the realm - even in the short term - matter.

I think that is quite insightful, and I totally agree.

Is it the case that Celest is also suffering from The Old Men's club and the confused youth club polorazing the city?

One thing I've never understood:

If the outer planes are open PK, why do we lose karma for killing on them?

I personally think Celest is suffering from a type of learned helplessness, a lack of role model and a lack of achieveable goal. Its starting to not suck - we're starting to get players coming in and those players seem interesting - and now the challenge is keeping them.

I had a whole rant written here, but then I realised that it was off-topic and it'd go against my previous declaration of "keeping in-game celest matters in-game." . Wanna know? Ask me IC.

I'm not really curious about the details, I'm just wondering if your seeing a seperation between older players and newer players that your post suggested. Within Celest specificlaly.

New /new/ players aren't going to go out there and take over the world. They're going to wander around a while, ask questions about the world, see that we're behind, and ask about it. Which is exactly what they're doing. I try to answer in the most positive light possible, but think about this:

* new players rock up; they're peasants
* there's no specific push (except by me again, as far as I can tell, I really hope I'm wrong on this) to get them to learn about influencing and get them up to influencing cityrank
* village influencing comes around
* we lose, cause generally we don't have enough high-ranking people coming around
* new players go "wtf?"
* old players, (unfortuantely including me), go "meh, not again"
* new players /will/ pick up on this
* new players, unless they've invested mucho $$$ into character, will drift away, realising that its not fun

I've seen this for a couple of cycles. I really, really hope that Celest gets a village or two this round because getting said village will more than likely mean our current crop of newbies stay around.

This is why I think /low level/ ongoing conflict would be nice. Stuff everyone, including newbies, can participate in. PK conflict should be lowlevel and off-plane: but there's nothing there to tempt the PKers out. Prime plane conflict, especially around villages, has devolved into guards, totems, PK. Its retarded, but I believe the golden rule of IRE realms apply: if people can kill, people will kill. RP/justification will always be found. The only way to prevent it from happening is removing it alltogether.

Want newbies to get involved and stay? Keep the PK away. Give them things to do.

Want the PK to stay off prime? Create low-level continuous conflict on other planes. Remove it entirely from Prime. Watch it for a while: you'll find it devolves to "who can create/keep the demesne" (evidence: pre-sanctuary influencing, wild nodes, Catacombs.)

In truth, the City vs Commune battles couldn't happen until very recently. Any city that angered both communes would end up with a horrible potion shortage, which easily cripples any player trying to bash, influence or...well, anything.

Kegs help solve that problem. Even with a full alchemy ban, all it'll take is one person with a need for gold to fill a batch of kegs and the city can keep going. You aren't going to see Celest/Mag vs Seren/Glom though since there's not TOO many reasons for the forests to hate the cities (note that even the histories hinted on it: They didn't agree and argued alot but generaly agreed to disagree).

The 2 v 2 fight will probably generaly stay on until the other 3 nations show up and that won't be for a long time. Overall, we just have to be content and work with what we got.

*attention fabulous idea*

Avenger peacing should only effect you on Prime. He doesn't protect the higher planes so why should peace carry over?

Hey, thats a cool idea.

I think group combat should be overhauled. Currently, we have a system that was designed to be primarily 1 on 1 being forced to adapt to large-scale group combat. The side with the tankier guys with the better systems wins: a decently organized group can easily take down another group by simply rattling off target names. There's no disadvantage to having a gigantic group, no incentive for any sort of combat tactics, etc. Large-scale conflict boils down to who can do the most damage before the other side shows up, and then which group can outlive the other. In order to fix what I percieve to be huge issues in a realm designed for large-scale conflict, we need to make some changes.

Implement formal armies with a rank system and such. Create a new ministry, the ministry of War, and assign a minister to it. This minister would be in charge of little but the finances and the diplomacy involved in a war. The minister would set the yearly wage for being active in the army. Activity would count as fighting in an army formation (see below). Champions would essentially be the generals in charge of the army, responsible for actually running the army.

Create tactical formations of combatants. This would work similar to following and grouping in terms of experience gain and movement. A formation can be as small as 2 people and as large as you want. However, there are advantages and disadvantages of being in such a formation. In a formation, movement takes longer. A giant formation would take a while to march from one location to the next, whereas a small formation would have no noticeable difference in movement speed. In a formation, you can create a marching order, with columns and rows. Front-row soldiers would be the first to get hit while last-row soldiers are limited in attack power. Essentially, the idea would be to put the tanky warriors in the front while putting the frail mages and druids in the back. Melee attacks would be out of the question if you're in the back row, but attacks that don't require you to be in arm's reach would work just fine. The people in the front rows would take almost all the damage from any melee attacks, allowing the people in the back to take very little damage, if any, from an attack directed at them when protected by meatshields. Formations have direction. By default, this direction would be whatever direction the formation last moved. However, the formation leader can FACE (direction) to turn the formation. Facing takes a considerable amount of time, during which the formation cannot attack or move. Formations clash differently if attacked from different directions. If a northward facing formation is attacked by a southward facing formation, there is no change. However, if a northward facing formation attacks a westward facing formation, the people on the leftmost column of the formation are treated as the front row of the formation for all intents and purposes.

Explosives. Selthar needs his boom juice. Pouring it on a non-magical item obliterates it, throwing it into a room lights up the room with the pretty light of burning body parts. Er, I mean, it deals damage to everyone in the room.

More to come, maybe, after I actually get some sleep... brain is dead...

I mentioned this in another thread. But here's an idea.

I think the Avenger and the Karma system work as deterents. What I think players complain about is either one of the following elements:

1) People want to be able to PK anyone, anywhere, without consequences. I don't think that should be the case. Why would you want to attack the non-violent ones?

2) People are mad when people wait for tactical advantages before cursing/vengance. That is a legit problem.

Here are a couple of ideas to tweak the whole thing.

Have a Karma and/or Avenger flag. If you karma flagged, you can use Karma and the Avenger. If you turn off the flag, you can't use Karma. PK Status would warn if somebody has Karma/Avenger status. You couldn't change your flag for at least a 24 hour period, and you would never have anyone with suspect/vengance status while the flag is off.

This would avoid a legit PvP flag, but would allow those who want to be protected to be protected, while allowing those who want full PK battles to have the option of retaliation. Daevos, Murphy, Narsrim, and Amaru, for instance, could then both agree to keep their Karma flags off, etc.

Other Ideas.

Write the Anti-Griefing Help File: This would allow the admins to set the guidelines that people are confused about. So many people thought this idea was good. I think some people get confused about this being a game you can win, and I do think discussing the factors of "good sportsmanship" is a very good idea.

Make villages come up more often. PLEASE.

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Admin, you mostly had the right idea to change the length of time in play, but really. If you had the villages in play once every two weeks, you'd:

* give people time to learn how to do stuff;
* give people practice on doing stuff;
* be able to shorten the max amount of time villages can stay in play, because if you lose it you'll get a crack at it sometime in a year or so.

Why not make things more frequent and then see what/how things go?



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Looking at my data and doing a bit of math, I see that, on average, one of the ten villages revolts every 4.7 OOC days. I'd love it if this was moved up to every 2.5-3 OOC days. That is, if the average time for a single village to revolt was every 25-30 OOC days instead of every 47.

Ah...what now?