Hmm... What did happen to Terentia?

Ohh, and Lisaera, I'm in your position... exept I choose to lock myself in the basement... and I get fed 3 meals a day... Heh

EDIT: You know what would realy make this game extremely cooler! If, for some odd reason, Fain and Terentia duked it out... That would be cool!

EDIT2: I'm sorry Isune left... She and Viravain could have both opened up a hole buttload of cool situations for Lusternia. Ohh well. We'll see what summer has in store for us

Terentia was run through a blender. Lisaera was often tempted with the Terentia-shake goodness that was once the Goddess, but Fain conspired against her and drank from it first, leaving the Silver Goddess to starve for another day. Isune, in her compassion, tried to recreate the beverage that was Terentia, but instead blew Lisaera, Fain, and Herself up, leaving Viravain to rule the Basin.

...

I'll start by saying that I'm aware that playing a god character can never be quite like playing a mortal character. Mortals spend their time bashing, question, goofing around and getting drunk. And the occasional (or less occasional) mudsex. All of which is pretty much impossible to do with a divine character, unless you keep it almost entirely separate from mortals, because mortals simply wouldn't have much chance at bashing/questing with divine competitors around and well, most people don't react that well to goofing divine. Let's not talk about mudsex.

However, I think there still must be some way to make being a god more interesting. Traditionall, almost all MUDs have followed the road of God simply being another word for Administrator/Coder/Builder. Gods are not -really- regular people who play the game, but rather staff who enables regular players to play the game.

My (maybe radical, maybe deluded) proposal is this: Why not separate admin work from playing a divine/immortal? (Lusternia already has taken a step into that direction by featuring distinct Admin characters, which however still are simply shared characters like the guides and it's really the divine who do the work again, in the overwhelmingly major amount of time they spend on the game.)

Why not have immortals/divine whose sole occupation is roleplaying their own character, interacting with mortals, posessing mobs to make small additions to everyday roleplay, run mini-events with little to no preparation and coding required to the same end. Maybe there could even be a divine equivalent of quests and bashing for these immortals, so they're not -entirely- subject to the goodwill of mortals? Gods, after all, are normal people, and may well be able to find pleasure in the same (actually pretty dull and simple) things "mortals" do. I imagine a large frustration factor from playing a traditional divine can be that you can only do so much in a very limited way, and essentially have to rely on mortals picking it up and making something out of it. That's why we see gods who begin with a richly drawn background, great principles, great roleplay incentives, only to go inactive after a few RL months because except a handful of dedicated order members nobody really cared about their roleplay, which did take an extreme amount of work to set up.

In other words, give divine a life! (to put this into a kind of cheesy slogan.)

Why should it not be possible to play an immortal, do normal stuff a mortal does too, only on a level fit for a being of such powers, in your separate part of the lands so you don't mess things up for players, and if you want interact with mortals and all that an immortal can do? I'm convinced it'd help make things more interesting both for immortals and mortals and help keep both dedicated and present.

(Note we're not just losing immortals, but also mortals. Often unrelated from eachother and even unrelated from matters of the game, but then again sometimes not.)

Personally, I found being used as a Divine Stressball and Viravain forcing me to sing pretty damn funny.

What would be the incentive for being an admin? Gods would get all the fun.. and we'd have less new areas.. less bugs fixed.. less stuff done. I know if I was faced with the choice of just being a God.. or doing a bit of Godding after hours and hours of coding.. I'd choose option one..

I would choose being a coder and never ever having to be a Divine, having the responsability that dozens of players had fun without pissing anybody off and with the idiots forum ready to point my most minor mistake. Specially in such a conflictive game as Lusternia, where everybody is against everybody else.

Same, but if the position was a reward for their hard work perhaps it could work.

Take the ephemeral program as an example, you have to show the needed dedication to get a god character and so on. Well what if on a case by case dealio () these gods who decide they've had enough, they want to get on with their lives or whatever reason, but the ammount of work they've done during their time and perhaps their player "fan base" or order as some call it could warrant the gift of keeping their god character(i.e what disruption would be caused to players. For example if a god had a truly staggering ammount of order members then leaves, it's going to upset quite a few people).
This way when they stop working, if Estarra or whom ever decides that their addition to the game is great enough, the responsibilities would be gone but the ability to help out at will would be there. The players could continue to follow their divine, These gods may be more available to provide answers and run rp events (they don't need to of course, but for example if Elcyrion quit and got the reward, he might be able to blow up more mountains )

That sound better? Imagine the idea that if you worked hard enough this reward may await you

Though it's to subjective to work (disgruntled admins who don't keep their characters, or who do the work and quit the second they fulfilled a list of requirements)

I think if a Divine has no time for coding or building they won't have the required time to RP with people either. Also, I think somewhere deep inside they enjoy building and coding besides RPing with people.

Also, the idea of the game is that is a player world. You don't want two dozens of Divines with nothing better to do than to walk around and talk with everybody. If a Divine is around all day it loses all mistery

but there would be divine that quit due to other constraints. They wouldn't actually be around all the time because if they quit because they didn't have time for it, Then it's likely they wouldn't have the time. I would imagine interaction would be likely to stay around the same level. For example if I were a divine who got a full-time job (shudder) and then had to keep up coding and various other things it might get a tad overwhelming, I quit to focus on my life but i pop in from time to time, just as a player could.

Yes, I'm totally not seeing why anyone would want to be an admin then. There would only be very few exceptions to this, as for example I never wanted to be an IC God from the beginning. Getting to be a God and central pieces in events and have the power and (theoretically) respect that comes with it is meant to be a large part of the reward for working so hard as an admin and builder. The other parts are getting to make fun of Estarra and getting to see my beautiful face every day.

Those statements are, respectivelly, not true and disappointing (To Joli).

I couldn't avoid imagining Lisaera face in ascii moving on the screen.
Scary

So... Being a god is like being on weed, just scarier?

For incentive, you should take out all the Gods on vacation to places like L.A. (or even better, Canada!) once a year and take LOTS of pictures and then post them on the website! If Achaean Gods can do it, why not Lusternia???

Oh, we get it. You're trying to get the REST of the team to quit now? For shame, Shou. For shame.

For a brief and completely unrelated sidenote/hijack

Got to love our Gods and Goddesses for Their sense of humor, especially Viravains. Haha love the signature.

Yes, I think that's just the problem, that playing a God isn't really the prime occupation for Lusternian staff, but rather a reward for the actual work they're doing, loads and loads of coding, building, organizing, dealing with issues, etcetc.

So when people then see, hey, as a God I'm really limited in what I can do, I mainly have to rely on my order members making something out of what I have to offer RP-wise but, sucks, they just don't... then it's not surprising some of them quit, right?

So solution A is to make sure such people get filtered out before they get to the critically frustrating stages and hope you get a select few who will survive for a while, solution B is to add more and different incentives and rewards for your hardworking staff, as well as implement larger specialisation of staff responsibilities, so more people can work at what they're really good at and what they really enjoy. Such as coding, building, roleplaying on a divine level, etc.

Version A seems to be what MUDs are usually doing, I think it'd be interesting to see B.

Or maybe I'm really just having a too limited picture of what cool things a god gets to do as a reward for all the icky stuff.

Actually, we do both. But JUST roleplaying is never going to be acceptable, there has to be some OOC work going on, so the RP-specialisation idea is just not going to happen, even if it wasn't super-dangerous and proven in the past to be a bad move.