Lets start the "make deepnight official" campaign... , that will piss off the admin plenty.

Right, celest will go up to them, and say "do you oppose the taint" and depending on the answer they'll be branded enemies, or not. If they are a city, half the commune's members will hate them. If they are a commune they'd be pressured to choose a side between seren and glom, or just dislike them both.

A 'Happy with everyone' neutral org only lasts until someone attacks them for the first time, and then they get pulled into the fighting.

I'm not saying that's always bad, I'm just saying neutral orgs don't last.

I think it would satisfy the playerbase immensely. Even the people who don't particularly like Deepnight would like to see it, since it would be a demonstration that Lusternia is a dynamic world and not some master plan which is being railroaded by the administration using the players as pawns.

(It isn't, right? Right?)

As much as I like the idea of a neutral playerbase, the problem comes down to the players. Or rather the lack of new ones. If we want to see new cities, I think the best solution is to advertise Lusternia. Write glowing reviews on Top Mud Sites and network with friends perhaps.

I have to dissagree, it's hardly the rest of the basin's fault if glomdoring doesn't start up relations with them.

That's an incredibly ignorant statement.

Not to ruin any ingame politics, but from a person who rarely plays anymore, and hearing about this war, and logging into the game now and then... I must say Glomdoring is pretty much neutral. Even though for a long time it wasn't.

Deepnight has enough people to support itself apparently. Letting it take small baby steps to becoming an org, (unlike glomdoring which went BOOM and then they needed to do all these quests really quickly) might be really neat, and hopefully not to hard to code.

And I also suggest that deepnight stay in aetherspace, and not be given "territory" on prime.

Dance puppets, Dance.

My reaction:

Yep. Remember, I tried to have a "happy with everyone" character, which has failed miserably. Most of the time in the last two years, I've been enemied to one place, and I think I've been enemied everywhere at once, and had each place cut off my manse between 1-3 times. It doesn't work to be neutral, but a wild card shakes it up.



Well, that's what we hope for in a MUD. And I've heard that as a reason for more than one person who wants to jump ship to Ilyrias.



I do it all the time. Why, just today, I was emailing a coworker about games, and I inlcuded Lusternia in my list of favorites and gave the website. I wrote most of the old wikipedia article on it (and unless it's been changed, is still there in my original format), have advertised to people and websites, etc etc etc. Heck, I got family to play as well (Shishi). Keep it up guys.



Glomdoring isn't neutral, Glomdoring is anti-everyone. Plus, they're a commune and "supposed" to dislike cities, and "supposed" to dislike Serenwilde. Note the quotes. They're one of four organizations who have reasons to dislike the other three.

Deepnight does have a fair number of people, probably 50+ right now. It has every kind of cartel, a newsroom, a post office, a library, a store, etc.

An idea I recently had involves a shield around the city, permanent floating in aetherspace, and Bob's aetherships back and forth to it, like the ship to spectre isle. But hey, it's only an idea, and I need to finish the rooms I have already.

Which dance would you like us to do?

Personally, I think a neutral organization could be done, if they had skills that were really strong in defensive and self-healing capabilities, but total crap in offense; and if they had a very firm RP background creating a strong tradition of neutrality, and an obligation to provide their economic services to all the other organizations equally, based on strong historical reasons. That would tend to yank them back to their base RP every time the temptation came up to move it towards partisanship.

It's one of the things I dislike about lusternia that's been making me play aetolia/imperian more lately - pretty much all the conflict is group vs group (usually org vs org) rather than PvP. I like a good fight. I don't call going up against 4 other people on my todd a good fight, I call that an excercise in running away. I don't call two groups of 10 people battering each other into a pulp a good fight, it's just who can spam the most effective macros and wipe out the other side first. I like going up against someone on their own, while I'm on my own, and kicking some arse. With org vs org conflict, that's very rare, because if you get into a fight with one guy then a dozen more will jump in. I put a fair amount of time into coding a good system, and I have the skills and knowledge to use them that means that I -can- take on a lot of individual players on my own - but that is a situation that will never ever happen.

/rant.

To the point of my post - it also means it's damned near impossible to avoid conflict because the conflict can affect every other aspect of an organisation, and some people would like to go on lusternia to relax, not go get stressed out by x people killing y to screw over z.

I dunno.. there's just something about the world of Lusternia that really draws me in though. I wish I could pinpoint it.. but I can't. The atmosphere is something I enjoy, the possibilities granted by the libraries, aetherships, influencing, and the great quests.. and all of those things together just really attract me more to this game than any of the others.

However, those things that attract me really don't require me to be in an org to be involved in said politics.. soo, yeah. When I am in an org, I enjoy the conflict to a degree. I used to have fun during the old wars.. but I think I much prefer a cold war with occasional, week-long bursts of fighting over a constant hot war.

I think that's what Lusternia needs.. a method for workable cold war, so that orgs can fight without actually fighting.

See, I don't really see that as a problem with organizational conflict. I don't believe for a moment that a neutral org would last unless they swore off all village/wildnodes/culture/etc competitions with other nations. Neutral pockets of people, little clans, guilds, whatever... maybe. Neutral nations, no.


Instead, I think there should be more opportunities for PK... ON PRIME. Every plane is aligned with a nation, and you touch anything there you're going to get ganked. The answer isn't to destroy the beautiful RP of each nation of Lusternia, it is to give additional alternatives to just nation vs nation battles.

I don't think there is a growing movement against RP in Lusternia's nations, I think the voices of rogues occasionally get louder and as always happens during an IRE war, people get tired of it.

Don't get me started on Exarius - some contributions aren't worth the cost. Even if an employee brings me lots of business, if they're cheating, conning and manipulating people to do so, I won't make a point to give them any special protections. But that's just a personal opinion.

I'd like to see some other dimensions for conflict introduced, and definitely some reworking of Prime PK. When the war draws to its inevitable close, then is the time to evaluate whether we like having different perceptions for each nation or not.

I think you're sort of wrong in two senses. This trend isn't exactly new, heck, it's not really a trend. This is how the game is set up. Everything has a place and a balance and an opposition, it's the way of Lusternia.

Also, I don't think everyone's been at war for 2 years. Serenwilde has had periods where we were not at war. Sure, we still had some scuffles and skirmishes, but it's nothing compared to full open warfare as we see now.

We need a method of conflict that focuses more on sustained effort and concerted action than in jumping somewhere, killing some mobs, and running away/dying. I think and hope Nexus Worlds can provide that.

Neutral organizations can't exist in Lusternia, at least not for any stretch of time. Gwylifar, the conditions you present wouldn't really help them in staying neutral - people tend to ignore the histories in matters of foreign policy. Serenwilde abandoned the people of Celest to die during the Taint Wars, and yet Serenwilde and Celest were buddies for ages in-game. Eventually the balance would shift within the neutral organizations and they would lean one way or the other. A strong leader devoted to maintaining the organization's neutral status could function, but such leaders aren't always in supply. Richter, Ialie, Exarius, and a few others could pull it off, but depending on how many of these organizations exist and the types of people that make up their membership there will always be, at the very least a bias, and at the very most a total abandonment of their impartial status.



In summary: a neutral organization could function, but it would be silly to imagine that it could remain 'perfectly' neutral, though with enough effort it might at least stay close. That's being optimistic, mind you.

The trend wasn't what you just summarized, the trend was that I saw more and more people, and newbies especially, wanting to go rogue.

And people keep talking about a neutral organization, and I don't like that idea. Being "neutral" is like having no opinion of your own. It's just that we need an organization that doesn't start off with a reason to hate the others.

And if I hope he doesn't mind, but a newer (I believe, sorry if I'm wrong) player sent me a message, and part of it said:


That's the kind of stuff I was talking about.

You can believe what you will about me, but it'll be wrong.

I don't want to turn this thread into a flamefest however so I'll leave it at that.