An idea about conflict quests. What if there was a 4 hours fade out time on conflict quests? You do a conflict quest against the enemy, the affects of that quest last 4-6 hours. This way, nobody is ever really "forced" to fight out the quest unless it happens during a time of day when people are around to take care of it. Many people play 4 - 8 hours a day, so for those people, having the conflict quest happen and not responding would be sort of silly, but for the people who log in, some 4-6 hours later, arn't "griefed" into fixing the quest that couldn't be stopped.

I would sugest however that the effects don't just "stop" but rather some NPC sort of fixes it for the community after seeing that the people can't fix it. So for example:

Hart Kills Crow, 4 - 6 hours later, Brennan shouts "How pathetic, must I do everything around here?" And then Rowena shouts "Yes, yes, you do!" and then there is a world wide emote of Brennan and Rowena bringing Crow back to life.

If you wanted, you could even have the death of brennan and Rowena, prevent the quest from coming back, but of course as soon as the two of them are alive again, they do the ritual. I think there are a lot of possibilities with this basic approach to conflict quests.

I was thinking of quests with more of an effect than killing pixies which seems more like bashing than a quest. Those are like penny slots while raising Crow to Kill Hart is more like the million dollar jackpot. In that analogy I want more hundred dollar slots.

Still, I don't know what that would look like either.

If you pumped up the affects of villages, so that when you raided there was a substantial hit to the amount of commodites produced, I think that would be your 100 dollar slot.

Being able to do "opposing" commodity quests, and being able to Tripple your own village production , or have the enemy get 1/4th thier production could have just that sort of affect. I had always thought that was what villages were supposed to do in the first place.

I think village raiding would be more gratifying if there was some better indication of what impact a raid had. As it is, I have absolutely no idea of how many commodities a village brings in, how much commodity quests affect it, how much raiding affects it, and so on. I think commodity income should be noted in org logs, and raiding's effect and any extra brought in by permanent commodity producers (dwarves, furrikin, sheep) should be noted parenthetically after the net amount.

02/01/2007: Dairuchi added +845 power (Krellan stole -72, Nejii stole -20, Folkien stole -18 power by killing villagers)
Dairuchi tithed 5 wood, 20 gems, 3 cloth, 7 leather, 10 meat, 6 marble (Krellan disrupted the production of 2 marble), and 4 silk (4 silk produced by resident silk spiders).

All of the info on villages read that way.

on another note if we could add a sense of tangibility to the existing conflict it would be come less of a drag. if Mag kills the supernals then all that happens is that celest is annoyed for a few hours until they could raise them again.(yes there is the power loss but the large amounts in each nexus negates that too.) I think limiting power would help but, if there were more risks/rewards to conflict then it would loss it's monotony.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I liked the old resource competition more than I like damaging another org. Power used to be like that. There was a very real risk of running out of power. Part of that was because conflict quests could take huge chunks, but also part because it wasn't so easy to create massive amounts of power. I don't know how that can be implemented at this point, but...if there was a scarce resource with positive impact for an org or individuals in an org, but minimal drawback for not having the resource, that would be cool. Something that you quite honestly might find yourself without if it's spent unwisely or the other side just plain outplays you for it, something that couldn't be stockpiled indefinitely.

well my idea would need to wait till nexus worlds are implamented but what if you need some kind of special commodity to build or destroy a construct. This commodity could be very rare as in only two or three per year per village. And once nexus worlds are fully implamented there should be in theory, conflict over taking down constructs. it would create a large risk on raiding and building constructs.

if this comes off as bad it's because it took me a whole two seconds to think this up and i want to fling it out before I forget

I like the idea of focusing on villages for economic conflict quests. They don't go for the throat, they're not based on specific orgs, they would let non-fighters participate more and they increase the significance of swaying villages.

One of the big problems with the old conflict quests was that if you failed to complete a quest you suffered no penalty, you'd just start again. The target of your quest was only ever going to get hurt or have no change for good or for bad. For economic conflict quests it'd be good to have some kind of penalty if you messed it up. Nothing so major that it would make the quests not worthwhile anymore but something that you wouldn't be able to afford to lose repeatedly.

What's missing is that all these conflicts are almost purely tactical conflicts, with minimal (if any) strategic-scale challenges involved.

When and why do raids happen? When someone gets bored. Just bop across the entire length of the world, pit your might against the opponent's standing defenses, and withdraw. Over.

There's no logistics, no investment in making a raid. Nothing to be gained, really. you just do it.

Make a game out of preparing for the raids. Force players to accomplish certain goals before they're even allowed to attack, and make it into a wagering proposition: if they execute the raid well, they turn some sort of profit. If they don't, they wind up paying more than they got back from it.

Things I'm seeing in other threads and in IRC make me wonder if the answers people gave a week ago need to be amended. It sounds like either conflict cranked up lately, or just became more tedious. And a handful of people have left or taken a break in the last week, even people who posted here that it wasn't too much yet. Not sure why. I know a lot of people are having choke fatigue: even people who like fighting find choke sucks the fun out of it. And of course there's the Narsrim factor. But is that all it is?

I'd say you've hit the nail on the head, Gwylifar. The conflict in the last week or two has definitely been cranked up. There are more raids every day, and I haven't logged on once in the last week without having to right away defend against some attacks. The Choke factor is annoying, certainly. Narsrim, the rogue, is just looking for any raid group he can join. The increased conflict is getting to many of the players, myself included. I enjoy combat, but I do not so much enjoy dying two minutes after logging in or dying four or five times in 15 minutes. It's not a good pattern for a game such as this.

We did have a relative lull in raids before this. It'd be interesting to get a group of highly active players to mark down the raids. What time, what date, for say, three months. If there is an increase in raids, that is in response to something. I know I've felt that until recently, Lusternia has been rather quiet. When I first started serious combat, there were infrequent raids, and lots of jumpings, but that sorta died off. Maybe it's starting up again (at least Seren-Glom) and once everyone gets sick of it, the raids will taper off

"everyone" doesn't get sick of it though, which is a large part of the problem. Not only do some people not get sick of it, they don't know and/or don't care when everyone else does, so largely they DON'T taper off.

He's right.

And I'm just going to apologize in advance. I don't like the constant raids. I don't want Glomdoring to "pay back" Serenwilde for what they (and by "they," I think we all know what I mean) did to Glomdoring. What happened with Glomdoring was sucky and discouraging on both an IC and OOC level. It showed TERRIBLE sportsmanship and should never be duplicated, but I'm seeing a trend that is moving in that direction, and I'm fairly sure a few protests by the "out of favor" are not going to have much of an effect.

So if things get icky, I'm sorry. Many of us really wanted something different that that.

And if it doesn't happen, then yay.

I agree with you, Shayle.

And while I have nowhere near the amount of political power you do, I'll do my best (and nag others!) to keep it from swinging FULL pendulum.

Heh. I hadn't thought of it like that. How unutterably hilarious. Using Narsrim's griefing in order to justify Narsrim's griefing. It has a sort of circular beauty to it.

I don't think Shayle was supporting that kind of mindset, from her post. That said, I've accepted that it's going to happen, as it's still happening in point of fact, and perhaps even resigned myself a bit to the idea that it's not entirely Glomdoring's fault/responsibility to prevent...it's his.

The people who actively support it definitely deserve whatever they get though. Someone actually tried to suggest that (e.g) Daedalion there is being ironic, but somehow I'm not seeing it in him.

Oh, she wasn't supporting it, and I don't think Aiakon believed she was-- he just found the concept she brought up to be amusing.

And no, I don't believe Daedalion was being ironic.

I'd like to extend my apologies as well. I did what I could to mitigate the coming griefing, but it turned out to not be enough.

I would love it if conflicts happened for a reason, had a set goal in mind, and a set thing to be accomplished. When that was accomplished, they would end for a while. Village revolts are a perfect example of this sort of conflict. Lusternia is not designed to support player-initiated conflicts of this variety though, sadly.

I believe its a failing of the players for not coming up with ideas for it rather than the fault of the game. Lusternia's proven to be quite adaptable towards player initiated conflict in the past. I just see so little by way of that kind of planning anymore by players.