Technical Items
- Combat coding has made some very fair and needed changes lately, namely tracking envoys and starting to address the blindness/deafness issues.
- Some things still require deep looking into, namely aqua staff.

Ebb and Flow of Combat Situations
- Shamarah was accurate in portraying how city conflict has essentially boiled down to cosmic raids and trying to attack people on random planes at random time (e.g. Nico/Talkan fighting Xanon/Deimos/other on Ackleberry yesterday)
- Many points of combat simply will not change much in the scheme of things. Having accepted this for its obvious reasons, we need more goal oriented endeavors. Perhaps every so often little things could happen which would adversely effect an organization; it could involve an enemy org or more interestingly it could involve more pointed things (e.g. I might get GM back, and I'm definitely going to be working up a storm, divine support perhaps/hopefully as well, to work on some guild events or happenings that are out of the ordinary not completely unlike some past things.)
- There are really endless possibilities with the rich history and player atmospheres to have really neat occurences (not necessarily an "event") which happen very sporadically albiet not too rare or common to really spice things up combat wise.
- City v city conflict died a bit due to the Sea quest changes (most were quite needed, but I think we need a replacement of sorts to fill a conflict void)

Estarra PM me if you want more in depth or abstract ideas about whatever.

Throwing together some ideas already put up by others, in the hopes that the combination works better than separately - why not add in an insanity effect as in astral for non-org members and non-org allies? If it's balanced right - strong enough, fast enough, slow enough to regenerate - that cuts down on constant raiding, while still allowing for small, short, pixie-raids if people want to do it.

To permit full scale raids, have a quest - a specially prepared stone for Magnagora maybe, something appropriate for each of the others. Magnagora could run their quest, and then while the stone-bearer is on Celestia, or either Ethereal, no Magnagorans/Magnagoran allies would suffer from the insanity. Maybe make the stone-bearer's name highlighted, so the defenders know who to go after, maybe not. Make it so that each quest can only be done relatively rarely - 2-3 times a day, maybe, with the effects lasting for an hour - and costs power / resources to set up. Less than a raid would make back by doing everything that could be done on the plane, enough that internal org pressure will exist to not raid carelessly and waste power / resources. Add in a world-emote for each quest.

The combination should mean that defenders always have some warning that a raid is about to go off (but not against whom specifically), and raiders would have a window of opportunity, and enough power invested to need to have an objective. Even a small team of determined (perhaps suicidal) defenders might have a chance to kill one specific foe before being obliterated by the numbers. And when that target is the one person upon whom the rest of the raid depends - the one holding the quest object - then maybe you have an answer to raids being all about the numbers. Perhaps add in a free in-org conglute on cosmic/ethereal and the defenders can afford to be suicidal, even if they're small. That way, the raid is more about coordination and training - either the attackers can defend their questor while clearing out angels/Supernals/etc., or the defenders can force the attackers to retreat shortly after the questor dies when the insanity effects kick in, whether or not they're outnumbered or not.

Inspiration deliberately taken from the Ascension finale; swarming eyeballs and tentacles optional.

Thoughts? Criticism?

Interesting idea, though having "timed" raiding periods whether timed in duration or timed in what hours of the day you can do such in is a poor way to reduce monotony within conflict. I think the end-statement should be to provide clear, significant motivation to people who raid and enjoy conflict or combat itself which works towards some known pursuit.

I'd be glad to hear other ideas on the matter - most of my posting on this has been taking ideas that seemed good, and trying to fit them together into a whole.



I could not agree more, and I'd love to see some of that occasional conflict you mentioned.

But I think that there are some real concerns about having enemies effectively living on Ethereal/etc. and killing the Aspects over and over, or equivalents elsewhere. That's a great deal of grinding, for little impact on the world, and it seems to be what generates a lot of the ill-feeling without generating a lot of entertainment for the raiders who are waiting for proper opposition to arrive. I think there might be an opportunity to make the impact of a successful raid bigger - and so motivate raiders - while making them less frequent, and so minimize driving other people off.





So - make the conflict less frequent and more meaningful, for the large scale high end raids. Either they fight a defending force, or, if significant opposition is absent, they can go after Aspects/Supernals/etc. Let the impact of such a success be much larger, to make up for the infrequency. The conflict wouldn't be as grindingly constant anymore, because - at some point - the timer on the raid runs out. Someone won, someone lost, everyone can tell who did which - and everyone can have a little downtime until the rematch. I can't speak for everyone, but who wouldn't trade the chance to sit there for hours and wait for mobs to repop or a defender champion to log in for the chance to leave Celestia/Nil/EtherX in flames behind you with some prize or prizes in hand as the quest object expires? Meanwhile, no one has to live with constant war on their particular Plane.

The proposal wouldn't stop someone doing smaller-scale hit and run raids, either, but it should limit the possibility of outright occupation, which seems to be one of the main complaints, while hopefully delivering much greater rewards (power, experience, karma, quest tokens, trophies - suggestions welcome) to successful large scale raiders. Add in world-emotes and just plain decoration to underline the rewards in the mechanics - if Magnagora crushes a Supernal, have an ash storm over New Celest until the Supernal repops. A cleansing rain if New Celest cleans out Nil, and so on for every other pairing.

I agree constant raiding tends to wear people out, even raiders eventually get tired of it. I know while raiding can be fun, for the most part I'd much rather fight people on less demoralizing measures. Hence lately I take a lot of my ventures to astral, where there is less need to defend the shrines (it is entirely your decision to defend up there) and whatnot.

As far as the choke factor, yes it's getting quite annoying for a lot of serens, because at no point in the past was there a number of at least semi-decent shadowdancers that would raid Serenwilde, yet at no point did the Serenwilde stop their own attacks and raids. Everytime I go nahhh, no need to raid today, some random weak to non fighter gets by seren groups, and then the fire gets burning again.

It's a somewhat neverending cycle, you raid so we raid so you raid so we raid, except at this current time it's "demoralizing" for the serenwilde because they are not used to having their arses handed over by Gloms, in the past no matter how bad or good Seren had it, at least there was always Glomdoring to kick the crap out of, and now that is no longer an option.


--I entirely feel for Serenwilde in that yeah, griefing sucks and I hope Narsrim does not do to Serenwilde what he did to Glomdoring, and hopefully he can be monitored to avoid that. No one likes to be on the losing side for long, but the sad fact of the game is that while one can monitor his own attacks and raids (and I do not feel I approach the level of griefing, If I'm mistaken feel free to correct me and I'll examine my attacks) the fact that this is a two sided game where basically, if both sides are going at it, either all combat needs to stop or none will.

What I mean by this, yes, Serens are undoubtedly getting annoyed with being raided often or Diamante swooping down bemidst their passage of Faethorn, but there are ways to combat such things. Get unenemied, stop raiding yourselves, bulk up a group of fighters again, talk to Glomdoring leadership IC. Most people don't want to see Serenwilde griefed, I know I certainly don't, but scaling down conflict is a two way street, in the past Glomdoring made efforts to do so when they were getting dominated by Narsrim but nothing was done, no such efforts have been made by the Serenwilde.

Hmmm, I'll try to keep it short, I'm not entirely knowledgeable of everything but so far this is what I've gathered as far as the communes.


Serenwilde rose from the forest finally branching out some time after the taint, the Gloriana forest cursed and altered by the taint but slowly cured but not without affect, wrapped and covered in shadow and darkness now. The damage done by the taint still obvious but Glomdoring is a thriving forest in of itself. Aside from this odd ascertation that the Glomdoring is still tainted and a bad place, there's no real obvious or logical reason for Glomdoring and Serenwilde to oppose eachother.


Serenwilde blames civilization for the taint, Glomdoring has been affected and changed by the taint and though loved for what it is now, the past transgressions that have seemingly attempted to been set up has been completely ignored so that now basically Glomdoring and Serenwilde are all honky dory with magnagora and celest for no apparent reason. I think a lot of what makes things stagnate is it's commune vs commune and city vs city for no outright obvious reasons besides the fight for power and tinkering over some silly supernals or fae's, which is fine, but there's no apparent drive that started it all.


I think things would probably be better if the ties between glomdoring and serenwilde could be mended over time and the cities could be seen for what they ICly are portrayed as in lore and in helpfiles as the endangerment to nature and the forests. Glomdoring's main focus could be Celest and Serenwilde's Magnagora and you'd maintain a good-neutral vs evil, evil-neutral vs good type atmosphere to make sense of the fighting on the base human level of understanding of morality. Also, I've spent a lot of time examining the skills of different archetypes and it just seems as if from a balancing standpoint fighting between the archetypes in cities vs those in communes are like, born to fight one another, where as everything I've seen from commune vs commune ends up a weird staring contest, completely overpowering or this stupidly drawn out ordeal that's made even more crazily slow and boring by those damn shadows *shakefist cauldron*


But anyhow, I don't much care, once I'm actually strong enough to not instantly die to Daedalion and others (I love how they go, "Hah, it's that circle 35 guy lets take him out first), damnit I was just trying to harvest faeleaf, happens everytime. Funny stuff, and I don't much mind the dying. As it turns out usually when Glomdoring raids Etherwilde there's maybe 2 people paying attention on the aether and you've got Nessa or Yini, or just one person up there going, "Hey guys.. Daed.. Pentu... Caelfijsdha name I can't spell" etc etc as they gather and no one responds and it's a literal effort for them to get anyone to even respond on CT let alone show up to defend. As it turns out it seems like Serenwilde's peak times don't coincide with Glomdoring's which makes all the raiding really obnoxious and bad for both sides, they hit us when we're at our weakest and we hit them the same way.

Maybe put an NPC on each city that randomy asked for an item located in a different (and "opposing") city/village. That would be an excuse for a raid or a sneak action, give some purpose to raiding, give the defending city/forest something to defend, etc... Even make the NPC ask for X number of heads of "powerful" members of the opposing army if you just want bloodsheed. Obviously, give some reward for the city/village if that's acomplished.

This way raiders would have an excuse on raiding and the governments could crack on excessive unautorized raiding claiming that NPC don't think it's tactically wise to raid (it strenghtes their defenses or leaves the forest unprotected or any other RP excuse you can look for). Raids would have an objective, a limited duration on time and a reward, and should be funnier than just smacking guards.

Perhaps instead of being random, you can complete a quest to goad the NPC into asking for that 'thing'. If you succeed, you gain something. If you fail, that NPC punishes the organisation.

Now, the only issue I can see with this is some serious raider forcing their own organisation to raid when the others don't want to.

@Diamante: You're not going overboard in my opinion, though others could see it differently I guess.

Don't really see why Serens are complaining about the raids, Glom almost never raids in full force. The biggest raid I can remember being in was maybe 5 people (me, Pentu, Kaervas, Nirrti, and Daedalion). We're almost always outnumbered and Serenwilde is usually able to kill us when they get organized and stop having random single people flow to our whole group. Usually it's, like, just me, or me and Pentu, or something.

The couple I've seen (I got Disgaea so I started playing that at the time the lame raids would be going on) haven't been so bad over this last week actually. It was worse before.

I haven't really seen that many people complain very often. There's an occasional venting of frustration but no full fledged threads about stopping the raiding or people threatening to leave. Am I missing something?

I think Communes and Cities should use their loaf and keep a leash on their citizens. Just to get personal here, Krellan, for one, has been quite a pain lately, kicking both Celest and Glomdoring, hiding behind his forest and even Magnagora.

My message to Magnagora: Lucky dogs, he's hitting your enemies. But he's doing it in such a lame way that first of all, there's no fun to be had in the game for your enemies (which is fine IC, but just grief-ish OOC), and secondly, now you can no longer do it! Kick Krellan, do it yourselves!

My message to Serenwilde: Leash eeeeet!! He's just being a pain in the arse doing little other than negatively influencing the fun to be had from the game from your IC opponents. Be a sport, let them have some fun too!

Sorry for picking you out Krellan, but you were the first example to spring to mind. Now that I'm thinking about it, there's a lot more names to be put up here which I will refrain from 'cause it's just plain nasty.

I've thought a lot about online conflict recently and this is the conclusion I've come to.

Everyone has their personal level of conflict tolerance, the amount that for them is 'fun' without becoming burnout inducing or frustrating. In online persistent games though, the players with the highest tolerance and time availability will end up setting the pace. The guy who's on 100 hours a week and causing conflict for 85 of those 100 will force the other side to match that. On a small playerbase like Lusternia's, that responsibility falls on few shoulders. Those people are responding past their own tolerance limits, eventualy they leave or just stop logging on. Then others have to take up the burden, and they in turn leave (note that no one's going to match the original aggressor's level of tolerance because the premise says they're the ones with highest tolerance to begin with).

The original aggressor isn't necessarily a bad player. They're just playing at the level that's most enjoyable for them. The results for the game as a whole, however, are not good. In the classroom, you don't teach at the rate the top student can learn unless you want everyone to rebel. In an online game, you don't force everyone to fight at the rate the most hardcore PKer fights for much the same reason.

So what's the solution ? Not sure, really. In the classroom you give the top student extra stuff to keep them busy while the rest of the class catches up. What to you do to keep an off-the-charts PKer happy, that won't involve some other player losing something ? I don't have any answers there.

He's not Seren people. Get it through your minds. And Serenwilde is not going to let people tramp through the forest in an attempt to kill him, we don't want the attacks in the forest. And if you're asking us to get rid of him because -you- want to kill him, that reason isn't going to fly. Reasons such as 'he was raiding' might, but we're not going to bloody well bend down and kick him out for no bloody reason.

Or reasons like "This divine said he was raiding...she is currently at war with us, and doesn't really seem to have much evidence, but she's a divine, so it's probably true."

And so another one goes down to the Policy...

I think the conflict of Lusternia itself is not really a huge problem, but the additional stress, requirements, rules, etc. that we as players place on top of it make it much more difficult for all of us than it has to be.

Bollocks to the word of a god we're at war with!
You can take a guess as to what I think about that.


This is why I wanted to reply. I think this is a great statement and I believe it completely.

That and people taking it all entirely too seriously.

Nope, I have no idea whatsoever...have we spoken about it before?



Wait...we're agreeing on something? That's a new, fun twist!

Still, agreeing on the problem doesn't get us that much closer to fixing it. Unfortunately I'm afraid I don't have many ideas on that front, other than suggesting and hoping that people learn to police themselves.