No, the basin is at war... it just as lows and highs... we have no form of peace or truce, but oh well, I am obviously talking to the wrong croud...

Lusternia is a game of conflict. By design, there is meant to be tension at all times, this isn't a realm full of snuggly bunnies who sing about love and happiness and joy all the time. It's a battlefield. I can understand wanting peace/truce sometimes, but implementing mechanics to force us to limit raiding and such isn't the way to go.

I was trying to point out that conflict DOES NOT EQUAL kill kill kill... But like I said, wrong crowd.

She's not saying that she wants a realm full of snuggly bunnies. Read the post.

It's called exaggeration. As I said, I understand not wanting constant raiding, but adding some sort of passive mechanic to limit it is not an improvement. Such passive mechanics would make things like shrine powers and ripples, and other active mechanics, almost worthless.

Let us have more options for conflict other than raiding, instead of nerfing raiding.

We already have villages, culture, and wildnodes as other means of conflict. Also I believe there's more coming with nexus worlds?

Callia, I really don't think you're seeing that the things you are talking about already exist.

As an example, Celest currently has a truce with the Serenwilde. Talk to some of the people that have to deal with the tensions of that and maintaining it and what have you if you don't believe anything besides outright kill, kill, kill conflict exists. The same can be said of relations with the Glomdoring. It's all about being very careful and negotiating and what have you. I imagine Magnagora is much the same as are the communes.

The only full out war is between Magnagora and Celest and apparently Glomdoring and the Serenwilde. All other relations are pretty much exactly what you're describing.

I think what Catarin said basically covers it. Take some time to experience the tension of the relationship between New Celest and the Serenwilde, which is a perfect example of exactly what you're talking about Callia.

As for the issue of preventing super-long raids, I have to say I agree with Athana. There is no mention of a mechanic to nerf raids. This wouldn't provide any discouragement to raiding - the time limit should be long enough to allow a normal raid without any noticeable effects. It WILL, however, discourage incredibly long raids, or continuous hit-and-run type raids. I personally love raiding and defending, but I think we can all agree that neither incredibly long raids nor continuously repeated raids are fun.

Who would complain about a mechanic that would discourage grief-fest raids, without discouraging normal fun raids?

That said, I don't have any problems with the current system. If someone is just going to hold a long raid like that, I ignore them and let them hunt, or 'guard the guards,' as Aiakon mentioned. RP-wise, I would love to protect Nil, but OOC enjoyment is more important. Usually the raiders get bored and leave quickly enough, and the vast majority of both Celestian and Magnagoran fighters do a pretty good job of observing when the fun has gone out of the fight, and the raiding force usually leaves.

So, all of that just to say that I don't see a major need for this, but it's another one of those things where I see absolutely no reason to whine and complain about it either.

Even Serenwilde and Glomdoring have managed a state of strained truce. What you're describing is the status quo, Callia. It just so happens that there're more orgs fighting than not at the moment.

Anyways, back on topic. I think the cost of the nexus powers is a bit heavy. I would never use them. There is a greater emotional attachment to the amount of power in the nexus than there is to the Daughters. It might not be right, but it's the way it is. That being the case, I think the answer is to greatly reduce the cost of all of them and slightly reduce the strength of the higher end ones. There's no need to add new mechanics when the existing ones just aren't palatable to the playerbase.

Friggen Valkyrie

QFT. Everyone gets a turn to stare into the abyss and become what they loathe. Celest just seems particularly pleased with itself for having finally gotten their turn at it.

Sweeeet. That was however one of the reasons I didn't like to play zerg often, you needed high-end air defense or you completely lost all of your houses/transports/detectors.

Edit:Is that map Lost Temple? It sort of looks like it.

Part of the problem seems to be the overwhelming predictability and boringness of a large raid sitting in a meld waiting for someone(s) with more bravado than sense to come charging into their inevitable death.

If you don't like Athana's suggestion of some kind of time-limiting device (astral sanity equivalent), what if the cosmic planes were a little more unstable than we thought - every now and then the cosmic forces propel you to a different part of the plane and/or dissolve a meld (which is an elemental based power and so inherantly unstable on the cosmic plane ...). If it didn't happen too often but just often enough to make sitting in a large group a bit risky and unpredictable, giving smaller groups of defenders the hope that someone might suddenly be cast off and vulnerable, it might spice things up a bit without killing raiding.

One problem I could see happening with some of these suggestions, mine included is that it's making the cosmic planes less hospitable, something the "you can now influence angels/demons" was pretty much the opposite of, trying to make them more hospitable and more positive activity oriented. If we make them so inhospitable that no one wants to go there it’s defeating the point of previous changes making them more-so.

I'm starting to sound like a broken record but:

Players already have methods to make the plane more inhospitable and drive off the raiders. That the players are not interested in using these methods due to an unwillingness to pay the essence or power costs involved does not mean that we need to create new free methods to accomplish the same thing.

Certain players can choose to pay unreasonably high essence/power costs in order to help in defense, you're right. However, that leads to more endless grinding to make up for the essence/power wasted, which is worse than just sitting through the raid to start with. Also, the reality is that large, long raids are much more likely to occur when very few (if any) people are around which can use these powers. Those powers are designed in order to protect the most valuable investments, they're not designed to be used every time a huge group decides to ransack the cosmic plane. Also, as has been pointed out, all the invaders have to do is leave and go to Earth instead once those effects are raised, which dodges them and just drains our resources.

The methods you keep mentioning are not meant to discourage long raids. They're meant to give the defenders the advantage in important situations, where they might be willing to pay the large cost. This mechanic would be used solely to discourage very long raids. It's not imbalancing, in that it does not give the defenders any advantage over the invaders, and it really does not affect the combat itself in any way. All it really does is draw the line for those who tend to want to sit around constantly, or raid continuously. The mechanics you keep pointing out and the ones suggested in this thread accomplish completely different things.

The essence has to be used for something (well it doesn't have to be used but not using it begs the question of why you bother to gather it) so why not use it to aid in defending?

Heh.

I'd pay good money to watch someone attempt to explain that to Fain.

I know pretty much nothing about Fain...He doesn't like his essence being used?

It's more the implication that his essence is wholly ours to use. In gamely, that is absolutely not the case. His essence is part of him and we borrow it in emergencies.. we don't squander it or it's zap time.

Maybe that's a dumb way of balancing it, though. It certainly seems to cause wild frustration in the playerbase.