On Imperian's forums, I saw a pinned thread listing the areas intended for bashing for level categories for each org. Sadly, I don't think we could fill up as complete a list here. Personally, I'm in a rut at 74, not being able to find anywhere that isn't *#$% bashed out all the time.

Another thing is, which may be a little off topic, but....

I noticed in Imperian there are several different places for novice only bashing and exploration. To me, if I were fresh to a new world, I think it would be more fun to be able to go to several different novice areas. Since most people end up near the top of smoke mountain, if a novice dies, they have to do all the required things to get back up there. Now it isn't really hard to do, but it could be a turn off to new players who want to just learn their new skills, and bash in places that arent swarming with every other new player.

If you give novice 5 little places that were their own, along with Newton Caverns, I think it would suck them in more, and hook them. Granted the 5 novice places should be awesome since that is where we are trying to get more players, and we need to get them hooked on the RP and in depth history we already have.

Example,

Novice Area 1:
Ruins of Old Celest:
Mobs; Paladins, Aquamancers, Celestines.
Quest: Search for Object A and give to Person A; reward small gold reward.
Descrip: An internal struggle between the guilds in the ruins of old celest have caused strife and turmoil, leading to civil war and you can go and help one of the guilds you choose. By helping them get some coveted object and turning in the enemies of a certain org you will get gold and exp.


That is a real rough example but make a few little places like that and I think it would disperse the novices enough that they see Lusternia as more exciting and fun and cant wait to leave newbie areas to explore the bigger areas....

Which would lead to..... more players, that leads to more spending on Lusternian credits, that leads to Matt being happy and giving Estarra more resources for builders, which leads to a Warrior Archetype that is Based on Stealth/Damage and of course more bashing areas for everyone.

I love this idea in general, but we already have the ruins of Old Celest. It's now called Spectre Isle.

I mean a small God/Admin community. There aren't half as many Gods and Admin in Lusternia as there are in Achaea, from what I know about (since Achaea has several 'active' Gods and even more Working Gods (uhh, what are they called again? Something that starts with a C)).

Of course the easy way round that one is to slowly go inactive and stop doing anything, so that the replacement can't fail to be an improvement.

Imperian is actually bigger. It's been around a lot longer though.

Someone mentioned that there are less raids in Imperian. Maybe nowadays that is true, but I played during the first 2 years in Imperian and there were countless raids with the usual times of quietness. Maybe it has changed but don't think that Imperian never has suffered from that crap.

Aside of that it is nothing unusual that people come and go. No matter which game at some point you have done or seen everything and then you move on to something new. But they all come back some day, sometimes just for a brief visit, sometimes for longer.

Celani?

Lusternia has the equivalent in our Ephemerals, but still not nearly as many as Achaea. But then, Achaea is the oldest and largest of the IRE games. It should be expected to have more.

Ya well you know what I mean, something around those lines, not word for word...




Ahh ok, thought ya meant players, because alot of what I have heard is this will happen only if we get more players...


Hmmm gonna make a thread for novice area ideas.... Please post some of your quick ideas there.

Wow. Been a while since I've heard this tune.

About a year ago, everyone was saying that everyone was leaving and the game was dying, but that seemed to finally go out of fashion. Anyone for another chorus of "My Friends Are Going Away, So Lusternia Must Be Dying"?

MUD populations ebb and flow, and they always hit troughs in mid-winter, later spring, and early fall, when so many pf the players are going through major life changes.

Wow for some reason this kinda irritated me. I am not saying this because my friends are leaving i don't care if my friends leave because i talk to them in other ways. i posted this because yes some left for another game, but mainly because i keep seeing novices come play a couple hours and just never come back so something must not be appealing to them. Yea I know when populations go down and up been playing lusty for a long time and other muds before so I understand when seasons hits and what not.

I've read some of Imperian threads in the forum, especially about Lusternia. They're, more or less, are having the same problems with us
Problems like more conflict vs less conflict, newbie problems, problems with Gods, admins, etc.
That is, of course, only a quick conclusion from reading the forum, not direct experiences from the game

In my opinion, no games are 100% perfect. As long as the admins still care about the game (and I'm sure, they still care now), innovations and fixes are being made frequently, I think it'll be fine

I started a char there, and I don't feel like going back. I got killed by a psychotic novice Taekyon when I was like lvl 15, and it took something like 20 minutes to get out of that dead people place. And the forums...I'll leave it at that.

Sorry for the late reply, I've been quite busy to post more
Now, as I said it's all about tastes. I find a bit risky to add new guilds when you have not enough people to keep them alive (wich seems to be a common complaint about lack of people) and not add more areas when people have been complaining for 6 months about the lack of bashing grounds, that's a reason I find Imperian administration agreeing with me more. They seem to do the stuff in a more conservative way that I like more. Same with balancing and going from one extreme to the other in skills/conflict/etc... and even the way they deal with the players in the forums, like taking the complaints less personally and not saying "you have no idea or shouldn't speak about this or that". I am sure Lusternia's administration is as dedicated to lusternia as any other game administration is. Probably the imperian people who see imperian as boring or slow or stagnated are coming to Lusternia at the same time I say this. So as I said it's all about personal preferences.

I seem to find Aetolia the most worthwhile departure from Lusternia among the other IRE games these days. It's a tad harder to get into I think from a novice/complete newbie perspective, particularly if you choose certain orgs to be a part of. But the environment is pretty heavy with RP, granted there's always those pseudo-RP players on these games but it does feel more natural to RP in Aetolia to me then it does Lusternia, perhaps that'll change with time.


I really like both, I like the path Lusternia is taking as far as combat better, just in it's general style and the very forward thinking and fresh ideas coming from Lusternia. But the environment of Aetolia is honestly a lot more suited to my personal tastes. Anyhow, guess we see how I do at maintaining multiple characters.


I think Aetolia has this problem just as much as Lusternia with certain orgs in particular. And the novice retention is an obvious issue of concern to them. They're perhaps worse off in some houses/guilds for people to actually be there to interact with novices, but when there are those there they seem much more engaged in conversing with you and interested in your plight as a novice. Not to try and derail, but the Inter-Planar speach to novices being allowed would really alleviate this problem with Lusternia to a degree. It feels like sometimes people wish to spend more time answering novice questions and generally helping them, but can't due to the restrictions of planar realms/travel, making them seem aloof. And they're often required off plane by necessity of their characters other activities.


As for old players, I don't think you're seeing anything abnormal, but I honestly haven't seen enough to know. But I highly doubt there's that much of a true exodus from established players as it may seem, it just doesn't seem a realistic situation to me. Lusternia appears to be a growing community/game not a dwindling one.

The only problem with being able to hear and speak on GNT from any plane is that people may start using it as a way around their low Planar skill to just communicate with those other than novices. It happened in Achaea that way (not different planes necessarily, but a similar idea).

People were already using clans to get around deafness.. nothing new. If GNT was changed though and people abused they simply need to be stepped on.. hard. Especially in the down times the few that are around of each guild might not be on prime, I'd rather risk the possibility of GNT abuse than never even knowing when a novice needs help.

You get Guild leaders/patrons to start disfavouring people for "filling the novice channel with conversation subjects that distract them from their education" and people stop doing it. Specially if you kick them out of the guild if they don't care about teh disfavours. You don't need mothering functions when you have human controllers

Ya Rly! Besides, using messages to get around deafness / aether bubble restrictions keeps your conversations more private anyhow.

I haven't left completely, but after realizing that I basically suck at everything in Lusternia, I've turned my focus more to World of Warcraft. I'm not trying to be "emo" or whatever, but it's very frustrating when you work really hard to try and do well in your guild and end up just sucking slightly less. I'm pretty much stuck at level 47 because I'm so discouraged by everything.

And for the record, I've never been able to get into Imperian.