Pretty simple fix would be to add time restrictions. For example, after you raid the comm shop, you can't do it again for X amount of IG months because of so and so reason. They have their stores hid or something. And after you siege, when the link is broken, its all to unstable to repeat for X amount of months. That way it wouldn't really be much different from Nexus Worlds.. except that it would work.

And then you get right back into villages and nexus worlds... where it's all time-limited, and you can't just go and do it when you want to.

Solution Part 2, add a quest that drops the protection granted by the time-limit. So, say you siege a Nexus and are locked out of it for 5 months. You can work to complete a quest that will stabilize the disrupted fields. This would be something big, on the scale of the Crow quests but without stupid "can only be done in a 1 hour window", but rather something that involves parts from all over the Basin. This would then allow another form of conflict quest, but it wouldn't be something hugely detrimental, because completing the quest itself would not actually harm your org, it would just re-open the window. So you can always resort to just defending yourself when the siege comes. If the quest was constructed correctly, it could be kept from being too tedious.

And for the village looting, well, you always have other villages to target if they have them. And if not, allow a quest to enable looting. Allow influencers to gather information about the new store locations by seducing villagers. When they manage it, they'll get a message saying that their target reveals where Mob X (village shopkeeper) has been hiding their stores, and that becomes the new location where the enemy org has to kill the denizen and then RAID STORES. And I don't mean that just one seduction manages it--it would be more like a mini-village influencing, where it might take multiple rounds of seducing the entire village to get the info, allowing for the defending org to take notice and protect against it.

Yes, it gets a little more complicated, but it also allows for more flexibility.

Trouble with villages and nexus worlds is that they're only available for a limited time. They become active and everyone scrambles to take them before someone else does. Making the sort of thing SAW suggests unavailable for a limited time lets people do it when they like, but stops them doing it all the time.

Not with an "Unavailable for X months" delay-- it's still mostly unavailable when people want it, hence that response to the delay proposal. Without a delay, it's the Burnout conflict. With the delay, it's too limiting.

Best solution is still, imo, non-organizational conflict that nobody *needs* to participate on (either offense or defense), doesn't give any org benefits, but requires that people who participate do tussle. There've been similar things over city-nodes, as well as the catacombs, but neither of these inherently demand conflict to get the benefits.

One problem I see right off the bat are mining villages. You need to raid them to get miners in your controlled mining village. And with these new bard guards, well good luck with that. You won't stand a chance, unless you take a non enemied person and weave a gate to them in the mine, then quickly try and get miners, and I mean so quickly that the tons of stunning (stackable stun?) bard guards, combined with the anti-burrow bard guards, along with the soldiers and affliction guards don't tear you up along with the players who will come to defend.

Right now, I think whoever has all the miners will be keeping all the miners for quite some time.

Hum, a small war-games style competition would probably be in one of the categories but here goes.

Every org could have one point in the year where they can perform a quest which opens up two gateways(which one you enter determines your team to allow allies to help) to some location in the opposing orgs territory. (with counter quests to block it for the opposing org) Fulfilling certain conditions within the arena would result in benefits.

It could work when the sun is conjunct with the orgs ascendant sign.

Probably could be fleshed out more but work calls


EDIT: Oh it would be most awesome if you could choose which org you are performing the quest against

There may be a decline in conflict, but there is an imbalance in the organisations with Celest and Serenwilde still superior, with Celest so much stronger that Magnagora can't raid back alot of the time, which may be diminishing enjoyment for some Celestians. Amplifying the consequences may make people care, but wide sweeping city conflicts seem quite out of place when some cities can capitalise fully when it is based purely on numbers of participants or active fighters, while others can't.

With that said I think there should be certain peaced quests or maybe more debating elements in conflicts (The recent angels one was good I think, even if limited to celestines). More frequent revolts would be quite interesting too, as it is last 2 of 3 happened in off peak which doesn't allow orgs the most chance to be involved if lacking an experienced leader at the time. I know I'm not that experienced, but just my view.

I'd like to think both communes are pretty even at this point. Serenwilde has quantity, Glomdoring has quality. Neither is better all of the time, but both are great in certain situations.

I'll be frank:

I supported discretionary powers such as Liveforest and Ripple.

I supported making guards not being criticaled.

I supported no beckon from Nexii.

But I utterly loathe the concepts behind these Bard guards. This is, in my opinion, the nail in the coffin for killing conflict.. At least anywhere on Prime that is. There is no way that placing guards in one location should make an area 100% proofed from raids, which this currently does UNLESS the person has Serpent and/or Divinefire. The first one being a matter of luck to avoid guards before it ticks. I'm more peeved, if anything, at lesser bard guards than the greater. I think the stun is borderline okay, but the instant knocking out of sky/unborrowing/etc is overexcessive and catering too much to pacifists. I believe there should be at least SOME player involvement with defending a territory instead of just loldroppingguards and sitting back.

EDIT: Suggestion for fixing would be to create more than one way into certain villages. Such as entering some of the mining villages through the Undervault. If only to avoid congesting a large amount of guards in one area to guard an entire area. The more guards, the more power loss the org will suffer. And while power is, quite frankly, massively abundant.. It would allow raiders a chance to actually do something without running into 50 guards in one room most of the time.

I think the entire idea was to prevent solo-raids. 3 people could make it through in theory, which isn't so bad. Solo raids are pretty much only when org either has no defenders, or raider splits as soon as they show up.

Idea: Make totems hit only one person on entrance, so 1 person can slingshot the group in.

In theory yes, but there is still the matter if players from the defending org come to defend. Then the crap hits the fan and escaping becomes impossible.

I am against the insta- abilities of the bard guards as well. Actually, Tael put it better than I probably could, so I'll leave it at that

I think you can sum the entire conflict issue up with 'Raiding is fun. Defending isn't.'

By design all 'raids' in Lusternia require the other side to defend. So for a few people - the raiders - it's fun, for some (or maybe a majority) it's not. That's why I see the conflict decreasing. People quit because they do not want to be forced to defend. It's a game, why play or even invest rl money if you don't enjoy it? Makes no sense.

I'm all for more conflict, but not as some (or apparently even many) of you think by forcing others to defend and replace what you destroyed or be screwed. Sooner or later you'll be on that end of the conflict too and there'll come a day when you'll start disliking it too.

EDIT: Of course you can simply go and log whenever your org is raided, however people tend to be blackmailed for that, directly or indirectly. Also, if your org lost you might just have to spend quite some time after the raid just fixing what was destroyed (ie raising mobs, replacing guards, raiding to get miners back, reconstructing / repairing a construct etc). Is that why anyone plays?

Any suggestions that involve nerfing these bard things are inherently flawed, by the way, because of this fact:

Flight should not be a mechanism for completely ignoring guards and statues. People who can fly shouldn't have this advantage that other people can't feasibly get. "immunity to a wide variety of guard placements, i.e villages" is not supposed to be a racial balancing factor for faelings.

Good post btw, Aesyra.

Uhm.. raiding was already practicly impossible...

You can't raid a village unless you can fly or there are more entrances like delport for example.

Raiding Etherseren is harsh and cruel, treelife+every damn shrine power in the book = your gonna die so kill whatever you can before that happends.

Raiding planes with ripple and flux.. I wouldn't even bother..

And yet, many people managed to accomplish the impossible. More than that, they were able to do it completely alone.

So we need conflict that has meaning but does not have an inbuilt debilitating effect on other organizations as that leads to the Burn Out (I'm stealing Xenthos' emphasis). History has shown that any sort of conflict based upon history or in an organizations territory is going to inspire a feeling of obligation on the part of both attacking and defending players.

It is not fun to desperately try to defend beings precious to your organization against a far superior force. It is not fun to do conflict quests 24/7 to try to undo what some other group did to you or do it back to them.

Village revolts are often cited as being fun as are wildnodes and I do not think there has been much complaint recently about either of these two events in terms of their structure so basing new conflict on something like these might be the way to go.

Nexus battles are not it. They involve an organization HAVING to defend, they are not particularly interesting in and of themselves, and the incentive for actually attacking is not very high at all. People might do it for morale, rp, or payback reasons but I'm not certain people are doing it because it's such fun.

And while the timing aspect of revolts and wildnodes works for those events, people are looking for conflict that can just be on a get up and go kind of basis rather than sit and wait.

So basically we're looking for the following in terms of conflict:

- Can happen at any time (surprise attacks when you happen to have enough people)
- Does NOT force players to defend it.
- One side can win and one side can lose but what is won or lost is not debilitating to the organization.
- People can choose to participate or not to participate
- Possibly some benefit to participating regardless of whether you win or lose on an individual basis

Idea 1: Claiming of territory in aetherspace

Aetherspace would have several mini-bubbles on which certain resources could be gathered. These would not be common commodities but special commodities that are required to build and fuel certain things like special constructs, aethership additions, special crafts objects, etc.

In order to acquire these resources (and these resources would be the same or similar to the type you could trade dust for giving another way to get them in more limited quantities and more actual incentive for the dust trade), an organization (or an individual) would have to gather them. There would be several different ways of gathering them depending on the resource involved. Some you could scoop up with an aethership. Some you could pick up on the surface of the mini-bubble in very limited quantities. On an organizational level, you would essentially build gathering equipment that would automate the process but would also be vulnerable to attack. You can't watch it 24/7.

Attack would take two forms. The first would be a standard raid. You could go in with your people and start siphoning off resources that have been gathered but not yet transferred to the org's own storage facilities. There will always be *some* resource to raid but if an org is up on taking care of their holdings, it won't be an excessive loss, even if you don't have anyone to defend. Of course if they just never collect the resources, they're asking for trouble. This could happen any time, you would be alerted if you had a basic alarm set up, and you could go in and drive them off. Another raiding possibility would be when your ship is transporting the resources from the bubble back to your org, it is open to attack. You can hope for the best or you can escort it to your org and drive off any enemy attackers that might want to loot the ship.

The second would be where you go in and actually use a colossi type thing (and maybe bombardment) to destroy their gathering equipment. You can then put up your own. The second scenario should be limited in some fashion. Not weakenings persay but something like this type of colossi requires a very rare resource that can only be gathered at a certain time and can't really be stored for longer than a month. So you'll know when an attack is likely coming if an enemy org manages to get their hands on some of the resource. Or in a defensive mode you can collect the resource yourself. The battle for the resource would in and of itself be another conflict.

Orgs can expend quite a few resources protecting their holdings. Perhaps a defensive perimeter that can be as simple as an alarm when an enemy comes into your territory, or as complicated as paying for an automated fleet to engage any hostile ships coming into range.

The sorts of additions and little luxuries that can be built up is really only limited by imagination and gold but as an added incentive to it I'll resurrect my idea for building up reputation by participating in any sort of aether fights and using that reputation to gain access to patterns the gnomes sell on both an org and an individual level. This would be the method used to get access to new construct patterns, new ship modifications, new gathering constructs, new attacking constructs, defensive addons, new crafts patterns, etc.

This could also lead to real trade agreements between orgs where one org agrees to supply the other org with x resource in exchange for y and it is an automatic transaction on a one time basis or a recurring basis.

I know this is a pretty big idea and at a very high level in terms of design but I'm of the opinion that just patching up something we currently have or having a meaningless, faceless battle area without real purpose, will not really satisfy the need for "meaningful" conflict.

Idea #2: Increase the rewards for people to participate in current conflict

This is a pretty simple idea. Make it more desirable for people to participate in raids beyond a desire to make the other org suffer or defend. I'm not entirely certain how but it would definitely bring about more conflict as people participate more willingly and it's less of a chore to defend especially.

This is what people were aiming for with nexus worlds but yeah...

It would be really nice to have the zones I suggested. (slightly elaborated/moded)

The gateways to the zones can be opened once while certain signs are conjunct. Performing a quest will open/activate two gateways into the zone, they are one way tickets the only way out is at the end or death(you can get back in again though)

Whilst inside there are various quests you can perform, they result in a small benefit for either team depending on how it goes. Only one side gets to start their quests though (Defenders v Attackers) and the opposing quests require stealing question objects from the defenders.



There would be a few different quests, and only half would be available at each time with the benefits being small but allowing for someone to "win" even if they don't win the scenario. Best case, Winning would result in a prize based off of the participation ratio meaning that if you go in at like 10:1 and the 1 win they get a hefty reward but if the 10 win it's diminished.(A denizen that blesses you compared to a power dump)


Meh, it's slightly fleshed out but it would be desirable to not have only one option on who to fight.

I suppose I should reincarnate, I don't have any reason to fly anymore