I think it's the nexus powers that throw the conflict off balance for everyone much like constant whirlpool to throw off groups on elemental and the ripple and slight damage on cosmic. It seems that those slight advantages play a big part in balancing out the two opposing forces. An even team that's defending is still uneven due to those passive powers that will make a difference in how the raid turns out. I agree that nexus world in itself is a great place for leveling and earning gold on nexus weakening thus would be an asset among all and would not want to loose it as such. I would say start by scraping the nexus powers and keep the nexus worlds as a hunting area as is.

To Estarra-

Didn't get a chance to read all the thread, but on contructs, nexus battles: an extraordinarily expensive waste of energy and investment.

Quite frankly, it's too much. Constructs should have offered some very minor perks, negligible ones really. Nothing that had bearing on skills for example. I'm being generous about the perks, because in my opinion it should have never came to be. Aethercraft and its specializations is a worthless credit sink and a lot of players probably ignore it, choosing to focus on necessary skillsets. I don't have the heart to tell players to learn to bombard when they need to transcend planar or some of the other common skillsets that should cost half the current credit requirement. Keep aetherspace and bubbles for hunting, exploring and whatever. Delete constructs forever.

In regards to the main question- Should Lusternia reduce conflict between cities and communes? No, but if you want to force players to align, toss away belief systems that have steered entire political structures (honoring and following a story line that -you- established, with the taint vs light issue), be prepared to level the battle-field so that everyone gets a fair shot. Mechanics > All. Make Nil/Celestia/Water/Earth fortresses or bring Ethereal to par with the other planes. Let everyone in the cities use their nexus as a gate. Either you make it even or accept that many city players will cling to the idea that the situation is hopeless and that you really don't give a crap, too content to cling to the idea that ethereal is just special and should therefore remain the fortress it is.

Enough with the events that force orgs to align. It isn't so hard to create an event that forces each org to rely on their own strengths to move it along. I would be amazed to see that. In Achaea, you rarely witness events that force orgs to align. On the contrary, their events create interaction between players and npc-run organizations and so on. And of course, the clique return-of-a-new/old-god event. Those are fine. Can't be helped.

I'm not sure what else to add. This game's learning curve is steep and I've had top tier fighters (a few friends I've tried to get to play Lusty) from Achaea shake their head in bewilderment before qq'ing forever after taking a glance at all the help scrolls. I'd like us to take a break from adding and just fix what's broken. Conflict is fine, but a level battlefield would be nice.


Edit: @Krellan- Not sure if you've seen the light yet, but there is no way four constructs should be destroyed in one nexus battle. Estarra has said before that she didn't believe that even ONE construct should be destroyed in one setting with even the best offense. Which was fair. Give defending orgs some time to actually save the things on the follow-up assault and not be a victim of bad timing. Not with how much they cost. I remember when Celest destroyed the Crypt (just that one. Not four) and the entire thing was made extra-difficult; constructs grew legs, could walk around and even shieldwhore against attacks.

Players feel obligated to defend, particularly cosmic and ethereal and so on. They also feel obligated to defend constructs, but let's pretend they didn't for a moment. Raids where the sides are imbalanced in some way (which, both because of mechanics and because there is NOTHING to balance teams, is the case more often than not) would then find themselves with nothing to do on nexus worlds when they want an unfair fight, or a fight they think is fair but the defenders don't, so they'd go to cosmic/ethereal.

I'm not against keeping constructs and just altering the mechanics of Nexus worlds more, but I don't really mind if you remove them either.

Expanding on my earlier point, though, there are a couple of completely confused posts going on about making conflict dynamic by making "conflict" easier (i.e you can go gank noobs or people otherwise on a level much lower than you whenever you want and get arbitrary points or rewards for it, and they can't do anything about it.) The fundamental flaws with these problems themselves should be obvious, but what seems to need to be pointed out is that if you want dynamic conflict, you should be looking at willing participants who think they or their team has a decent shot in any given raid or whatever, not "whenever some random griefer wants."

I won't go into conflict that isn't strictly PK-related (because the horse has long since left that barn) except to say that the fact most people don't even think about it when "conflict" is brought up is telling about either how much we have of it, or what the subject really is here.

No, Shiri! You're doing it wrong. Just say 'Delete them plz.'

Well, maybe it has some validity, but I've heard that too much with everything new to this game to take it seriously at this point

This is about monks, innit?

And bards, and beastmastery, and sanctuary, and ...Glomdoring, and...yeah.

Glomdoring should have been deleted long ago and you know it. Then we wouldn't have this choke business to deal with. :>

/derail

I wonder what it was like with only three orgs. *daydream*

Whichever org had to fight the other two would bitchbitchbitch and beg for a fourth org to balance things out.

I would suggest just focusing on cutting out the tediousness of certain conflict quests and also insure that the effort to complete the quest is equal to the effort it would take to hinder its completion. I feel there are quite a bit of long and tedious conflict quests that are sabotaged by someone simply by killing a quest mob or performing some other simple and quick action. Therefore, hours of effort, some times tedious effort, negated by a person performing a few seconds of action.

Still as much complaining as there is now.

Everybody step right up, yah hear? Step right up... to the last game of darts you'll ever play!

mwahahahahaha!

But at the same time making it possible to stop and not being completely blocked off from stopping it by the opposing force.

I did not vote.

Can someone put my vote in for "reduce" please? Just because I want it to be a tie!

I enjoy cityvscommune conflict, it adds a nice twist rather than just raiding cosmic planes daily. Though I would enjoy it even more if it was in fact on par with the cosmic planes in which I would have to agree to some of Narsrim's points.

Repeating what a friend of mine said on Skype. He doesn't play Lusternia all that much, though, so he doesn't have a forum account:

"Conflict produced by game mechanics are pretty much the worst thing imaginable as any conflict created will be contrived, have no real meaning, grow repetitious, be hated by everyone, and overall simply be boring. Conflict can only be meaningful if it's based on some set of beliefs (which the organizations have) and is produced in a way that is actually important to the players. Players and admin should work together to create unique conflict between orgs, rather than rely on game mechanics to take care of things for them."

Edit for another part I found:

"Just - mechanized conflict != good conflict, as it grows stale really really really fast and in the end, nobody cares about it but you have to do it. Otherwise, you'll be at a disadvantage."

Likewise find myself agreeing.

(even if he's a jerk )

I agree with this.

While I agree with this in principle, it would be trivial to make a long list of similarly true things that suggest that MUDs should be thrown away and we should all play person-to-person games with GMs. The limitations of having to have things that work without a GM constantly arbitrating things, and developing new stuff as fast as people can play it, and not being able to scale up to hundreds of players, mean that MUDs will always be absolutely awful by comparison by those standards.

And yet we play MUDs despite them being so dreadfully inferior. Why? Because they have other advantages that come from that very same "produced by game mechanics" character: support for a huge number of people simultaneously and all the cultural stuff that arises from the synergy at those scales, for instance, as well as the fact that there's something to do when your "real" roleplaying group is busy. And several others.

MUDs still have a place, and making unfavorable comparisons focusing on the weaknesses of their game-mechanic-driven structure out of the context of their strengths is missing the point, the big picture.

At this point, perhaps the best thing might be to go down through the list one-by-one of all the "conflict quests" and see what's liked and disliked?