So, one thing I think Lusternia can use are PK quests.

These are quests that are completed via a system that require two even sides of players being involved in the quest.

I think the basic rules to the quest should be something along the following lines:

1. Quest does not "initiate" unless there are at-least two groups of X amount of people who have done some activity to start the quest. (e.g, 5 people have agreed to recover an itemt for Mob A and 5 different people have agreed to do the same for Mob

2. Quest makes RP sense for the Lusternia world.

3. Quest has a substantial reward, but not imbalancing.


Initial start off suggestions:

1. Bridge between Celestia and Nil is opened by seducing an angel/demon and bringing it to a spot. (bridge does not open unless there are 5 angels/demons on the appropriate spot) Each person then tries to kill the demon/angel belonging to the other side. When either all demons or all angels are killed, the opposite team wins. ( If all the demons are kiiled, then a horde of angels decends upon Nil and kills all the imps etc. then the bridge closes till next time) A demon or angel can not be killed untill the person who seduced said angel/demon is killed.

2. Same as above, except a bridge between Earth/Etherseren, Earth/Water, Water/Etherglomg/ earth/etherglom, ethereal/nightsphere, eathereal/moonsphere etce etc

post more ideas!

Mmmm, capture the flag.

Oh wait.

Well, something like that.

When I saw "pk quest" I was thinking something entirely different. A mud I used to play called Evarayn had a quest to become a necromancer profession, which required you to kill several players and bring the corpses to an altar.

I think a reference we can use is old Landmarking in Aetolia. I loved that system, and I even created a Paladin specifically to be more involved in it. It pit players against each other in a way that wasn't overwhelming and made a lot of sense. The rewards earned were neither over the top or devastating to the loser. If I lost, I gained Devotion a bit slower. It was annoying, but i never felt crippled.

Also, no one was excluded for lack of a way to access another plane, novices didn't have to understand complex movement systems like aether space... they could just run and start collecting butterflies or sands or whatever. There were no unbreakable fortresses like ethereal and noone had to quest just to open an area up for a "level" playing field. Simple and fun, that's what made it awesome.

I think part of the problem Lusternia is suffering is a lack of simplicity. In an effort to make a rich and complex game world, the effort has been taken to far. Some systems are overly complex and new people to the game don't even try to understand them. There are too many afflictions, too many insta-kill, too many ways to completely overwhelm your opponent. There are a lot of planes (after a long time of playing I still don't really understand how the aether bubbles work, or how many of them there are, or how to get to them using an aether ship...).

That said, I -do- realize that Lusternia has become the elitist IRE game. A lot of people come here looking for the complexity, and that's fine. I simply believe that it's worth stating that perhaps part of the reason we've had to many problems lately is due simply to over-complexity, and when rethinking how quests work and if we should re-tool the system that should be kept in mind.