My subtitle got banhammered, and this is one of the most annoying quests I've ever seen. Made in a nice, bullet-point format because that's how the Admin love suggestions/fixes.

Annoyances:

• The boy runs away and the quest is stalled for hours so long as someone just walks up and kicks him. You cannot defend him against this, as it happens on Prime.
• Better yet, you can be smart an ass and grab the children yourself, have them follow you, and dump them off in some corner of the world where you have to wait hours for the child to respawn, considering Ildil will only give out a single child at any given time. The child refuses to follow anyone but the person it was loaned out to.

Fixes:

• When the child is sabotaging an antennae, have it vanish from the room until it's done.
• When the child is kicked, don't make it just bawww its eyes out and run away.
• Have Ildil refuse to give children to anyone that has repaired the TBC (check for the honours line).
• If a child is left unattended (ie, not following anyone) for a certain amount of time, have it return home.
• In the event that Ildil is dead, allow Wielm/M-whatsit to give out the children as well.
• In the event that all three parents are dead, add hidden candy (or whatever it is they like) across the TBC that can be found and given to a child to make them follow you. (Again, check for honours line)
• People will probably just use a second person to try and slip through some loopholes, but I haven't figured out what to do about that one yet.

Or just add a quest that mirrors the raising of the TBC, but destroys it, rendering it inoperable for a set amount of time (say, two RL days).

I like the idea of it being GONE for a time period, that would be great! Only make it random, so neither side gets an advantage, or nobody sits at it for 18 hours a day, making sure it stays up/down.

Or make a counterquest such that the last org who put it up can't get scholars and whatnot for as long as it was up.

Yes, we're looking at you, Krellan.

Don't worry, the topic is too lame to insult.

I doubt they'll make it so that if you do the quest, you'll never get to do the counterquest. Otherwise, it is a nice idea.

It seems like people only do this quest to annoy others with Globglob

The boy not resetting within an hour after being out is a bug if it is still happening. If this happens to you, starting at the time of this post and onward, please submit a BUG report with a painful amount of detail. Please only submit a bug if you've seen and/or experienced it!

Now back to the topic

The kid vanishing from the room is really a good idea.

Be nice if the kid heard about the person who raised the TBC and refused to have anything to do with them too >_>

That doesn't really make sense, you know. If someone wants to destroy TBC, the kid should be willing to help-- otherwise, you're stopping Magnagorans from dropping it when Glom raises it, and vice versa. You could also technically work to destroy it even if you put it up the most recent time (decided it was a bad idea). The kid can be led away for an hour, or he can be killed and take an hour to reset, but now it should be the same (just like any other quest with ways to stop them).

It's less of "I'm willing to help you evil people." but more of "I don't know any better, and I'm getting candy for this later, aren't I?"

Also, if we do forbid people to do the opposite quest, which is to build if you destroy or destroy if you build, then it would make sense to do the same thing for similar quests like Verasavir Valley.

One version of this I proposed ages ago was that the kid is up on the antenna and therefore out of reach of anything but the scouts who can also climb the antenna. (Doesn't make sense that you can't fly up the antenna? Sure, just like it doesn't make sense that no one else can figure out how to break the things.)


One of the things I IDEAd is that for as long as your side has TBC up, you have a slow but constant culture drain, so that if you just raise Globglob and then do nothing (as is almost always the case) you will lose culture, but if you take advantage of the bards/scholars factor, you will come out easily ahead. This would eventually ensure that Globglob is used as the admin seem to have intended him to be used, as they seem to still imagine he is being used: as a tool in the culture struggle, rather than as a means to annoy people, which is actually the only way he's ever really used. If your organization suffers from you raising him and not following through, your organization might stop you from doing it. (Flaw in the idea: what if rogues raise him? I'm not even sure if they can, actually.) Incidentally, the IC excuse for this is simple: while you may gain from the brainwashing mind control with those affected by it, you'll obviously also lose credibility amongst those not affected by it, when it's revealed you have to resort to mind control rather than actual reasons to sway people.

... what actual reasons? "I will lead you to a great stage" is not really a major verbal feat.

It also doesn't bring the things itself, it just stops others from collecting them, so I am not sure your reasoning is quite as cut-and-dry as you state.

As a rule, I don't think we have any quests which are only accessible to certain people, or are inaccessible to certain people. Theoretically, a Celestian can raise the Ship of the Dead, a Magnagora can summon Mother Night, a Glom can revive Hart.

The only exception would be the Xion Initiative/hai'Gloh Zemordia, which absolutely require the CLs of both orgs to at least initiate the process, to ensure everyone's on board.

Anyways, continue discussion!

Oh, also, I believe a reset time was added, so the quest can't be redone constantly as it has been in the past.

God forbid a quest in this game actually do anything. I don't know about other orgs, but whenever Glom has had the TBC up we've taken full advantage, according to the 200+ scholars and bards frequently listed in 'culture'. That said, quest with real consequences needs to be interruptable without the interrupter gaining status... maybe completing a step of the quest could autodeclare you against everyone not in your org, or the area could be made open PK.

This is demonstrably untrue, but maybe all the time you noticed that you had it up, you took advantage, and you just didn't know about the other times. If you really think this is true, you wouldn't mind the suggestion. And if it went in, you'd probably find out how untrue it actually has been.

For my part, I'd be entirely happy with the entire area being open PK provided that "entire area" includes the highways, which are where the counterquest happens. However, that could only be the start, since even without Avenger involved, the difficulty of stopping the quest versus stopping the counterquest is still ridiculously imbalanced. If the boy and Ildil were as hard to kill as Norchatine, and as hard to get to as Norchatine, then getting Avechna off the case would be a sensible additional step.

But when you add it up, there's so much wrong with the whole quest in its every detail from concept to execution that dwelling on details like Avechna's role, or the boy's frailty, is missing the point, just as bad as the old missing-the-point red-herring "the quest favors one side" that Eventru just revived from the dead. There's just nothing good about the quest; it's merely bad for the game without any real redeeming virtue. One can understand why it might have sounded like a good idea on the drawing board, and one can forgive making the mistake of putting it in, and one can even forgive the admins being slow to take seriously the complaints -- given how much we as a community drown everything, good and bad alike, in complaints.

But that this much time has passed, without even a public statement that someone's going to seriously look at it and how deleterious it is to the game itself, let alone actual adjustments, is hugely damaging to any confidence we as players can have that the admins aren't as vulnerable as anyone else to living in an ivory tower and being out of touch with what's really going on. (Which is the area that Lusternia has always most thoroughly exceeded other MUDs, so it's particularly galling to see this one thing being neglected that way.) And now that nexus world conflicts got summarily removed, we can't even excuse it with the idea that "we can't throw away the time invested" or "we need to find an IC explanation for the change". There's no longer a reason not to just disable it at least until we can find a way to make something good from the pieces, if it's going to take that long to do it.

There is a "good thing" about the quest. The people who raise it can try to use it to get cultural center (which is +1000 power). Being the only org able to get the culture points while it is up is a significant advantage...

... and it also stops other orgs from trying to catch you via bards/scholars if you're in the lead.

Once or twice, months and months ago, TBC was actually used for that purpose; and at that point, the idea that TBC could be a legitimate conflict quest was merely a tremendously inadequate counterargument to the many ways in which it is bad for the game. But that was a long time ago. It hasn't even been tried to be used that way in ages, and now, that argument isn't merely inadequate, it's entirely moot, entirely irrelevant. But no argument on this forum can be complete without precisely that sort of dismissive irrelevancy.

What worries me is that the admins actually believe that it is still a conflict quest, and that the people complaining about it are complaining about the conflict, and that's why the complaints are ignored. That's the whole "ivory tower" syndrome, and precisely the one that Lusternia's admins are usually so good at avoiding.

(The point of my idea where you lose culture doing it unless you actually play out the conflict quest part, is to force it to be the conflict quest that you, Azoth, and the admins imagine it to be, by making it impractical to use it any other way. Since you're so sure it already is that, that wouldn't be any problem at all, right?)