Glom, Celest and Mag are all the same... except Magnagora's chancellors are "High Chancellors", which I guess makes them better than ours.

They were all like that by default but we thought they were crappy so we went through some kind of disastrous democratic process that ended up with the weird combo you see today (I seem to remember it being Lendren's idea and Everiine screwing up the process, but I could be wrong).

You guys could change them if you wanted too, probably.

I propose SHADOWWANDERERS and SHADOWSHADOWERS.

SHADOWSHADOWER AZOTH NAE'BLIS, SHADOW OF CROW'S SHADOW

CT SHADOWED GREETINGS, SHADOWY COMMUNE

Why'd you steal Tuek's sig.

I stole it from someone on a totally different forum. All I remember of Tuek's forum persona is the hypnotoad.

nothing to see here, move along (needs to check for new pages before replying)

Uh, wot? I'm perfectly willing to take the blame for a lot of things, but how does one screw up a vote? Ideas were submitted, a certain number were presented in a vote, and we all voted. What we have is what we voted on, so if you don't like it, blame everyone who voted.

It was one of those votes where your favourite got 5, your 2nd favourite got 4, 3rd favourite got 3, etc. etc.

If it wasn't you though, sorry!

I still fail to see how it is one person's fault when everyone voted...

This might not allow to newbies directly, but in general to people.

When something combat related happens (domoth, raiding, defending, etc) you are expected to help (more so if there few people on in your guild). Now that is all fine if you are a combatant, but people like myself who are not -at all- are not going to be much help, if not just be more trouble.

The only part that was my idea was how to count the vote -- Lisaera (if I remember right) told me we were going to pick our own titles and asked me to organize the process. I chose a vote because I saw no other way to do it, and no one would have liked it if I simply decided for everyone. Which in hindsight I should have done anyway; at least it would be better than being a zombieGreywalker. The vote method I picked only didn't work because one side split its vote while the other side didn't. I wonder if the same would happen if we did it again now.

Combat has always been less than palatable for me, mostly because I hate things I don't do well. I found, though, that in addition to an abundance of helpful pro combatants who will take the time to teach the inept the basics, it's also useful to have these same people give you a single action to perform during any sort of skirmish. That way, you can absorb the mechanics of the battle and still contribute, albeit very slightly, to things.

I haven't played Lusternia in awhile, but one of the main things I've ran into that's troubled me is not really knowing anyone.

A lot of times, MUDs only wind up being a mostly single-player game for me. I just don't really know how to socialize in a game like this (and I'm not very good at it in real life, either). So, I'm normally off doing something by myself (which can be rather boring), and everyone else is going with other people. There are a lot of cliques in Lusternia, and that may not be readily apparently to newbies, but player interaction, I think, is of the utmost importance.

Because, honestly, it sucks doing most everything by yourself.

Since I am somewhat new to Lusternia, I thought I should post and at the very least explain the frustrations I have had with trying to get into involved. Lusternia is not the first IRE game that I have played, but it has been at least four years if not longer since I played any IRE games, and I have never played Lusternia before now. My first couple of days with a new character always seem to go well. I get introduced to the guild I have decided to join, I meet a few people, I get assigned a few help files to read over, and some fairly clear tasks to accomplish for the Collegium of the city or commune that I have decided to join, and everything goes pretty well for a while.

Then at some point I seem to graduate to novice hood, at which point I am usually assigned some further tasks, usually which are far more abstract, with no real instruction on how to even go about accomplishing them. Stuff like learn what some important symbol means to our city / commune / guild. Well I would love to know, but I don't know who to ask, or where to look to learn that, and usually the more important looking members of the guild seem to be really busy with whatever they are doing. At this point I usually find myself trying to earn some experience and some gold to buy important items, but I find myself spending lots and lots of time by myself, with no interaction from anyone. I start to feel completely abandoned, and worthless as a character, and start looking to try a different guild out, or maybe just move on to another game altogether.

If you actually want players to stick around after novice hood, there needs to be someway to get them involved with the goals and objectives of their city and guild, so that they can feel like a contributing member, and so that they can work closely and become friends with the other members of their guild and city.

This.

We do honestly try though. I'm not sure what guilds you've had experience with, but most if not all after graduation have another task that isn't so straight-forward as "heal these 3 fae" or "go to these 5 locaions". It's usually more important than that. Taking your example, if a guild wants you to discover the meaning of a symbol, it's because the symbol is intimately important to the guild, city, or commune, and discovering why it is important will help you understand things about other characters.

Though understand, if you aren't willing to talk to anyone, then that's a bit on your shoulders too. You should feel welcome, but we are all players too-- only the Fate Guides log in for the sole purpose of catering to new players, everyone else has their own objectives as well. It is very likely that there will not be someone checking up on you every hour. You may have to approach people yourself, and if they are busy, they should be able to tell you so. But you won't know unless you ask.

To add to what Everiine said: Sometimes we honestly don't see what you say. There has been more than one occasion where I have missed something that one of my friends have said. If I can miss a friends tell, I can miss yours. I feel bad when I find out, too. There are some occasions when it's best to ask for help more than once. If you leave me a message at least the information wont be completely lost within lines and lines of text.

For most people, the best cure for what Telak describes is for the lowbie to have a mentor, and to have the mentor give the lowbie the kind of one-on-one assistance and connection that it's hard to get any other way in the jumble of things going on. By the time you leave novicehood, it's hard to have any kind of pre-sliced help to offer; it takes the more personalized interaction a mentor can bring to guide someone through that phase.

As a GA, all I can do is strongly encourage people to get mentors. We have a novice advancement for it, but more effectively, we have a "free instrument" carrot to dangle, which requires a short ritual, which in turn almost requires a mentor. (You can get the ritual without a mentor, but I try to encourage it as much as possible to be done with a mentor.) But I can't require mentorship, and I can't force our mentors to give people that kind of time. And I can't force someone like Telak to bug his mentor, either.

But in my experience, most newbies who get a mentor stick around, while most who don't get one don't stick around. Sometimes one is cause and the other effect, sometimes vice versa, but either way, encouraging mentorship in your guild is the best way to help keep people through this phase.

When I started, I bungled around in newton, and managed to stumble my way through the quests. Terms like "novice", "collegium", the innocence time, the first guild rank titles- they all just blended together in one moosh of "this is new player stuff". Yes, it is clear later on, but for players truly new to the game, I could see it being frustrating, redundant, and useless.

But, I just ignored it all and pranced about until I managed to not be a guild newcomer anymore. To this day, I have yet to do any of the guild paths in any of their iterations, or any of the advancement tasks. I have bungled my way to GR 9 (I think?) with random favors for random things.

I also didn't grasp the mentor process, and never had one. But for me, I would rather have a help file, and a channel to ask questions on. Having a mentor talk to me for an hour would be frustrating, especially if I had limited time to play. So, for me, structure and hand holding being imposed on me probably would have driven me away from the game. I don't like feeling like I have to do something.

But the biggest obstacle to clear for a new player is getting that operating gold level up, curatives, and starting equipment. It's expensive. Bards/scholars/pilgrims help with this, a LOT, because for starting players, even the steam-breath attack of rockeaters can be pretty dangerous. They need robes, or plate. They'll need masterweapons eventually for knights. They will also be told at some point to look at the curelist, and buy some of everything on it. They'll need a boggling number of vials for a new person. They'll need a rift full of cures. TBC is frustrating in this regard, because it forces new players (read, not new characters- yes, we know that when you start an alt, you can get X gold in Y time without touching bards/scholars. We're all terribly impressed, really. But this thread isn't about you, stop being a narcissist.) into a fairly small pool of stuff they can reliably do for decent gold. Even when I make an alt now, knowing some alternatives, the impact is definitely noticeable.

Now, a new player probably isn't going to care, or quit because of some abstract thing like an org hoarding wanderers for culture. However, they just might do it if getting enough gold to play the game is needlessly time consuming or tedious. If they wind up ratting for six hours just to blow it all on vials because they, as a matter of practicality and inexperience, can't find better alternatives. If they feel like they can't really hunt out of newton effectively, because they wind up afflicted and either can't cure it, or are blowing (to their mind) expensive cures on (for them) long fights. If they don't already know all the denizens they can shield easily against if they get in trouble, etc.

Ultimately, it's a question of accessibility. Think of it like this. Imagine the first time you saw your favorite movie- but you didn't know it was your favorite of course! Now, imagine if, before the actual start of the movie, you absolutely had to watch six hours of The Joy of Painting.

You might have never gotten to the movie you loved, thanks to watching a poofy haired goofball talk in a mellow voice about happy little trees.

For me:
The Glomdoring event is why I'm still around.