I will preface this by stating that the current Xion Initiative is over. It had been in effect for 2 RL days, lasts for a total of 6 RL days, and the counter-quest takes 3 RL days maximum to end the other effect. The only real question here is a matter of time, but barring bugs, the thing is over and done with.

So, with that said, I have noticed a large number of issues with this event chain, having experienced nearly all parts of it (enacting it, being hit by it, and doing the counterquest to remove it). I'll start with the
Counterquest:
1) To enact the XI / Hai'Gloh, all you have to do is the base quest. This nets you 10,000 power immediately, and if uncountered, will drain 25,000 power from your enemies when it fades.
2) To counter the effects of this, you have to do the base quest. Doing this by itself does not counter the initiative/rite. After doing the base quest, it will then take 3 RL days for the thing to be ended. During this time the process can be sped up by gathering angel/demon/fae corpses. If the Rite/Initiative fades out 'normally' before this process is ended, it still drains the power.

Just looking at this, this makes absolutely no sense from a mechanics standpoint. The attacker does a quest, and then gets an immediate reward. Further, by doing absolutely no more work on their part they have a very high chance of getting 25,000 additional power (and sapping that from the opponents). However, the defender, by doing their side (which, if they had done it first would be 10,000 power to them immediately!) gets absolutely nothing at that point. Not even a return to status quo. All that happens is they are told they can... work to collect more corpses.

Wouldn't it... make more sense for the attacker to be the one who has to do the work to get the extra reward? The attacker should be required to gather a large number of corpses during the Rite / Initiative's effect in order to actually gain the extra reward. If the defender manages to do the Rite/Initiative, it should immediately cancel further effects and return things to the status quo. After all, keep in mind that the attacker doing it gets 10k power right there and then. These are not easy quests. They are time-consuming, frustrating, buggy, and just all-around pains.
3) Please make sure that mobs do not say things like, "You have 3 days to collect angel and demon corpses. At the end of that time, if you have collected enough, I will break the crystal." Because this prompts things like "... wtf. We now have 3 hours to actually make sure the Rite succeeds. On top of already doing everything else." It turns out this wasn't at all what was really happening, but this spawned a lot of death and more frustration last night as we were all racing around trying to make sure that everything we had done was not going to just *poof* into nothingness.

The quest itself Here I will mostly be talking about the hai'Gloh side as this is the one I have knowledge about. There will be some speculation on the XI side here and there based on snippets I've managed to catch, but you with more intimate knowledge of that side are welcome to clarify and/or post your frustrations with issues on that part.
1) Now, only the CLs can actually start the quest. This makes sense to an extent-- you don't want people starting it randomly without full support. However, you have also made it so that the only way to actually 'legitimately' stop the other side is to do your own. This means that if the cities attack and only get one Avatar, you can't do anything unless both CLs are around. I don't understand why, if one side is started and progresses to the point of actually growing crystals in Faethorn / trees on Cosmic, the GMs of the other side can't be authorized (as an 'extreme circumstance') to actually... defend Faethorn / their orgs.

This issue leads to a massive flaw in the entire quest. It makes more sense, mechanically, to just kill our own Avatars at this point.. If we had killed Gwyllgi, the thing was over. The rest of our Avatars were invincible still, and we could have just dropped them when that wore off. We had the force around for Avatar slaying, but we were told by Maeve that we could do absolutely nothing because Asmodea had logged off a short bit beforehand.

When the most effective way to stop an event of this sort is to kill your own Avatars (or ask Seren to kill them and just 'forget' to defend), something is seriously flawed in the mechanics. Further, if we were to enact hai'Gloh and then kill our Avatars, we have just ensured ourselves 25,000 power. Because at this point the counter quest cannot be done.

Solution: Make it so that the side that has done the hai'Gloh / XI does not get invulnerable supermobs, and these supermobs respawn on their own within 12 hours of being slain. This solution does not really help with the first issue (I'm really not sure what will), but it will help with the second. Further, in some ways it is even a buff-- the "winning" side does not even have to put in time gathering essence if they do not want to while the thing is in effect. It just means that they can't sit on invulnerability. And, again, let GMs actually start the counterquest / try to stop the main effect.

2) The Rite of hai'Gloh is not made up of any new quest parts. The only new thing is that there is a bush which supernals/DLs can be put into. Beyond this, it is a mishmash of old quests which were not designed to be part of a quest of this size. For example, one of these subquests which is required to even start our side has items that have a 6 hour reset time. More than one. If someone just goes in and grabs it, well, guess what? You're not doin' the quest. Another quest can only be done once every 32 hours, and relies on an item that spawns once every 32 hours (and if that goes, well, again, you're not doin' the quest). At least this one does not need to be done every time, but still. Also, there are a plethora of mobs which must be kept alive in order to do these little quests-- because they were designed to be little quests, that people would not really be trying to interrupt.

These quests are also spread across multiple areas, not one of which is actually formally tied to an organization (no discretionaries, for example). Unlike Earth/Water. Further, Earth/Water are unmeldable, whereas all of the areas for the hai'Gloh can be melded by cities (though Faethorn requires killing Maeve).
-- Slight diversion here, while I'm on the topic of killing Maeve. First of all, we're told that Maeve is highly important. Her death is something which is very harmful to Nature, we can't live without her, etc. Yet, she is made up of Night, Crow, Moon, Hart, and all six Avatars, yet she drops like a sack of potatoes with a moderately sized group. Not even an area attack. It's really difficult to, IC, see her as all that important when she actually doesn't... do anything except stop the cities from melding. Not even able to try to defend herself, unlike Avatars.)

Further, the Xion part (which, I imagine, is doing the Xion quest) is on an aetherbubble. This aetherbubble has exactly 1 entrance. You cannot cubix to other parts of it, you cannot use a pyramid part to hop to a different room and avoid the entrance. You enter in exactly one spot. The Hai'Gloh parts of it... being on Ethereal, do not have this kind of advantage to fortify when needed.

Solution: Um. I really don't know. Maybe just rethink how the quests are actually set up. And/or let CLs/GMs get the items when needed whether or not some city-person has already grabbed it. This doesn't help with the plethora of mobs that are needed alive to progress at any stage, but... I don't have a solution. Hopefully someone does.

Conclusion:
It really seems like these quests have some pretty fatal flaws in terms of setup and execution (the hai'Gloh especially, as that's the one I know). I can understand wanting the aggressor to have a difficult time of it, but when trying to remove the thing... when you have to start getting Divine Intervention to even get the parts because of insane reset times, there are problems. When you are seriously considering just attacking your own Avatars, there are problems. I think I've addressed most of the reasons why and tried to give solutions above, but on the whole... this is a pretty large headache. I'm not sure why it's set up in the way it is, as it just does not make sense to me.

Also: Raezon, when you invite me to post my thoughts in a new thread, you should have known what to expect.

It is longer than I thought it would be.

I promise that this is a serious post. Why don't we just delete the quests? The events for them played out, what is the point of still doing them? I know people were complaining about the game being light vs. taint but that's also the way the game has been set up for a while and it makes the currant alliances seem so forced and artificial. And as long as these quests are around, outside of another world changing event, I don't see the current set up changing back. They are not the best designed quests, they seem to cause a extra amount of grief compared to normal raids (like xion pretty much allowing the cities to take Faethorn over), and they played out their role for allowing events to play out.

All it takes is one city and one commune to refuse to particpate and the quest can't be completed.

If you don't like dealing with it there is an IC way to put an end to all this.

And all it takes is one city -OR- commune that had agreed not to do it to decide that they would like 35k power to cancel out such IC agreements.

That doesn't change the underlying mechanical flaws one iota.

Othero has a point. Change them, evolve them, delete them or replace them with something new - personally I'd prefer a quest ONE org can enact against ANOTHER org.

i.e. Glom and Mag are at war with each other and both neutral with Seren/Celest. Glom enacts a version of the hai'Gloh which only affects Mag, the only effects it has are to prevent discretionary powers used by Mag against Glom citizens and steal 10k power from Mag plus the chance of stealing another 25k later on. Or some variation thereof.

That would serve beautifully to negate the current alliances whilst leaving part of the mechanic intact. I'd like to get back to smacking Seren around/being smacked around by Seren, but with the current situation thats not going to happen.

I should also add I also want to fight Celest and Magnagora whilst I'm fighting Serenwilde, but all of you individually.

Or make it so that all Nexii can use DL/SL/Avatars to attack. i.e. Glom kills DL's, Glom shoves DL in Ravenwood - Wyrden Giant smashed Necromentate. This would also be pretty cool and just require a small tweak to the current quests.

Both sides of it are pretty messed up, it would be much easier to stop doing it then to spend the next rl year tyring to fix it and make it more fair.

So if someone actually wants to make my post a seperate topic that might be good. Up to Xenthos I guess, looks like mine might detract from his when it comes to having mechanics changed. If the quests are going to exist they should be improved.

That does not change that the underlying mechanical fixture would still be there, and it would still be done again at some point. The issues will still exist. Trying to sweep it under the rug won't do a blessed thing, because it will come back.

See: Magnagora getting 5k power per Avatar handed to Gorgulu. As well as it being extended to accept the Glom Avatars, without even checking the power gain from handing them over.

This thread is about constructive criticism. Your post qualifies, and given how flawed it is I think at the very least it's probably best if they put a mechanical pause on it until they have a chance to work out some of these issues. I don't mind your participation!

I was hoping the Nif event would have added in some kind of conflict quest that was mag/glom vs celest/seren to give us a more reasonable option of changing the politics more to how they were.

lol

I still think that Org vs Org conflict quests should be confined to 1 vs 1 rather than 2 vs 2. I just think that all orgs should have a way to attack the other three orgs.

I'd actually like to see my suggestion of Nexii's being able to attack all other Nexii rather than just the standard opposing org Nexii implemented.

Ok, more back on topic, it does seem there needs to be a more reasonable way to stop it from being enacted.
The communes seem to have the short end of the stick on that one. It seems there are a number of ways to complicate their efforts with fewer ways to gum up ours. Saying that the communes should perma camp Xion isn't really reasonable to me.

I think adding in a new mob on each side that would be fiarly accessable and key to initiating the quests and had a significant respawn time might help with alieviating that.

There is still a major issue with this: Chiefly that if one side finds theirs and decides they want to start, they know exactly when they are doing it and can keep the other one dead (and thus, the other side from even starting theirs) while working on their own.

How about a mob that when killed would reset the quest? It would add in an extra hurdle of having to defend it while trying to do the quest.

It would depend on mob strength, but that's a decent idea for fixing one of the problems.

Also: Make this mob unkillable when the other side is in effect, so that the side trying to fix things doesn't have it reset all the time.

This.

Each Commune and City should have a quest to hurt any other commune or city. It just kind of makes sense, and though alliances will probably be formed, there are options to keep things from being static.

I was hoping that the fact that you guys were having to angel and demons meant that something special was going on. I was HOPING that that special thing was that hai'Gloh and XI quest chains would both be deleted. Clearly that was not the case. I support Othero on this one; we're done with 'em. I don't mind still being buddy buddy with Mag, but with those quests in existance, we don't have an option not to be buddy buddy.

Mayhaps I will now bother Japhiel and see if there's any way to seal off the Cosmic planes from Ethereal witchery at the cost of preventing us from performing XI....

Rewrite them to the 1v1 versions Chade mentioned. If people really want to be able to take org alliances anyway they like then this will result in each org having a way to attack the rest.

If there is an issue with xion being incorporated into the quest line then the tree aetherbubble could be expanded as necessary and an equal amount of work required there compare to the effort in xion etc.

Or the quests could take place primarily in aetherspace, a few new bubbles here and there where new unique quests can be completed perhaps with something central so that only one org can launch theirs at a time and they can fight for it. This would also offer a way out of using the pre-existing quests so that if they were fine already they do not need to be changed.