Regarding 3), I think you are overestimating the pull of what the admin can do.

I don't think it's a silver bullet or 100% effective, I just think it's a lot stronger than anything any single player, or even a small but unified group of players, can ever hope to achieve.

Regarding 3), I think you are overestimating the pull of what the admin can do. We've certainly found, much to our chagrin, how players will dismiss what a mob or even an Elder Gods says or does if it goes against what they want to do. (Believe me, I've been caught flat footed several times.) Also, there have been several severe backlashes against the admin when they are even perceived as trying to influence how the players RP or how their politics stand. Finally, I'm not sure even an "area wide event" would do anything to change the politics of the time. We were, frankly, caught off guard that the city/commune conflicts erupted in the middle of the toymaker event (which was a band together type of event as well). If we, the admin, decided we were going to to create an rp situation that basically forces the current political situation to stand down and raids to stop, I really think that will end in more grief and ill will than it was meant to prevent.

I've come up with a solution for warrior combat: remove all arties and shell out the $1000+ refunds where applicable to all those that bought arties for weapons, make poisons always go through, remove wounds, change poisons to make venom locks capable, make chance to miss nearly negligible, and only have jabs for attacks.

Damage scale != Eviscerating Warrior Combat - I'll go play my Achaean Infernal Mhun if I want that type of combat

But it's easier to deal with.

Okay, let's try to stay focused. I have two questions that really haven't been answered:

1) Does anything more need to be done to dilute the current conflicts/raiding? And if so what? (We did address the hai'Gloh/Xion Initiative quests so I'm not sure why anyone would say they're off limits. In any event, since neither are even up now, it seems they are strawmen when it comes to the current conflict cycle.)

2) Are demigods too powerful? If so, what should be done to bring them in line?

Concrete suggestions will be listened to!

How would feel if we drop divinefire and the stat bonuses from demigods?

While I think the problems of balancing combat, including demigods and similar things, is important, I would hate to see it totally displace the question of whether the game is about combat, or about a lot of things including combat. What drew me to Lusternia, and drew me back to Lusternia, and drew me into Lusternia, etc., is that it was about a lot of things. There's plenty of games where combat tends to dominate the activities, and Lusternia wasn't one of those. (And other games where combat is completely, or almost completely, eliminated, and Lusternia also wasn't one of those.)

What can fix that? I've addressed this twice previously, but anyway...
1) The leaders can become dedicated to making it end. I have little faith in that under the best of circumstances, and even less given who the leaders are right now, but it is at least theoretically possible.
2) Some random shift of people can drain the steam from the offense, or shift the power balance, but we can't really make that happen. People will org-hop or go dormant as they choose, and the only trends in that area are usually the ones that make problems worse, not better. When this changes things it's an unpredictable jolt that comes when it will.
3) The admin can do an event which either distracts us from the momentum (like the "you must band together to survive" one mentioned earlier), or which changes the meaning of things (like Maeve changes her mind again, or Raziela does, or some new factor makes the current alliances again untenable). This is the only one that's really directed at Estarra's inquiry of "what can we do". It feels like a copout to say the admins can do it but we can't. But the admins have two advantages: first, they can move in unity, which we can't; and second, they have huge leverage, a few words from a Supernal or an Elder God can be more persuasive to the populace at large than anything a whole cabal of city leaders can accomplish in a decade.
4) It will eventually restore itself to balance, over the course of RL months or longer. Those might be months that a lot of us spend somewhere else, and some of us won't find our way back afterwards, but it will work, and more people will arrive during them, so maybe that's the best option. (Though I think it's overly simplistic to imagine that everything will always return to how it was: the conflict might die down, the power balance might shift, but it could still end up with a standing change in the focus of what life in Lusternia is like, if nothing counters it.)

Also, from my (limited) experience, 1v1 really doesn't tend to overwhelm me with either afflicts, damage, or WALL OF TEXT unless it's a bard in maelstrom or a monk, because monks just... hurt. (Well actually, any of the tip-top-tier will smush me, but they're special cases stacking TFs with Ascendent/demigod, artifacts, blessings...as much as they possibly can get, plus they have the experience to make it all happen. I don't.).

Group combat, I usually tend to get killed by the WALL OF TEXT that floods in so fast that my system (or my brain) can't parse it all before I die some horrendous gruesome death. I'd like a way to do "narrow focus" or something like that, such that only combat messages pertaining to you or your declared target show up. I.e. I won't see Shuyin brutally decapitating Esano, because Esano is busy chasming Tynghall instead. None of these actions directly involve me, and thus my narrow focus won't see them. I think this would go a long way towards clearing up group combat to be less painful for a lot of people.

A lot of other (non IRE) muds offer this option, so it's certainly codeable. From my past experience, telling newbies to enable that has made them so much happier and allows them to do more than freak out and freeze up. This would be a rather useful, great way to give the game a basic option to make it more user-friendly.

A lot of other (non IRE) muds offer this option, so it's certainly codeable. From my past experience, telling newbies to enable that has made them so much happier and allows them to do more than freak out and freeze up. This would be a rather useful, great way to give the game a basic option to make it more user-friendly.

I would love this.

I also vote yes on the narrow focus.

The reason I am so bad at combat is because my pc just sucks. Sad, but true. I can NOT find a system that does NOT freeze up during massive group combat or sometimes even in small group combat.

The MASSIVE wall of text is annoying, because it does freeze my system up until my chars either 1) Die 2) I tyep CTRL + ALT + DEL and use that to exit MUSHclient or 3) I just say screw it and not load a system.

Narrow focus would make things so much easier and newbies/midbies/highbies(not Demi, Titan, just more than mid and less than 90-ish), wouldn't feel like they were so damn worthless because they're getting raped in that massive wall of text and they CAN NOT even see when they're getting hit because of all the other spam.

When I played on my laptop, I had to adjust my system to only check if there was things to cure every other second. Because it basically crashed in group combat when it was checking stuff every single line. ):