Hey now, Krellan is the least restrained of all of us, and when do we get our Glom membership cards? I've been here for a while.

Politics only work if both sides want to change something. As long as one side doesn't want anything to change, it won't change, and there's nothing the politicians can do about it. (Even if the politicians on both sides do want something to change, often there's still no way for it to happen).

I'll never understand these arguments. Nobody is ever going to convince anyone else, and it's just going to continue going around in circles. It's so boring.

Jack Sparrow wouldn't have that kind of crappy attitude MERIK.

Jack Sparrow would find it boring too.

At this point, Jack would have had a fight, seduced a woman, gotten drunk off his and found some treasure, and then sailed off with somebody ELSE'S boat.

Not really. It's really more of an issue of certain leaders (and these certain leaders have specific names that are irrelevant right now) being unwilling to hold their own accountable for fear that they'll get screwed over for trying to hold the high ground. There's also the issue that you notice when you're being raided more often than you notice a raid. Talan probably truly doesn't understand that Urazial is a blight on the game. You yourself probably don't even realize how much trouble he causes outside Serenwilde. Still, controlling Urazial doesn't put Narsrim et al. under control either. So, Talan doesn't have a lot of motivation to handle the local problems when the people who elected her are much more concerned with the things they can see, which is not Urazial, Sadhyra, and Celina, but Narsrim, Ixion, Ethelon, or Lehki. You and Sarrasri, of course, don't see any issues with Lehki's actions, but see a lot of issues with the raiding Gloms--even though, if you cut Urazial out of that list, Lehki's no better. Glom just happens to have the worst offender du jour and a greater number of people who really aren't griefers, they just happen to be beating on whiny, demoralized Serenwilde.

Then, we take that one step further, and we have to remember that the game is here to be enjoyed, and a lot of the time, the enjoyment of one comes at the detriment of many. The code can't differentiate between everyone. For example, Serenwilde just wants to be free to do its own thing, but every single coward that Serenwilde calls "champion" is scared senseless of Glomdoring. They flip out every time they see a Glom combatant in Faethorn and expect it to end in a bloody novice-harvesting grieffest...but that's not Sadhyra or Shuyin. That might be Incabulos and Celina, though. How can the admin be expected to code between people who really want a fair fight and people who really just want to win and enjoy fighting as a means to that end? Furthermore, why should people who enjoy fighting for any reason be prevented from doing so?

The admin started with good intentions for the combat streamlining. Hopefully it goes better than I think it's going to go. The answer to this is three-fold: one, orgs need to start recognizing crimes other than treason; two, individuals need to start recognizing individuals as individuals; and three, people need to feel like combat isn't some tremendous, arcane burden that ends in all but these strange god-like "combatants" getting beat down and losing xp. The admin are making an effort on that last point, but the first two are in a lot of people's hands...and one of them is you, Lendren.

EDIT:

Membership cards are a lot like sleep. Getting eight hours doesn't count unless you can get those eight hours all in a row.

Well 3/5 ain't bad.

Time to go find a boat...

I feel like Xavius saved that in a text file somewhere and just whipped it out.

Guess what else I have saved in a text file?

Your mom.

¡BASTARDO!

On a side note, Polyphasic sleep works quite well for some. So as long as you're in glom with a semblance of regularity....

You're not even reading my posts, are you? Apparently, you think I'm actually blaming Talan, or you, or maybe even Gwynevere, for Urazial's bleepishness. Come on, Xavius, at least try. The whole point is that that is absurd today because that has always been absurd. It was absurd when Glom-du-jour blamed all of Serenwilde for Narsrim's bleepishness when he was a Seren. It was absurd in the days when Chade was taking the guff for Visaeris using scabies before anyone had figured out how to brew liniment. Every time, since the first day the game opened, that someone has used the actions of one random bleep to justify perpetrating the same kind of actions against everyone who happens to wear the same color shirt as him, it was absurd. All that's different today is that every nation has had their turn to be absurd in that way pretty much equally.

So if you feel like you're being unfairly blamed for Urazial's actions because he's doing precisely what you said you would never do when it was your turn... that's precisely the same unfair blame everyone else has been complaining about for five years now, and yet it's still happening. And people still post as if it made sense. That's the point.

If you post again under the misimpression that I'm supporting the very absurdity that I've been decrying, I'm going to have to throw you into a select group with a few others that "I used to think got it, but didn't really, turns out". Don't disappoint me!

All three of your "what we need to do" things are the same things we've needed to do, and people have been saying we need to do, since 2004. I doubt one day people are going to start treating individuals as being responsible for their own actions because you or me posted that they should. So what else is there to do? That's the real question.

On a cynical bad day I might say "play the game Lusternia insists on being" which is to say, embrace the absurdity because it's the only game left. Treat the pretexts with the same suspension of disbelief we use to explain how you can carry fifty bulls and sixty vials and sip the right one while paralyzed, or why the countess never sees the murder coming even though the village has had a murderer on the loose for 150 years at least.

On a better day, I hope that Lusternia is going to at least partially wake up again, and attach causes to actions, but I don't really put much hope in players doing that -- they have given themselves credit for it before but they haven't really done it, it's been a side effect of admin-initiated events.

We'll just have to see which way it goes.

Honestly, this thread just needs a good closing.

I'm still baffled as to why people get so upset over the back and forth raiding.

It's a text game. It might suck for the time, but it'll change in a few months so stop treating chopping trees and kicking ladies like it's the next Holocaust.

edit: what I mean to say is while I understand annoynce and being upset over a situation, I don't understand this extreme, long term bitterness and over dramatization of a situation we've seen over and over.

My goodness, such angst. Tempted to put working on a quest aside to stir the kettle, but I really do like the Paavik mansion.

Because when it reaches a certain point, it prevents the things that some people enjoy about the game. Also, because there are a hundred MUDs out there where you can do that stuff, but very, very few where you can do the stuff that stuff prevents. (Incidentally, I expect you're vastly overestimating the level of upset here.)

Then it's a problem of people simply not understanding the game they are playing, but I've been over this before.

And I don't think so. You and Xavius are exchanging novel length posts, and for your part at least, it's not the first time. Your tone also speaks volumes.

There are two reasons why someone might want to fight.

For the challenge of the battle, or to win.

There are two reasons why I person might want to win.

A feeling of accomplishment, or because they have a goal in mind which involves them winning.

There are multiple reasons why someone would want to win and not care about the challenge level. (e.g. punishment, xp gain, territorial pissings)

I think it is more rare that someone would be looking for a fight just for the challenge then they there would be people who are looking to achieve something specific and thus wish to win "at all costs"

Politics also only work if the ones doing the politicking have any sort of control at all over the people they are governing. In my humble opinion, trying to run an org in Lusternia has got to be similar to herding cats.



I agree strongly with this, unfortunately, there are problems with achieving the actualization of these solutions.

The problem with the first point is that in order to punish crimes other than treason, you are going to alienate your fighters, and everybody knows that in Lusternia, the org with the most fighters wins.

The problem with the second one is Lusternia is a small community. When the number of active combatants in the game numbers around twenty-thirty, two or three people from one org acting in tandem can easily be construed as the org itself perpetrating the offense. It also harkens back to the issue with number one, in that leaders have to be willing to actually punish their combatants for doing offensive actions when the org cannot take the repercussions.

The problem with three, is, of course, that quite the majority of the players in the game -do- view combat as a tremendous, arcane burden that ends in all but the combatants getting beaten down, because that is exactly what happens! The people who do the fighting are the ones that know how to fight, everybody else just gets dragged along for the ride.




Your perception of Lusternia seems to be a fighting game that has some RP for flavor. I would counter that the majority of the players, (and I'm talking if you polled people in-game, not just forum-goers) would say that Lusternia is an RP game that has opposing factions as a set up for interesting interactions, and combat is a side effect of this.

I don't think necessarily either points of view are right, but it's rather a mix of the both.