I personally don't find that raiding is overly excessive at the moment or ever was, really. Some people can accept that there's nothing they can do to stop a raid at a given time and go on with other matters. Others find it hard to bring in line with their rp to ignore intruders, even when they can do little more than die to them. It will always be a problem, I think, and both notions will have to be accepted.

If you want to make raiding a little harder, lowering or removing the cost for guild discretionaries would be a start. Since no org decided to keep the construct that allows to use them for free (and I think it was no mistake, the constructs chosen are all more important in my eyes), they usually don't get put up for small raiding parties. The power cost should be no real problem for any of the orgs, but it can probably be somewhat frustrating if you have to use power repeatedly to shift the odds somewhat in your favour against the same set of people over and over again.

I think this has come up before and players prefer that these beings have meaning (so long as they're hard to kill--see latest announce). Anyway, maybe we should just remove the ability to chop down trees, remove consequences from avatars and cosmic lords dying, remove everything where another org could cost orgs power, and let all conflict be solely RP driven.

How far down is player activity though? I'm sure a fair few combatants have quit on the opposing sides, because I know how many refuse to be in an underdog position. But I don't have the numbers you do, so I obviously can't make any real speculation.

Still, these raids are something that can be handled ICly. Glom showed that with Celest when they accepted the peace treaty, even though it only lasted a short time. It was upheld fairly well too, except a couple violations. As far as I know, nobody else has tried that. Their are people in every org right now relying on the fight fire with fire method, which certainly isn't going to stop the raids. The thing is, if people are feeling that their playtime is impacted by their raids, and enough people have decided to give up on the game that you're making a thread like this, they should all go to their respective leaders and go 'This is stupid. We're losing, and we're losing badly. We need a break, we want to do other things, but we can't because x and y and z keep aggravating a and b and c and it's just this pointless back and forth. Talk to the leaders of x city, please.'

It just requires a tiny swallowing of e-pride, and a couple compromises. I know Talan isn't some baby eating Satanist IRL, so it's not like she's going to try and take over your org if you ask her for a ceasefire.

There are roleplayable methods to end this raiding. Someone just needs to step up and make it happen, instead of chopping trees or killing the stable denizen at 3 AM.

With the amount of power in nexuses, I really find it hard to believe that the discretionary powers aren't being used because of the cost. Am I naive here? I don't know!

Yyaayy. But that would discourage combatants and lower the numbers logging in even more, probably.

Well I could think of a few things.

Why not let gods help in large scale fights like how the raids have been?

Lower the cost to form guards?

Make it so ripple or other thing like ripple can do something and not just be a laugh in the face of demigods?

I saw upgrades to demon lords, supernals and avatars which is good but no idea if it will make much diffence really as we lose demon lords in a matter of seconds. Five per demon lord is my math when I hear the calls on nil.

Lower the cost of combat type skills or let people move more guards around but again if demigods can kill a super mob more mobs is not the answer.

As for people killing other people and just that. Well really there is no downside to the winning side just more xp for them or laughs. So all I can think of is thinking of some downside to players yet also don't see any of this really going to work out. Not to say admins don't listen it is just that I know my ideas won't work out.

Discretionary power generally isn't worth it if it's just a few people plinking away at things that end up costing the org less power than raising the defense, and it's still a lose-lose for the org being raided (500 power vs. 100 power, still worth defending either way). Also, any significant power cost is a deterrent to orgs, who don't see 2 million power as an impressive hoard, but rather the never-ending boiler on the Ascendant train. On a personal note, I liked when all the orgs had free discretionaries. It's not like any org has changed their mind on their one construct since Nexus Worlds was dismantled (to my knowledge), so it wouldn't be too bad to restore discretionaries to what was the status quo before last summer.

Really I think they should be lowered as I know I hate to use them for the idea of having to get that power back due to we are trying to do things with said power and I know serenwilde is in need of power due to the flame going out and with the weekly deaths of the lords and avatars don't help that

If I had something to do or work toward when I logged in, I might actually stay around. As it stands, well, there is nothing for me to accomplish anymore in the game. Getting zerged anytime you want to fight is old. Wanting to fight 1v1 is somehow, as stated by Xenthos, not an even fight with me. I know Ceren is in about the same situation as I am. He claims himself to be a non-combatant shopkeeper. There's no point in bashing because I have a ton of essence as it is. (nudge essence shop nudge)

I don't have the feeling that raiding is out of control.
In fact, I think things are just taking a good turn in that the entire basin is coming together to battle Glom. I think the streamlining combat and the upgrades to DL's supernals and avatars, the change to distort are going to do the trick. I might be wrong but i think that at this point we should see how things play out from here.

I'm looking forward to seeing if we will find a way to bring Glom down or if they waill continue to steamroll the basin and frankly I don't know which way it will go and to me that's fun.

I guess that's fair enough. Anyone want to propose alternate power costs for some of these things? I'd love to see nexus guardians used more!

And yet Glom puts discretionaries up at the drop of a hat, because from our end, there's no reason not to given power income. Us putting up discretionaries at the moment is nowhere near as costly in terms of relative income as it is for, say, Magnagora or Serenwilde.

At the same time, discretionaries go up too quickly in the face of big large-scale raids, and if they were free it would just go back to having all discretionaries up 24/7 (including the new and improved distort), which... to me... seems like a pretty big issue in the other direction. Unless you want SMob raids to always be off-hours, I guess.

Frankly, I don't know if there is a solution. I considered the notion that discretionaries are free but take 5 minutes to go into effect... yet, that doesn't affect the kick-and-run raider if you don't have it pre-prepared. Pre-prepare it and the 5-minute prep time is pointless. So, yeah, I don't really have any ideas here. Maybe what we have now is the most balanced. :/

Finally: Tree griefing is worse than Avatar griefing in terms of time and effort to fix it. Just FYI. Not as bad as Crow / Hart griefing, but it's definitely more work to regrow a pile of trees than to recover a full-blown Avatar, which seems a bit odd.

I would suggest a combonation of objective and subjetive ways to deal with the situation.

Make some sort of "grief counter". when a person does something that could be considered griefing, they go up in points.

When that person reaches 5 grief points, an admin approaches them and tells them to tone it down.

If they are approached 3 times, the person is shrubbed for 30 RL days.

"Could be considered griefing"? Who decides this? What are the cases? If Hai'Gloh is put up, is that griefing? If it is put up 10 times in a row, is that griefing? Who gets tagged, since it takes a large number of people to be involved? Etc. Essentially, it's pretty much impossible for a coded system to determine this.

That's silly, the game would lose more people than it has already.

Rather difficult to come to a consensus on what exactly entitles griefing.

Could make Arena duels actually worth something, mechanics-wise (Achievements would be a good first step, provided they're not too farmable). Or we could have a new type of Arena duel, where the combatants bet power from their reserves, and the winner gets the loser's power for their org, or something. Or maybe have a new area that's a nonstop FFA, where people who enjoy fighting other powerful foes can gank each other to their heart's content without ruffling the feathers of the rest of the playerbase.

Why not make demons, angels, fae and such harder to kill? People will get stronger but the mobs are at the same level and that could stop random attacks or at least try to stop. Really I am shock a level 30 person could kill my archdemon and it is kinda sad at the same time

That's basically how all off-plane areas are, it wouldn't change anything to have an area set up for just that. Also.. power? I can go to astral for 30ish minutes and get full reserves.

Sounds subjective and abusable. Lets remember the issues with the avenger before giving it even MORE teeth.

Estarra, rather then removing conflict-mechanics(No. No no. Just...no. No.) orgs are given a discretionary they are able to have active during a certain part of the day, which will force-equal on any combatants on their plane.

It can't be constant, then why have numbers? But during a portion, that must be approved by Admins, any enemies beyond a certain point will trigger the discretionary and start ticking an un-renouncable grace onto people. The number that triggers the discretionary is directly proportional to the number of Protectors and Security around at the time. However, only a certain number of non-prot/securities can participate in the fight before they too are graced.

In other words, for a certain time period, combat will be restricted, preventing Zerg on both sides.