I think you need to look at the reason why people raid. It's not generally just about being a jerk, though I'm sure there are many instances of this. More, it's about making a show of dominance or a gesture of retaliation. My suggestion would be to implement systems that mean more, but hurt less. I realize that you wrote above that you're not looking to implement new conflict systems. However, it seems an impossible goal to try to stamp out the desire of people to show that they can one-up the other team.

I've written before about the recovery from raids being disproportionate to the effort of raiding. Let's say that on the outside it takes 30 minutes, for a large enough group to gather together, travel to, and kill a supermob. It takes 3-5 hours in a best case scenario to recover from this. This time is much longer if, as is usual, multiple smobs are killed, and if hindering is done following the raids, and if there is no access to Xion, or if multiple orgs have immediate need of essence, etc. etc.

An idea that I think has been bandied about multiple times, and which was seen to be fairly effective in the hai'Gloh/XI, is forcing a pre-quest before effects are set in place. For the commune side, this was also limited by requiring certain things which can only be done at certain times. Filling the Well of Souls on full moon, for example. To make it clear - I think that we all agree at this point that the initial effects of these quests were an extreme. I'm not suggesting that we revert to anything like this, merely that the idea of any negative effects for the other side require no small amount of preparation. Why not include the negative effect of having an smob die? Require that they be weakened before they can be killed.

Further, I like the double-edged sword idea that was attached to the hai'Gloh/XI towards the end. If you put one org at a disadvantage, you will injure yourself as a result. If you feed opponents to your smobs, perhaps the process of creating the essence globes weakens your guys. Certainly it should strip any immunity they had from attacks.

Anyway, I hope that this conversation does not result in any further patch-fix attempts. If you keep simply raising the bar by making the mobs harder and the planes more hostile, all you really succeed in doing is making a stronger, more clever (read: whorish, exploiting) group of raiders. You will not succeed in dissuading those people who do play the game to engage in raids, pvp, domination, etc., from being what they are and wanting to play how they want to play.

While we can consider that, they're not exactly low level as it is. I've been wondering if perhaps we shouldn't just beef up mobs across the board.

Except that a large number of people need to go to Ethereal, Elemental, and Cosmic, including non-coms, for reasons like harvesting, influencing fae, bashing essence, etc. Making a new area not essential to any org solely for killing each other would not involve said players.

Take a look at Talan's post, I think. Changing mob strengths at this point isn't going to help much, and if mobs are beefed up across the board... you mostly just hurt the people who are already having issues hunting.

What would that do except make it more rough on novices to the point they give up bashing at lower levels and quit playing? That will neither keep more players around nor bring any back.

Why in the world are you agreeing with me?

That's twice now.

What if there were something like an org-level Avenger? I think one of the biggest perks of the Avenger system is that no one cares or tries to figure out why you did something, only that you did in fact do it, and as long as you don't do it too often, it's a non-issue. The same thing could be applied to orgs: someone from org X caused this concrete, measurable damage to org Y. Org X gets suspect points, org Y gets victim points. If suspect points get too high, the org or its members get weaker. If victim points get too high, the org starts to gain always-on defensive effects.

I think the real advantage in a system like that would be the power to self-police. If it's very clear who is doing how much to who, org leaders will have something tangible to use against those who are disproportionately aggressive, and they'll have a motivation to do so (i.e. preventing damage to their own org). Knowing the tendency for IG governments to completely over-react to any real or imagined threat of loss, the penalties can probably allow for an awful lot of abuse before they kick in, and the numbers can be adjusted down the road.

I was confused as well. =\\

I don't see every off-plane area as a nonstop FFA (for me Faethorn is for influencing Fae, Astral is for coning, Catacombs for bashing, but I get ganked on all of them with no provocation). I think it's the people who do see it that way who get tagged as "griefers" even if they're just looking for a spontaneous fight. So if there were a plane where people who want pick-up fights could go, and maybe get some kind of personal or org reward for killing people up there, it'd serve both the people who want random fights, and the people who want to use other planes for hunting/influence/power/etc.

While we don't have the resources to implement any fancy quests like hai'Gloh/XI any time soon, we could add something simple like making all the avatars and cosmic lord require quests like Raziela/Gorgulu where you have to use corpses/essence/something to make them vulnerable to attack.

Open PK -- FFA.

EDIT: As I said earlier, it wouldn't stop being zerged and it would just be abused by any given org with the most people at the current time for more buffs like Domoths now.

It's a start, I guess. The real message I wanted to convey was, if you think this is a problem, please do not assume that the fix will be some simple idea you can pluck out of this thread and implement tonight. The reason this keeps coming up is because the right solution is NOT a quick fix.

The plane could have special code that makes you form teams and declare foes, similar to Wargames, and no team can engage a team with 2 members greater or fewer? I don't know, there's all sorts of ways we could go here, no sense shooting it down so quickly. You're the one who wants fair fights, right?

What, it'd never get used that way. I'll put my team of Ceren/Narsrim/myself up for that.

Yeah that would harm a lot more people aka low levels as I know I have a hard time bashing at level 68 (yes I fail) but if all of them were higher level or more health or such then I would not really want to try to level up anymore as that would mean more vials for combat and that is more money that i dont have much of

Ok, let me take a stab at an idea for a new mechanic to help curb raiding. As I said, I'd like nexus guardians to be used more, so let's try to incorporate that as well!

What if nexus guardians have a special attack that warps a target's aura. Someone can only be hit with this attack once per game day. At the end of a game month, all aura warps clear. Each warp of an aura will cause a health drain (because the energies of the plane are now inimical to the aura). The health drain rises exponentially depending on the number of aura warps. Thus, someone may easily handle one warp, but two warps are noticeable, three warps extremely painful, and more than that deadly. The result would hopefully still allow freedom to raid but offer a way to retaliate (even if a noncombatant) and prevent hours long camping/raiding/relentless hit-and-run schemes, etc.

How about just 1v1 then? I'm not sure how hard that'd be to code, but you'd have to declare mutually that you want to attack someone. You're the one talking about how you want more 1v1 fights that actually mean something, and don't like getting zerged when you want a pick-up fight. I'm only throwing out suggestions, so help me out here, what would be your ideal world for something like this?

Well, I was thinking it would have to be done per tree, in the room. With maybe an herbal commodity cost as well.

What's the power cost for a Nexus Guardian these days, anyways? I've never seen one summoned or used either for or against a raid since they were implemented. It still seems more effective to actually go out and fight than to summon a guardian, to me.

I'm not sure why everyone assumes we'd do anything that makes it more hard for newbies. We could easily curve it so it won't be noticeable until a mob is level 50. I mean, level 80 mobs should be at least a little bit challenging for a level 80 player but they're getting mowed down by half that level!