That.. would really suck.

I wonder if limiting the number of demigods/ascedants within a particular order would have any affect. (too much divine competition:P )

we just got #4 on top muds so things can't be that bad

I doubt it - Nocht's order has its fair share of Demi's as does Viravain's. Very limited number of Avatars in both orders though, Nocht has no active avatars. Fail to see how it would make a difference?

Comparatively, just Eventru's order has more avatars running around than all of Glom.

Good job we don't have many then, otherwise people really would be crying

It's called Faethorn. Get with it.

Except that there was a recent reward scheme/proxy fiasco resulting in several muds losing 100+ traffic votes. Yeehaw for being legit.

I have to wonder, why all this mob and org stuff? Lusternia is probably the easiest-going on death penalties and escaping, as well as survivability. Raiders don't give a crap about dying because it's a drop of rain in the ocean. If people actually had to care about dying, they'd suddenly stop being so aggressive or pay the price. Similarly, people have ZERO INCENTIVE TO KILL DEMIGODS. Anyone have the exact figure on what a regular player loses with conglute or even a prayer death versus what they gain from killing a demigod? This equation has been screwed up since you first put essence in. A level 99 gives insane exp and a level 100 gives less than a level 30 but is exponentially more powerful? Hellew? Literally no reason for a non demigod to really want to kill demigods. Risk/Reward is 100% backwards.

Spreading the population out? The game itself prevents this. Unless you have a certain amount of fighters you can't even participate. Being the only demigod in Celest for almost six months was so much fun it made my eyes bleed. You also need competent melders to play the metagame or you might as well throw in the towel. Eight total classes with multiple passives that affect the enemy list in a game "based around solo combat" is a total joke.

Diversity for the sake of diversity over game balance is also a giant factor in this. Here's a shocker when you talk about org populations:

Some org skillsets are great while others suck immensely. This can be attributed to "unique" versus "balanced" which comes up often.

People will want to gravitate towards stronger skillsets, not just players. Necromancy and Night are the two main examples. They provide unheard of levels of synergy and offense/defense compared to other specs. Only one melder in the game has passive damage/stun that can cut a third of someone's life and kill people outright if they aren't in the 4k+ range. Two melders have TWO skillsets that function perfectly outside a demesne, the other two suck horridly. One set of bards received a slew of nerfs that basically crippled their spec and has received nothing in compensation, the onus being placed on the players? How does that work? Is it not glaringly obviously by the amazingly high number of Cantor fighters over the past six months that MAYBE people are right when they say Starhymn is godawful? But it's up to a player special report to fix it.

A new org would thin things out, in reality. Player dilution is what people seem to want. Unfortunately, that really isn't possible with the number of positions in a Lusternia Org, be it guild or Commune/City. Eventually the same thing would happen with power clustering.

If you really want people to change orgs via a mechanical bonus, make it insanely cheap to change your skills to a "hurting" org's classes. I wouldn't mind helping Serenwilde out as a Shofangi or Serenguard but HA HA HA if you think I'm paying that skill loss cost to join a flailing underdog.

TL/DR: More factors than just e-friends and winning to side choices. Curb raiding by ramping up risk, not by making mobs harder or raids impossible. Demigods present insane risk/reward skewing for non-demis trying to kill them.

Agree. Highly agree.

Come to think of it, a lot of me thinks Divinefire is a large issue too. Though, if nothing is on the horizon for Demigods/Ascendants, revamping Divinefire may be too big a hit.

On a separate tangent:

I think "e-friends" come into the equation as much as "e-adversaries". The consequences of certain combatants constantly taking dumps on people who can't handle it is that it earns them spite from certain other combatants, which results in the same people tending to oppose one another, no matter which orgs they belong to. Which only builds over time.

Certain people have always been known for using the kinds of tactics that force the administration to waste time coding ways to prevent ridiculous things, time they could have been spending on making the game better. Nothing new there.

It apparently wasn't avenger avoidance. Dorcha and the novice were on the Water Plane, neither of which enemies to Celest, and they transversed to Ethereal. From there, Ethelon came and conjunctio'd Dorcha and left him and the novice on Astral.

While what you wrote was great and very helpfull, I think you have to look more closely and realize that most of what you wrote fell under the "winning" aspect of things.

I'm not saying that it's not valid, just that it really is a function of winning. Who wants to have 0% at winning? Nobody sane.

I wonder if the xp reward/loss for pk combat should maybe be looked into and have it actually be costly/high reward?

I wasn't clear then. By winning I meant band-wagon org-joining based on who is on top. While it's a different form of winning to prefer complete skillsets that have uses, it wasn't what I meant.

The guts of the mechanism seems to already be there though, namely innocence. Just expand it so that it doesn't automatically drop at whatever level it does and flag certain denizens to make innocence drop if attacked.

One idea might simply be to make certain things in the game more difficult to obtain the more you have, within reason. This would be practical to explain because of what history has shown us about the troubles in maintaining large empires simply because of their size.

It's akin to how a trampling beast breaks fewer limbs in a room with a lot of targets, except it would be on a larger scale. The more villages you hold, the more difficult it is for you to sway other villages that revolt. The more domoths you hold (personally or organizationally?) the more difficult it is to claim another.

The effect, or purpose, would be to spread out that positive reinforcement a little more evenly, giving the underdog a little help but not stopping the top dog.

Oh confound it, stupid forums didn't save all the posts I'd marked....

Anyways, I think there are a couple of -very- clear cases where people need to be told to knock it off. Would it really be so bad to give them a warning?

I did like the idea of something similar to "now now, don't be so hasty" for entering/exiting hostile territory. That would do a huge amount for cutting down kick and runs designed solely to annoy.

I think Nexus Guardians are so underused because of the culture of the game. Telling people that they need to make everyone a protector is... kinda steep. As previously mentioned, Protector is a title that affords a certain level of prestige within a guild. Same with Undersec. Even though they might be mechanically not very weak, the title still implies an increased level of responsibility. Cheapening that is not the way to go. Killing culture just drives away more people.

I get frustrated with the envoy system, too. I see some very glaringly obvious imbalances, but when they're brought up on the forums, all I hear are "ask for your envoy to change it". The envoys can only request a change to one skill at a time, once per month, and sometimes this just feels too slow. I know there are special reports and the like, but... eh, we'll see how the streamlining thing goes.

Regarding artifacts: I'm still not sure how anyone can honestly say that a good number of them exist for anything except raiding. Gems, Maps, Cubixes and related items... If one looks at how they're used, the numbers should speak for themselves.

One thing I really liked: The long, drawn out conflict quests that took forever and a half to initiate, but maybe half that effort (if that) to undo. Prime example: Raising the ship of the dead. It took forever and a half for Magnagora to raise, but all it took to undo was a good team of Celestians to go in and curbstomp Ladantine. Beautiful, and I really do mean that with 100% sincerity. I'm pretty sure killing Marilynth went the same way. Mag could see Celest empowering the spire and swarming all over the Inner Sea and say "aw baloney, we'd better get ready to kill ghost-wench" coming from a long ways away, and then relatively quickly remove that threat to their organization.

I know people complained about being sucked into these conflict quests, but I really believe that the Sea quests (Marilynth/Ladantine) were at a decent balance. If they get whored too much, why not just add a cooldown? I think they were already related to seawolves/turtles, which in and of itself meant that the quests couldn't be spammed to keep an org's nose in the dirt. Also, they were at least interesting, versus these "raids" where we...sit... at the nexus, waiting for something to happen, and nothing does for hours on end. At least with conflict quests, we could -do- something. Similar logic applies to the nexus world weakenings, where even novice fighters could at least focus on a construct and feel like they were helping out, versus being a one-hit ablative shield (or not even that, in the event of room-wide attacks).

Summary:
-Many small steps that anyone can do.
-A few big steps that only big people can do.
-Things don't reset. If even just a few people in the org grind away hard enough, the quest -will- finish. This allows underdogs to fire their lazor.
-Moderate reward/damage (stopping spectre/sand collection really isn't that detrimental to an org, but is a strong enough incentive to go -do- something about it).
-Reasonably easy/moderate counter that is doable at any time.
-Mechanically enforced spacing (preferably not related to absolute times, e.g. moon phases, but more like, x amount of time has passed, you may do the quest again).


People do stupid raids when they're bored. Mechanical disincentives aren't the way to stop raiding. Providing other ways to pass the time is.

I like this idea.

As it is, most novices are eager to drop innocence earlier than they have to, so I don't see how this would help. Someday you're going to have to come out of its wholly protective shell, and then these kinds of tactics will be used until the admins realize and waste time preventing them.

Me too.