To ensure the other thread isn't hi-jacked, and to also let you guys expound on this, I've moved the few posts on the subject into a new thread. I'm aware some of you felt there were some good ideas in an Ideas Thread, and you're welcome to re-pitch them in this thread - I'm not going to subjectively cut through it, however, myself. - Eventru

As someone who has floated away from the game I'd say the issue isn't a excess of raiding or griefing but that combat/raiding has slowly become the only part of the game. The orgs want to "win" the game. You can't really win politics or roleplay so the most important thing to each org becomes combat. Make other things within the game important and offer rewards for taking political and RP routes with things and you'll probably see combat become less extreme because people are now playing the other parts of the game (I realize griefers will still exist) and you'll bring in and retain people who are interested in something outside of combat.

I think that even without brainstorming new ideas up, you could help a bit by nudging the power rewards associated with prestige up a notch or two. Culture used to be pretty important! Now it's more on the side compared to other methods of power accumulation/loss.

That might be worth looking into. Being cultural center of the basin nets you +1000 power, which... these days ain't a lot. And even if that was upped significantly, there's so much power floating around people probably still wouldn't care that much.

Maybe a purely RP reward, something like... being the cultural center attracts troupes of bards or something. Something like a mini-version of the Czingany Wayfaire perhaps. Or maybe some notable scholars takes up residence in your library, that answers lots of questions about history or events or whatever.

EDIT: Thinking further, with rewards like that, would probably need adjust how often culture score resets, or maybe make the visiting bards and scholars not count, or you need to hold cultural center for a certain number of months before they show up.

For rewarding RP, one way that already exists would be for the divines (collective) to utilize their ability to reward/dock RP points. I realize the problems with this approach, but it can be a start.

Additionally, for new rites submitted for guilds, have a competition in which the guild gets recognition for new ones. This provides an IC incentive for RPers to congregate to other RPers, and it does have an important effect on the game, being that it's conceivable for a shift in populations to occur.

I'm also not against individual rewards for great role-playing. The best way to implement this would be to have a recognition system where you can recommend other players. To avoid gaming this feature, you can only recommend x people per time period and only once to one person each period. The recommendations MUST be detailed and give a brief summary as to why. Have the divines monitor also for abuse (I don't foresee it being a huge workload, as there's a built in limit). The important thing here would be to avoid ranking players publicly. Also the rewards given should not be directed to combat specifically but also be inclusive enough to encourage the demigods/ascendants to participate. Credits would be the ideal reward, providing the most universal and wanted incentive. It doesn't have to be much, either.

Have at it, boys and girls.

Maybe once every week or so pick a random Org to have some people audit(secretly) for RP, and if the org does well, give them a certain buff, or perhaps power?

XP Gain Alternatives

XP is an obvious choice. How about Karma/Esteem bonuses? Maybe karma/esteem/gold boosts like the achievement XP boost?

The idea originated to curb raiding, which granted it doesn't have to, but extra XP potentially wouldn't matter to demigods with lots of essence.

I would be motivated by gold for credits to get skills and artifacts. Or bound credits.

Personal rewards are nice but I was more thinking org rewards. People do combat for two reasons, they either find it fun and it usually brings in power and other things to a org. I think the suggestions that'd really help are




All of the aspects of the game should have some sort of impact on the larger conflict present in Lusternia. I'd love to see the gods create events that seem like more then just "Group A and Group B get similar tasks and have to finish it first.". What if there was a event where Magnagora had to pick people to go and trick a angel into leaving Celest with them for a ritual to the Demon Lords? A untouched glade of woods is discovered in the Basin and Serenwilde and Glomdoring both have to produce a manifesto to present to the leaders of the glade in a attempt to sway them to their side?

I have to restate the question- how?

Also, more specifically, what do we want to reward?

If an admin comes along and sees you roleplaying with someone in elaborate, paragraph-long emotes full of flavour, do you need/deserve/want compensation for roleplaying?

When you write up a treaty or a charter for a guild/city/org/alliance, do you want a divine to come along and give you a favour for playing the political game?

How about when you write a book? Wait, we've got the prestige system for that, and I'd rather not waste my own time with it.

In regards to power, simply increasing the rewards of a resource that already exists in excess is going to do very little to truly encourage active participation, nor will the reward be as fulfilling. If anything, we'll just exacerbate the 'there's too many Demithings bawww' issue that may still be at hand via the Ascendant system.

Sounds interesting, but I can just see the complaining about bias in events likes those.

It originated in that thread, yes, but these posts were moved because they have nothing to do with curbing raiding. The topic shifted toward raiding overtaking culture/politics/RP in terms of benefit/reward.

As for the bonuses I mentioned, I probably should have elaborated but I was kind of tired. They could be organization wide bonuses given by completing certain quests, or doing certain achievements as a community. They could reset every IC month, year, 10 years, etc. to keep the strongest orgs from doing them again and again and again and again and making the gap between the haves and have nots wider. This would also serve to keep orgs from 'policing' the achievements and telling people not to hunt in certain areas or do certain quests, as would likely happen if they never reset and were one time use.

It would basically be kind of like inverted, super-watered-down domoths, but instead of competing with others for them with combat/raiding, they're given for things related to culture/RP instead. Obviously the benefits I mentioned (gold, karma, esteem, XP boost) would have to be quite small to keep them from throwing everything out of whack, but if coupled with a decent chunk of power I think that it could be a decent alternative to relying on raids to get your power. Most importantly though, it would make people who can't compete with demigods feel like they can contribute once the dust has settled.

Edit: You could make them specific to the conflict, if you wanted to tie RP/culture to that. If there was a reward from a quest/library/culture... thing... that increased the amount of pixies in Serenwilde, or made elder trees twice as hard to chop down, or increased the amount of nuts given from the Moonhart tree, there are plenty of people who can't fight (myself included, here =P) who would be happy to try their hand at it so that they can contribute. I'm not certain what, if any, parallels the other orgs have to those things, but it's an example.

As desperately as I want to see a resurgence of the everything-but-combat parts of Lusternia, I don't see a reward system as making much of a difference. It does make sense to increase the proportion of how much culture matters to power, just because it got left behind by the other escalating power boosts (especially domoths). But that's not going to restore the lost parts of Lusternia. Imagine how much culture would have to be worth before the city and commune leaders would stop pushing people to raid and instead push people to write (with more than the token gold/credits/favors reward system and the occasional encouragement that we have always had). Culture would have to be worth so much before that happened, that the forums would have long since exploded in a fireball of rage.

I think that what Lusternia needs is not more incentives and more power escalation. It needs:

• Reducing the incentives we have now to conflict, such that you don't feel like you're screwing up every minute you're not raiding, and you can justify taking a few days off from grinding your opponent's face in the dirt.
• Distract us with some kind of event that forces us to break the momentum of escalation. Problem here: we all know that can't happen until next month to fit in the holidays-to-Ascension schedule. We can't have one before that. So we're just going to have to keep watching Lusternia hemmorhage its spirit and hope by time that event comes along, there will be enough left to rebuild from. (But whatever event is being planned, maybe they can start foreshadowing it a little earlier. A few mysterious prophecies can go a long way to distracting the event-whores even if they turn out to say absolutely nothing, and thus, don't limit what you actually do come December.)
• Find excuses to remind us of our history. A new Elder Wars chapter, for instance. The Gods talking to their orders about why they feel like they do about each other, instead of just "go squish them!" Stuff like that. I'm not saying they're not already doing that; I'm just saying, crank the knob a few more clicks in that direction.

We don't need to encourage roleplaying and culture and politics and commerce. They are all self-encouraging for the people who do them, and for the others, no amount of Free Gifts is going to make them stop to write a poem, nor should it. We just need to stop crushing those things and give them a chance to recover. And the longer we wait, the longer it will take for them to recover, and the more likely it is that they won't be able to recover because of the loss of too many people and too much interest.

I do agree with this, but it's important to note that they'll never recover if the rewards are not proportional to what you get for raiding. Keep in mind that not only does raiding give your organization power, it tangles the others up with recovery in the event that your raid is successful. You can't measure it purely as a 1:1 power reward for raiding and culture, because there are many factors beyond power that cause raids to be so potent.

I have no doubt that the people who want to write and RP will continue to do so even if the rewards are lackluster, but they'll eventually get burned out if contributing to their organization means that they have to stop doing what they want and fight. If the heavy combatants had to write prose and poetry all day long for their orgs, they would probably quit too, so if the numbers really are depressed because of the raiding it's really no wonder why.