I get on Aicuthi to do ministry stuff and chat with the Shavatts, but I think her day has dawned. Sorry Kio.

Eh. I really don't care at this point. If that's the kind of leader people want, who will just do :censor: and let people follow them, instead of actually trying to see what the guild wants to do, then they can have it. I've got a job lined up hopefully and should step down for someone who can be more active anyway. I'm tired of getting treated like an idiot for asking people what they'd like to do and having people who don't fight called fools and ignored. They can keep those leaders and I can go dormant again, screw it.

QUIT SERENWILDE.

Noooooo

It is -precisely- reactions like this which make me -not- want to play Sarrasri. I said one thing, and was targetting not just you in my general "Moondancer leadership" thing, but I suppose you can say you are where it started. Pro-tip: Responding with hostility to -everything- I say IG is not a way to make someone want to play. Saying that person gets no right to an opinion doesn't help either. You may not like the way I do things, but there is no way in hell I'd ever respond to someone -all the time- the way you do to me. And when you give stories, give the entire thing rather than just the points that make you seem right. The guard thing was a whole movement of -9- guards. Yes, 9. Into a better position. The other thing was a mushroom circle being moved north of the nexus rather than in the portal room with no guards.

This may change in the future! But anyways, this thread isn't about me. And in similar vain to this conversation:




I sympathize with your position, but don't you think you're being a tiny bit rough? Sarrasri plays this game for enjoyment just like you. She doesn't mean to be neglectful, or not help the guild. She's just playing the game in a way that she gets the most enjoyment out of it.

For better or worse, I think a true leader would stick to their guns and not give up.

I told him the same thing

When a Domoth goes free, I just want one Ascendant to say: "Rally ho! It's claiming time!" Because it's not like we don't have a decent enough amount of Demigods to at least try to put up a good fight. I can't count them on one hand.

I wish I were a good enough leader-type to take this upon myself to do, too.

EDIT: I also want our gods back. Seriously.

And despite my apparent whining here, I'm happy in Serenwilde.

Like Hilter Shuyin!



He knows I kid because... well, not sure why, but its just amusing to call him Hitler for no reason. The same reason Esano is the Burger King, which is the real message to take away from this post. Esano is the Burger King. I hear he wants a tailoring suit specially designed. Might I make a humble suggestion?

I’ve been an Undersecretary and Professor (not for Serenwilde) for some years in game, and one of the things that sometimes happens is real life people quitting an org/their city/the game because they are given the impression or outright told that they must participate in pvp or else they are useless/bad/whatever. Some of these people will give pvp a try and either don’t enjoy it or aren’t any good at it (or both) and some don’t want to try at all, but at the end, when they decide they don’t want to pvp, they feel like they don’t have the option to do this and play the game.

This doesn’t come about because of the game mechanics (we have all kinds of ways people can help their orgs outside of pvp; hell, the whole Influence skill is based around people not fighting) Instead it comes when people who like pvp insist (INSIST!) that everyone must play the game the way the pvp players enjoy it. There is a person (a real, live person sitting at a keyboard) who wants to play Lusternia via influencing, designing vials/robes/books/whatever, working on their tradeskill, whatever? So many pvpers absolutely cannot stand this, and I don’t know why. If some nexus snuggler hides whenever there is a raid (qqs, sits in a manse, etc), you have no fewer defenders than if they quit the game. Simply, if you are losing in pvp, it isn’t the presence of snugglers that’s causing the problem, it’s an absence of fighters. Making the snuggler’s player feel bad risk bumping them out of the game (people don’t play the game to feel bad). And it isn’t just new players either. There are reams of older, helpful players who assist in many ways (providing power, helping new players, making stuff with their tradeskill, etc) who very much feel that they are viewed as unimportant/bad/etc because they don’t pvp.

I myself am pretty bad at pvp (although I’m still trying because I WANT to play as someone who pvps). Many, many times I have been yelled at for going up to defend or whatever and sucking, but if I don’t go because I suck, then people yell at me for not trying. Often it is the same people who do both (someone yells at me to help defend, I go help defend, I die with incredible speed, and the same person yells at me for being fodder for the enemy). Now, this is profoundly unfun for me as a player. I WANT to help my org, but I, as a real life person, am not good at pvp. I defend, I lose exp, I get yelled at, or I don’t go and I get yelled at. I can only imagine how much more icky this is for someone who doesn’t to pvp at all.

This is a game. Whatever you do, not everyone is going to want to engage in pvp. That’s just reality. Heck, one of the things I love about Lusternia is that there are so many ways to contribute even if you don’t want pvp. What I would really like to see is the community make a space made for people who for whatever reason don’t want to directly take part in pvp. You are a player who wants to help your org during a raid but you suck at pvp or you just don’t want to take part in direct pvp? Well, then go and do “X.”

God that was long. Sorry.

The problem with Serenwilde isn't the snuggling or the MUDsex or the silliness; it's the lack of drive and cohesion amongst the populace, inspired by the lack of any reward mechanism whatsoever from the higherups. Guild- and city-favors are hoarded, kept in reserve just in case we need to throw a bunch of favors at our combatants. Our lack of an active or visible Patron means that we don't see any divine favors being given out either. I don't see any praise for our authors and playwrights, for the people who influence villages in the off-season, for the people adding tons of power to the Nexus, for our tradesmen, or for our teachers. The only thing that seems to matter in the political arena is whether or not you happen to be logged in when something that involves a sword comes up and whether or not you're willing to drop everything to jaunt up to Ethereal and stand in a circle for two hours or throw yourselves into harms' way repeatedly. Apathetic leadership promotes apathetic underlings, and I'm seeing a whole lot of apathy everywhere.

So, does Serenwilde have some sort of policy for giving out favors, or can I start tossing them around whenever I see someone doing something nice?

Maybe the problem is with 3 out of 5 of your VA's bailing for Gaudiguch and taking their clique with them.

I do think that constant favouring for meaningful reasons helps boost morale, myself, even if it's not all that great.



And so on.

That's not the problem, that's a symptom.

Oh man, are you still on this? When I see Shiri next, I'll be sure to remind him that he's got real-life obligations to Serenwilde because Serenwilde made one of their numbers in a text game go down so that some of Shiri's numbers in a text game would go up, and that he's a horrible, horrible person for not spending fourteen hours a day on Ethereal defending against Glom raiders. Shame on Shiri. May he be fired from his job, snubbed by his pets, and die a virgin.

Or, to run with your earlier post, shame on him for "keeping" VA. If he's going to have the truly horrible audacity to play an alt instead of leaving Lusternia, he should at least log onto Shiri and type RESIGN AS ASCENDANT OF SERENWILDE, because that will totally work.

PLEASE DO

That's not sarcastic or ironic. It boggles my mind when people tell me I'm "wasting" my GF on someone who -they- didn't think deserved it. There is no policy in place that says you cannot favour someone for the good work they do (I checked).

If you go check the ancient archives on the forum you will find evidence that I absolutely was not fine with it when the shoe was on the other foot. There are certainly Serens in abundance who were, and who are complaining now, but one of the few benefits of clean living is that I've left a clear record that stands precisely with what I'm saying now. (That record even extends to before Glomdoring's founding, though you'll have to look at my old alt for that. I think everyone knows who that was by now.)


Here too I completely agree with you, and have posted a number of times how they got way too much credit for turning things around. To the extent that Shuyin's defection made a big difference, its biggest difference was Serenwilde having a sudden drain as so many people followed him in the space of a couple of months -- there, the effect is on Serenwilde, not Glomdoring. I have always said Glomdoring was already fixing its problems long before Shuyin's defection and doesn't get enough credit for it.


I think this is a dangerous half-truth. It takes one person who is both charismatic and eager to sacrifice their own enjoyment. The single-person-who-saves-an-org story pretty much always ends with them quitting, burned out and miserable. The process of turning around an org single-handedly sounds like a wonderful challenge only to the people who aren't doing it, have never tried, and aren't likely to ever get a glimpse of what it really takes, what it really costs. There's an exception to this rule, but it's even worse: the charismatic sociopath who takes pleasure in the process of slicing off bits of their own soul to make it happen. That tends to end even worse. (I'm not sure if it's happened in Lusternia, but real world history is illustrative.)

While I'm kind of glad to see this went onto its own thread, and sorry to see it wasted a few pages on the "snugglers" red herring/straw-man, I'm mostly disappointed that it never once came around to the real issue.

What's the difference between a chess game and a war? Well, there's two, and they're both relevant.

The smaller one: in chess you always start with even-sided teams, but in war, in real life, once one side has an advantage they tend to be able to use it to make more advantage, and in Lusternia, that fact is even more true. (Maybe the endgame review will slightly mitigate some part of that, but this positive-feedback-gone-too-far thing has existed before the things the endgame review is addressing.) This is mostly a problem because we always have a bunch of people who love playing chess but with five queens, and can play it over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over; and don't give a damn about the people stuck playing the other side. This has been the case many times, and almost every org has had its time being the five-queens side, and almost every org has had its time being the other side. So it's easy to dismiss this, trivialize it. "The wheel turns." Blah blah blah. That doesn't mean that it's not bad for Lusternia. And it doesn't mean that it can't get to a point where it pushes an organization over a line from which it becomes just too hard to come back.

But the bigger difference is that in chess, you're just playing white or black. It doesn't matter which side you're on. You're not fighting about anything. You're not fighting for anything. You don't stand for anything. You're just trying to capture pieces and gain position. When the game ends you can just start another and even switch colors because it doesn't matter. And that is the real problem. Everyone mistakes one of the symptoms -- people feeling burned out, people throwing around the cheap-shot overgeneralizations about snugglers and griefers, which skills are OP, who's attacking newbies, whether the raids are spaced out, whether the raids involve actual fighting or just intentionally annoying people with childish vandalism and running-in-and-out (attacking players but not their characters), etc. -- for the problem. Those all matter. But the root problem is that we're not fighting about anything. Neither side stands for anything. We're just the white pieces being beaten by the black pieces endlessly.

Maybe it was always that way and I didn't notice because the side that was winning has the surplus time, energy, and population to spare on such trivialities as being about something, and caring about it. Heck, for all I know, over in Glomdoring right now they're actually figuring out what they're about and how to achieve it. (Even if so, I suspect the three or four people who spend the most time in Serenwilde aren't part of that, but that's neither here nor there.) But I doubt it. I think that meaning has eroded away almost completely on both sides of the fight. It's just "raid because we raid" or "raid because they raided because we raided".

That means the raids have no objective, and therefore, there's never a time when they end. It means that morale being eroded by the incessance of the raiding isn't getting replenished by people having some reason to fight, something to fight about or for. It means that everything is hollowed out. We are only fighting the hollow, empty shell of a war. A war about nothing. That's why we spend all our time bickering about nothing: that's all we have to work with. That's why the closest thing we have to motivation is yelling at and berating people: what else are you going to do, remind them of what we're fighting about? We're not fighting about anything. That's why people on both sides go on little petty raids -- there's really no other kind, so if you can't do anything but petty raids, why not be even more petty, and run in and out of three different borders every thirty seconds for an hour while refusing the fight you are pretending to be seeking? Why not leave statues and flame-sigiled panties, and spend days trying to instakill afk people? If you have no objective and no purpose, then purposelessness is all you have. Pettiness takes the place of purpose and becomes almost its own purpose.

I've fallen prey to mistaking the symptoms for the problem too. I've made a big point about how we need a way to make conflict so that it happens for a while and then stops for a while, and we do, but that's not really the issue. If we get back to where there's room for the conflict to be about something, everything will tend to fix itself. Raids will be aimed at an actual objective (hopefully not a "force the other guys to spend the next 30 hours fixing it" objective -- remember when we used to complain about that? but right now, that would be a welcome change!) and therefore will be limited by the range of what it takes to achieve that objective. Petty, childish behavior will tend to fall aside in favor of doing something that matters. Morale will be boosted by the fact that people have something to rally behind, to care about. There will still be imbalances of personnel, of power, of skills, etc. but they will lead to less lopsided conflicts because, while some people will always choose sides based on wanting to be with the winners, some will choose based on what the sides stand for. There'll be avenues of conflict other than killing, like propaganda and the clash of ideologies and even (I dare not say it) culture, which will both reinforce conviction, and bleed off some of the hostility into other forms, keeping it from becoming so trivialized via repetition.

This'll be the part where everyone tells me that it's my job to make all that happen, and there'll be the insinuation that I haven't even tried, that I'm just sitting here going "waaaaah, fix it for me so I don't have to get off my fat behind and do anything". I'm not going to use the forum to defend that I've been trying for a long time, and so have a lot of other people, because you either believe it already or you won't believe it. Doesn't matter though, because I haven't managed it. I'm not even sure if, if I were Maylea or even Estarra, if I could do it any better -- they certainly have a few tricks they can pull that I can't, but would it help? I have no idea. I'm at a loss for what could fix it at this point.

About all I can think is, there's a natural resiliency to people, to morale, and we just need to give it a chance to come into effect. A few coded changes to revive the punctuated rhythm of conflict we used to have could help a lot by giving us a chance to catch our breath; it wouldn't be a solution, but it might allow the natural healing process to help. If five or six particular people were contained from engaging in the more unrelenting and/or petty stuff (and those are people on more than one side) that could probably make a big difference -- though historically, once one idiot stops, another one pops up to fill the gap, so that might not help that much. Heck, if we just had a single solid day when there wasn't any experience bonus or artifact-dropping bandit or anything else that drags players off, and we knew for sure we weren't going to have to spend it on the edge of our seats awaiting the next person streaking through the forest throwing boogers, maybe we could have some kind of gathering or ritual or something to remind ourselves what we're about... if there's anyone left to organize and write it who isn't too exhausted.

But to venture another analogy, when a population in an ecology gets almost wiped out, it can recover with amazing resiliency, and it can do this over and over and over, but there is nevertheless a tipping point. You can get complacent talking about how the population has recovered from die-offs and predation and famine and storms over and over, and miss that. But once the population drops below a certain point, it can no longer recover on its own, without help. It loses a certain synergy. The more long-time, dedicated Seren players I see moving to alts for the very good, very justifiable reason that they almost can't remember the last time they had fun for a whole hour straight, the more I think Serenwilde might be near that point.

This is always been something that's shocked me about Glomdoring compared to Celest and Serenwilde: Glomdoring is very generous with their favours. When I still had a Blacktalon alt, I got a GF from Nyir (then GC of the Blacktalons) for demonstrating knowledge of Crow's teachings in a semi-debate with a Nekotai at the Ravenwood. I can almost guarantee you that a similar thing would never get a favor in Celest. You're guaranteed a favor for raid defense or village influencing, but you have to hope that someone notices you for everything else - and even if you do get noticed, you have to hope that the person checking determines whether or not you're worthy of the CF/GF.

Power, scholars/bards, empowering angels, teaching, etc.: All of these have been favored in the past, but it's not a sure thing and sometimes that's really demoralizing.

I can partially attest to this, since my name keeps getting bandied about in this thread (even though it hurts so much ). I've already said before that part of the reason why I switched was because I liked helping build an org up. This was true when I was in Serenwilde, it's true in Glomdoring, and it'll probably be true wherever I go next (Honeyguard). With that comes the tacit understanding that the time and effort required to do this will sometimes have to involve doing things which I feel makes the game a bit unfun for me. But still, in the end, I can rationalize it because while the effects may not be immediate, I know that it almost always pays off in the end. It is a wonderful challenge, but it sure will try your patience a lot.

Couple that with me just getting bored with Lusternia as a whole, it further justified my reasons for moving and trying something new and exciting out. That's why, as much as I make jokes about Seren VA's alting out to Gaudi, I can understand why they'd move: to have fun. Though personally, I've always felt that if they wanted to move, they should have taken their main over. Fun > RP.

Tl, dr: I kind of agree with that part, it's rough, but it's not all that bad. You just need a certain mentality.

----------------------------------------------

Edit: Wait I actually forgot to talk about Serenwilde, that last paragraph was more or less all about me

Re: Serenwilde, conflict - I can agree that meaningful conflict is a hard balance to attain, but let's face it, when Glom raided villages to achieve good feelings for conquest, Serenwilde complained anyway. I highlight doubt giving 'meaning' to acts which may or may not cost people xp and time will suddenly make them feel better. The fact of the matter is, no one likes losing, and losing and makes you feel bad.

With that said, I think it is a bit overly dramatic that Serenwilde is Doomed ™, it is not and will probably never be. It is certainly in a slump, and has been for months, but I am confident that the people in it know this and are still trying to fight the good fight. Glomdoring started off like this, so it's not entirely implausible to think that Serenwilde can do it too.

Ahhh... I think your brand of making an org better is a little different than the brand Lendren is talking about. It might not be, but what Lendren is talking about and what you did for Glom (and Seren) are different things to me.