I had this long-winded reply all written up to everyone's comments so far. But then I realized that no one would take me seriously. I think the current climate and environment is irreversible, and any changes will come about in 2 - 3 rl years. Props to all the people digging in for the long haul.

Though they do clump pretty easily, and I don't think you can kill them fast enough unless the RNG smiles upon you. I think I've heard enough people cursing mummers over the years to have a feel for that.

Shrines are powerful, but it's unfortunate that no one was willing to listen to Glom/Celest when they were being continually used against them in this fashion for months and months, far back enough to date to Thoros' play time, and they are only awful terri-bad things that must go once they're being used against your side. Oh well, that's the story of Lusternia conflict for forever.

Hope you're being sarcastic. Else this is exactly why they shouldn't address such complaints with penalizing orgs that do well.

I think it's incredibly sad that the state of the game has come down to 'if you can't handle something, cry and complain on the forums until it gets changed.' This really has become an all to common occurrence. The general motiff seems to be 'I won't\\can't figure out how to deal with certain situations or skills, they are obviously overpowered and should be stopped' IE squall, shrines, domoths, villages, choke, fearaura, badluck, old school pyros, chainyank, balestone, SL faelings, warrior damage/wounds, and lots of other numerous crap. You can sit here and pretend that you're in the right but for some reason it's never your own incompetence, it's always OP skills.

I can tell you the reason we shrine up, there's 2 of them really 1) if we don't, there's a good chance you will and 2)we're going to get zerg rushed by Magnawildifax and we need something to balance it. Yeah sometimes the rush ends up being 4 people and we probably don't need the shrine, but sometimes the rush is 2-3 times our number. For instance, the last domoth fluxing, we helped Celest grab death and fought off a pretty even rush, well, for Life, Celest couldn't help us on the ground and we expected the same rush which would put us outnumbered, so we shrined up again. Turns out a lot of people went to bed.

3v2 is not good enough to get Seren to do anything like preparations or even org-wide unity. Instead must complain on forums. Seriously? Sort out your own org and reach a reasonable performance stage before complaining about anything else.

This is the part I find frustrating. One- shrines can and have been used by any org. Two- they are mostly used to stave off the surging number of enemies Celest has to deal with of of late. I totally get that Iasmos feels it's okay to overwhelm one org with three others (with how the current system works) and then complain that they use a shrine to even it out. Three- shrines don't win it. Celest has beat out Mag while rooted with a shrine. As has Glom.

In the end, I see a lot of complaints from long-time players that don't give 100% like some others and want everything made easier. Glom is Glom. They're small and terribly efficient at what they do. Celest is larger and tends to hit rock-bottom often enough but what I love about them is their ability to rally forth and kick rear. Nydekion, Inagin, Catarin, myself and others- we put in a -lot- of effort to get Celest motivated and it... works. (shock) It sucks that people don't see that and instead push for some mechanical change to crush that effort.

To be fair, I get the feeling that their position alliance wise makes sitting back preferable to getting their hands dirty, making org-wide unity less attainable than it otherwise would be (but unity has always been Serenwilde's achille's heel - they have a history of enjoying arguing over everything, and did best when they could set it all aside during immediate moments of conflict).

Some of us have other things to do with our free time, in and out of the game. We don't spend hours, days, weeks plotting the demise of our enemies. (Shock!)

I have a lot of fun in some of the massive group fights, balanced or not. I have less fun fighting the same people every few hours. I have no fun fighting a shrine.

In summary, you complain far too often about something you don't have time to do. Sounds like you're just too busy for Lusty. At least: stop whining about how unfair everything is when you don't even have the precious time to invest. Some do. Even with school, children, jobs and so on. And please note the sarcascm.

It doesn't take as much time to do what we do. It's just the quality of the time that comes into play. I'm glad I play with quality players.

It takes 5mins to whistle a few ships to a bubble ahead of time, during which you could probably sanctify a shrine, shrines aren't that hard to deal with, again, just because you have no fun doesn't mean we should nerf it to hell. I actually enjoy fighting in shrines, especially when we win.

Okay, so clearly the summary is, if you're ahead, it's because it's really easy for anyone who's as marvelous as you are, and all the big pile of factors piled up favoring it are mere coincidence. As always, everyone says the opposite of what they said when they were on the other end. Big surprise. And no one seems to have the slightest interest in how this applies to game design, or the overall health of Lusternia, or anything but their own particular goals, and to hell with everyone else.

Now that we've settled that, let's get back to random tweets about nothing, not rants.

I am marvelous, thank you. The credit mostly goes to the druids and aquas in the game. Go Viynain and Nydekion! Where would Lusternia be without melders...?

It's not so much whining as it may sound when read in this text form. Honestly, I've resigned myself to having to deal with this, mechanically and otherwise, not expecting any "solutions" from the administration.

Do cancel the hijack though. Bubble stuff can go in a new thread.

That one will just get locked, Shiri!

Man, this is exactly what I'm talking about. I'm nothing special, it doesn't take rocket science to figure out how to prepare for an aetherflare, or for a village, or for a domoth. You all can do it, you just choose -not- to with flimsy excuses complaining about the odds stacked against you. I never once complained about a curbstomping serenwilde gave glom when we were down, not once, it could get frustrating yeah, but we started figuring out how to deal with it and started winning little victories. Grow up man, seriously

I think Aetherflares operate just fine. I think the only thing we've discussed is slightly speeding up the rate of revolts - they're assigned a random time and a random date, within a given range. I note nothing prevents one org from owning every village, though there are some difficulties associated with keeping it that way. If you can't scramble a sufficient, manned aetherfleet for flares, you'll lose. I note that Celest has poured more money and credits into an aetherfleet than any other org - with three of the best ships in the game, fully diamonut'd. I watch them, a couple times a day, run aetherflare drills, where someone cries out on their fleet clan a random bubble - and everyone scrambles to load up in aetherships and get to the bubble. Glomdoring is, surprisingly, the smallest organization in the game - but the people they have are all great combatants. Throw Ilosia into a pool with the Hammer, Shield and Dagger, and I don't think there are better aetherships anywhere in the game.

I don't think the system needs to be made so that they cannot control multiple bubbles because other organizations can't be bothered to get their crap together. Unfortunately I was asleep when this last one was up, but I've watched every other aetherflare - consistently Celest is the first organization in the aether, with Serenwilde and Hallifax trailing somewhere 5-10 minutes after. Generally, Hallifax is up before Serenwilde. Magnagora's participation at all is a wild card.

With three bubbles up like this, and looking at the time-stamps, I'm really curious as to what happened, how many ships each org scrambled, what have you. Cankermore certainly must've been interesting. Alas.

Seeing the posts that have gone in since I started writing this post, yes, enough is enough. If you have constructive critiques of the system, please feel free to make a thread with suggestions on how you think the system can be improved! Elsewise, goosfraba.

*clicks like*

Was there ground fighting? Else it doesn't matter much if I missed it, since I would have just been sitting around on a ship, or focusing, and that's kinda boring.

I didn't get an honorable mention.