All this, Celest has programs and such in place to encourage people to get involved. We prepare ourselves and do our best in conveying information to the city about what's going on. It's not perfect, but it works well enough.

While selling PvP books at Comicon seems like a profitable idea, with the comic in mind, they're still winning regardless of who they tell about it.

Maybe winning on different fronts compared to others, dunno; we all play different parts of the game.

There's an argument that Mag/Seren/Halli (how do you merge that together?) 'won the game' since they won Ascension though. See you next year, suckers.

I like Magnawildefax.

'No way, they obviously just used OP skills that we couldn't compete with, it's not fair and the odds are always stacked against us, delete Magnawildifax' /iasdren

teehee

(The blog post under the comic has nothing to do with the comic itself.)

What was up with that meteor event? Was it a precursor to another upcoming storyline, or did we just get trolled into thinking Jadice would come back?

It's always silly reading through Lack of Rants Tweets.

Probably this. We were left with a very "to be continued" feeling.

I'm not complaining. It was a good event. I just don't know what happened after it ended.

Nothing... yet!

Daraius has to reincarnate into a furrikin now.

I think that we should be able to destroy that sphere to release the ice devils again. But this time, they'd be aggro. >.>

-jingle coinpurse-


Also, at the honourable mentions. I'm not much without the support, really.

Naming characters is harder than writing dialogue. I'm tempted to name this fat trill Madame Friedchickenwing and be done with it, but it would kind kill the atmosphere of the play.

Does not compute.

Sylandra was worried about that too. This play has a loboshigaru bard, though, so we're already suspending disbelief.

Point of order:

I've seen many of those.

Hrm, I'll comment, hopefully without falling back to hard on the usual boogeymen.

-----not entirely necessary context and leadup-----

I started playing in 2007, which makes me middle-old, as players go. Not ancient, but I've stuck around. I started in Serenwilde. Seren wasn't particulary scary at first. I don't remember what the alliances really were at the time, but I remember plodding in to both Celest and Mag and not being rushed out as a novice.

I meandered about, meanwhile Seren came into ascendance, wound up teaming with Celest for an extended period, and went back and forth for quite a while with Thoros's mob. Eventually they got bored with mag and, after a hiccup in the alliance when Raziella got captured by Muud and branded by the Thornroot (or is it Thorn'queda?) movement, decided that the best remedy was to blame Glom and beat the freaking tar out of it.

Then Shuyin got bored and went to glom. Except he took almost all the combatants with him when he left. I remember we did ok at first defending, but then more people saw the way the wind was blowing and left or disappeared. There was a weird period where Seren and Glom worked together, but there were too many Glomdoring people who wanted to beat the tar out of the org that hurt them (despite the fact that the real culprits were at that point, mostly in Glom!).

This was about my low point for wanting anything to do with combat. There's a difference between a tough defensive fight, and dying to a group in a few seconds while incurably aeoned. The former I could learn from, the latter is just... meh. So I settled for laying a crap-ton of traps so that the daily "lets run through seren and chop everything" idiocy at least got bogged down a little bit when I was awake.

Then Gaudi came out. I moved there, in part because it looked cool, in part because logging in to Seren was becoming a chore, and in part because there were no trees for coat-tail riding idiots er... fair-weather-low-activity-time-heros er... "combatants of opportunity" to chop. Eventually, I headed up Templars, decided I wanted to be a mage, left for pyros, got rage-y about the utter crap that was fostered off as a pyro/aero special report, went nearly inactive for about two months, then decided to give Celest a go. All of a sudden, I like being active again, and I'm more involved in fighting than I have been in three and a half years.

Which is weird for me. So I asked myself why?

-------end context-lead-up-thing-----------


A big part of it is in org morale. Celest doesn't have that precision organization as much as other orgs, but it IS blessed with a large number of people who seem to really love the org itself, and are willing to go that extra mile for it, even if they aren't particularly capable. This resonated with me for the obvious reason. There are also a lot of resources to draw on to inform yourself on what you could be doing RIGHT NOW, and how you could be doing it.

Comparatively, during Seren's darker days, it usually felt like nobody wanted to do work. I ran around trying to get trees carved and replaced, or do what I could for defense, but at the time, there was a lot of apathy. It didn't help that there were little donkey-butts thinking it made the coraegous to chop down half grown trees during off hours, or that many of the people who weren't apathetic were actively engaged in suicidal provocations that they often weren't awake for the fallout of.

As for Gaudi, it never felt like it got its legs under it to begin with the whole time I was there. We had a good bit pieced together for a while, and it started to look promising, but then there got to be so much utter bull-crap flung around that it was depressing to have to shovel through it all. Throw some really shoddy envoy treatment in there, and it just stopped being fun.

So the moral of the story-

-Morale is everything. If people love winning, but don't love the org, you're utterly screwed when things eventually hit the fan. I notice orgs that hold together better have some sort of unifying concept that they've made work for them. Do it for the (Wyrd|Light|Collective|Sometimes Engine). Serenwilde has a sort of vague bit about nature that Glom can even hijack at times. Seren as a whole lacks definition. I never felt like there was something basic to get behind, so instead, we had people spitting and arguing, and generally falling over eachother. And then driving combatants away. Same deal with Gaudi. Gaudi at least COULD work with freedom. It's not as vague as Serenwilde.

-Random observation! If someone wants rank before they do hard work, they aren't going to do the hard work that comes with being a good holder of said rank.

-Something winners can do to help the morale of the game as a whole- don't be snotty and pretentious about winning. Even if it is in character. It very quickly becomes obnoxious to the point that the game isn't fun. Think about it, why log in if some part of your play time will be taken up by someone telling you that the org you joined is getting its butt kicked, in some arrogant way or another? Even worse if the person in question is entirely tertiary to the process? Its one thing to be excessively bitter, I'm guilty of that, and its not a particularly endearing quality. But its just as bad to be a pompous turd about winning, if not worse.

-Another random observation- If someone is loud and dramatic and distruptive, for the love of your org, don't let them near power. Heck, DON'T EVEN LET THEM NEAR INDUCTION PRIVS. Because they'll just invite in their loud and dramatic friends, and your org morale will shortly thereafter go into a corkscrew of death. I think Glom actually has an advantage of being small. They won't have undermining nitwits running about like a bull in a china shop. I know Celest had that problem at one time, but honestly, it seems to have all been purged out of there, and the org is great. I'm enjoying myself more than I have in RL years, I'm working on guild and order stuff, and generally having a rather good time.

Ok, rambling over.

The factions in Serenwilde was one of the reasons I stopped playing there. I find neutrality boring; I played a Cyrenian char for years in Achaea. They are too vague and it's hard to rally a group when there are so many differing opinions. SW should just be anti-taint!

This makes me happy.