Personally, I think Lehki had the right idea. The reason Faethorn is a place where so much fighting happens is because all roads lead to Faethorn.

If you're in a city and you want to get to an enemy cosmic/elemental plane without a cubix, you need to use Faethorn.

If you want to get to an allied plane yourself, you need to use faethorn.

If you're in a forest and want to go get essence from an elemental plane, you need to use faethorn.

The best way to reduce fighting in Faethorn would be to reduce the need to go through Faethorn like with some other extra-planar area that could be fought in between the elemental planes or cosmic planes. (Maybe even with a quest to take over it for a while with some ramifications, that way people actually have a reason to fight over it.)

Am I the only one who thinks that the location griefing occurs at is purely a manner of convenience? Putting all sorts of effort into grief reduction on Faethorn is a bit silly. It'll just go elsewhere.

On the subject of planes as open PK areas, I really enjoy how it's set up. One problem. For cities, both Elemental and Cosmic are incredibly tightly tied to the everyday life and necessities of that org. However, because they're off-prime, they provide easy targets. Additionally, Prime itself is not safe. The Avenger is a brilliant idea, but it has no teeth and far too many loopholes due to enemy territory for hunting. Last on the list is that hunting and influencing are absolute necessities to life in Lusternia. And prime ranks woefully low in quality and quantity when it comes to these two.

It boils down to: People -must- leave prime, and aren't even safe on prime itself.

Suggestion: Remove the loss of Avenger for prime enemy territory outside of villages.
Suggestion2: Grant Avenger protection to anyone not enemied to the org aligned with the plane.
Suggestion3: Give Avenger some teeth. Big scary ones. Make karma curses crippling the more people on the list when they're applied. Make them extremely hard to remove when you have more than just a couple people on the list.

Just wanted to mention that quasi-elemental planes could perhaps provide both a central crossroads for conflict between cities (water and earth make mud, fire and air make. I dunno, electricity...) but would also take the heat.off of faethorn.

I don't think having fully separate planes would be strictly necessary. It'd be cool, but making them all worth doing something on would probably be more trouble than it's worth. A Faethorn-esque area linking all four planes would probably work better, IMO, and it could be designed to have different regions of stuff depending on what planes are nearby to have that same sort of effect.

EDIT: I do like the idea of having some sort of bridge for the elemental planes, even outside the take-some-of-the-head-off-Faethorn thing that seems to be going.

EWWW no no no no no no no no no to avenger protection on elemental/cosmic/ethereal claimed territory. It would utterly devestate raiding another plane to the point of it not being realistic. There is no reason for noncoms to spend large periods of time on these planes.

It would only prevent attacking those not enemied to the plane until they'd performed an aggressive action. If you're raiding, you're there to either kill important denizens, or you're just there to grief. If you're there to kill important denizens, then Avenger protection will mean nothing, as they'll lose it as soon as they attack you. If you're there just to kill people and giggle, then you're not raiding, we have a different term for that, and it starts with the letter 'g'.

Lol, avenger on nonprime. Ridiculous. Almost as much as the belief that elemental faethorn will take heat off ethereal faethorn. Now we'll just have two places to jump people in.

no it doesn't as anyone that comes to defend knows what they are getting in to, by having avenger protection on these planes you give full initiative to defenders. For example if Akyaevin and co were coming to kill supernals and their melder had status on me I could just bypass their entire meld and go directly to the supernal- And that is only one of the disadvantages

I don't think griefing is an issue.

-People jumping for Blood house honor is silly. I can get more in 2 hours hunting than anyone can jumping any and everyone for 12 hours straight. Those in Blood houses who jump people know this, and it's not why they do it.
-People grief others' epic quests. I know of three major contributors to this, and one has been forcefully told to stop/peaced. At the end of the day though, it's just an annoyance and as with anything those who want to finish something bad enough will get it done regardless of anyone else trying to stop them.
-Distort buffs, 2 million+ essence loss on death, etc have created a clear shift from formal raids to jumping random people because those same people enjoy fighting yet the risk is not worth it much of the time. This is a clear cause and effect as I see it.
-At times there's some semblance of mutual respect between 99% of the playerbase not to randomly jump. All it takes to throw that off is a couple people jumping enough to piss off the major fighters of the other side and so the saga of jumping continues. When people can jump with no warning at all (see: gloomtide) it's pretty trivial to kill most people as they hunt.

-How to fix? I think mechanical things like tether aren't needed. The combatants help fund Lusternia considerably and decisions can directly impact said funding (I know a few who cancelled elite memberships instantly because of the pliers/auction genesis)
-The best way to fix these types of things is to tone down maybe a couple outliers who just jump all the time (which has many precedents as I know you know) and allow us to focus our bloodlust in other things such as mini-events, RP, whatever. I'm subject to this as well- the more monotonous that things become, the more I want to randomly start some shite to cause a ruckus for fun.

I don't understand what this "griefing" complaint is about. That could be because I only read the first and last page.

You know, I try to get jumped or make Eventru make me pray, but he always revives me. The best I can do is have Veyrzhul take Reiha hunting, because he manages to get her killed even after the hunt is done and she's just sitting at the pool. I try so hard to get ganked but people are just like "LOL" and they leave me alone. People need to stop whinning; you have a good thing going!

OH and I almost forgot - people apologizing for killing Reiha in a raid. Why are you sorry?! Players these days...

For the past two to three weeks, I've barely been around, and when I have been, it's been afking in a manse or talking to one or two people. For two weeks, I had all but two active aethers off, and just the other day turned them on again. Yesterday, or the day before, I actual did some fighting, but I'd say for the past month or two, my out-of-manse activity has dropped significantly. I don't bash and most of the time, I don't fight. The one time I wanted to bash in about a month's time resulted in an enemy-territory death before I killed anything. I have no gold right now, and my essence is much lower than I want it to be for pk and other things. My motivation to do most anything has been killed.

Why is this? It's a myriad of reasons, some of them quite relevant to the topic while others aren't so much. I'm tired of game's view on balance, and the envoy system is an utter flop. The inequalities on all sides makes combat more frustrating than anything else, especially when uniqueness is argued as justification for a skill's existence or a change in the mechanics. It doesn't have to devolve into cookie-cutter skills for all orgs, however. Aside from this, there are players who love to gank any and anyone, and even if they do focus on the combatants, it can still become aggravating.

Solutions to on-Prime griefing:
- Remove enemy territory death penalties from npc areas. Seeing two to three hours' of work disappearing in seconds is a great way to kill the game. I don't care how easy sitting in a turret is: I find aetherhunting to be extremely boring, and, regardless, it's still time consuming to rebuild from a single death.
- Make it impossible to enter enemy territory while graced.

New mechanic: Focus (name it what you will)
- Inside of enemy territory (excluding npc enemy territories), this feature has no effect.
- Any aggressive action taken against another player locks the aggressor in as the -only- individual able to take offensive action against said player.
- An aggressor can have any number of focused players.
- A player can only have one aggressor focused on him at a time.
- Offensive action against the aggressor of a player does not break the focus of said player. This caveat allows for 1v1 fighting without interference.
- A player who makes an offensive action against another (aside from an aggressor) clears focus towards herself.
- Focus lasts as long as declaration.
- Players can renounce this form of protection for one Lusternian day; this renunciation will still allow group fights to occur.
- Can be enforced by Avenger for IC justification.

I just came up with the above, and I can see some shady areas that might create potential problems, especially with group versus group fighting. However, I definitely encourage people to explore the idea and improve upon it.





Replies to posts:



Being present in a fight, either offensive or defensive, shouldn't make one a combatant. Lowbies often show up as known meatshields or webbers. Being labeled as a combatant should imply competence and a reasonable threat when compared to other top-tier players. It's an opaque distinction, granted, but I would definitely not consider Donovan to be a combatant because I don't think he could kill me even if I idled.



I think it's sad that pointing a finger at org-level politics is now viewed as justification for consistent targeting.




I, as an ex-envoy, would whole-heartedly disagree that the admins obviously listen. They do listen, on occasion. Perhaps we should refine our complaint to "the admins have highly selective ears." That said, I have been pleasantly surprised and quite happy with some of my interactions with the admin on balancing and other non-IC things. I can't say that it's consistent nor that I'm happy over-all, though.

An elemental crossroads (could be a Gnomish pathway or something that they made, bring back the Gnafia to start smuggling elemental stuff or some-such) would be appreciated, especially if it couldn't be distorted-- would keep elemental planes from being super-hard-to-escape fortresses. could even make it 'distorted' with something like Shafts, so you can exit but not all the time, or where you enter is random (a la the Moon/Night bubble Astral mirror-things).

(I just like the idea of Gnafian smuggling rings and secret higher-plane tunnels... seems like a nifty little RP thing, especially if there's gnomes there that are utterly confused as to why there's a bloodbath going on in their tunnels all the time)

Avenger protection means everything for the record. Since suspect doesn't drop from the victim if they attack you in enemy territory. You will basicly be running around trying to kill whatever while blahblah and his horde of blahboo's beat you to death without you being able to attack back.

Let's remember that Avenger is crap broken before we start adding it to cover more things, please.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'crap broken' but if there are bugs, feel free to contact roark@lusternia.com directly.

I feel that when people help with planar quests, it's literally drag and drop. Drag the noob, drop the item. Donezo. Definitely need to start instilling fear into everyone new.



One problem with this is sweet Rage and Terror covens being plane wide on this specific moonphase. You'd be cutting off it's best time and place to use it!



Does that mean you're gonna boot him out?

And mess up my clan numbers? Now that would be true griefing.

Avenger isn't broken per se, it's just limited, as all mechanical measures are. I haven't read pages 12 to 17, because damned if I'm gonna sink another hour into this thread, and thus I don't know whether Estarra shot down the idea of administrative policing, but I'd like to bring it up again, at the risk of sounding like a broken record.

The limitations of Avenger:
-> You cannot take away enemy territory from bashing areas, simply because if you do, you're allowing PK heavy combatants (or griefers) to hunt at the best bashing areas without fear of retaliation (or hefty essence loss) right after a fight or something like that. If you've been actively attacking others, you should expect consequences, and one of those would be added risk when bashing.

-> You cannot add Avenger into off-prime areas partly because Estarra said so™, but partly because it will stifle all off-prime raids. Prime raids never happen nowadays, beyond cutting trees or the occasional newbie-killing in their city. Giving off-prime raiding a smack in the face like that would be plain idiotic, not to mention astral is one of the most lucrative bashing areas as well.

The problem comes when it's non-coms using these areas for bashing (or idling). They don't participate in PK, and they don't get Avenger protection. When they die, they scream bloody murder because, hey, they didn't do no nothing (triple negatives, yay) to get jumped. The rationale of off-prime being dangerous is just that: a rationale. It doesn't lessen the frustration and rage when a non-com gets killed there. Telling them they died because they're in an area that is designated as dangerous doesn't change the fact that they feel it is unfair. If we're trying to improve the game for those who get killed in this manner, then here's where admin policing comes in. These non-coms can say, "Screw this :censor:. I didn't deserve this, someone up there, get your ass in gear and do something about this griefer." And the admin can say, "You're right. You didn't deserve this :censor:. Someone's gonna get hurt real bad." and manually activate Avenger against that someone, so to speak.

Of course, it's going to take a load of resources and time and effort to get such a system in place, and even after, it's gonna cause no end of headaches for the admin, no matter how well written the protocol for handling such cases are. On the other hand, it allows the admin to catch and shore up the Avenger system's limitations. It's a balance between admin time, effort and suffering versus player satisfaction. As a customer, I know which I'd expect, but there are limitations to resources that our team of volunteers have, so it may well be that this dream is not possible. But it's at least something that should be considered alongside any additional mechanical measures (or tweaks to the Avenger system).

This is maybe my favorite paragraph in this thread so far. I mean, the reasons for me leaving Gaudi were various, but one of the factors was frustration over the absolute crap treatment their skillsets got. Then right after I left, badluck got crushed to crap.

Meanwhile, other skillsets retain their awesomeness. Combatants cluster to those, and the spiral of stupid just gets worse, as those combatants defend their skills and keep atrocities like what was done to gaudi from being repaired.

A big part of the frustration was the distinct feeling that the admin just were fine with, essentially, liars tearing apart an org's skills.

So I left. And I made sure to join an org that had firmer foundation in that regard, though that mostly simply ruled out going to Halli, or Seren I felt.

Myth, it's still strong especially for a low skillrank skill.

Which doesn't matter at all when we balance around omnitrans. It went from pretty damn strong to "now has a power cost, procs half as much, and the consequences of the proc are far less".

If nothing else, the power cost should be dropped. Its like the admin took several people's independent suggestions for nerfing it, and just implemented them all.

I mean, what if every suggestion made to nerf choke was "lol, ok, we'll just implement ALL of them at once! Yay all done."

There wasn't any sliding scale, they just took a machete to it and moved on.

And that doesn't even begin on pyromancy.