God, if anything ever deserved a nerf-machete it was old badluck.

This thread wins the award for most derailed thread this week.


Congratulations.

I'd like to thank the Academy, Jesus, Buddha, that guy who plays music on the corner, the short old lady at the bakery, George Lucas, and a lot of other folks.

Ok I am a third of the way through this, I stopped reading... dear Nil people. The first 6 pages are half flaming and half *point people*.

First off how do we define griefing? This has been left open to interpretation in several levels. Using invasion in neutral territory to kill without status isn't a bug, but seems like griefing. I could do this to grey moors, nothing stops me. Is attacking people enemied to the city every time they leave prime griefing or RP?

If you want to fix things do not look at only the players look at the source. When is the last time you saw a druid grief someone on Earth? The issue is not always about who is doing it but what is allowing them to do it. This does come back to the Envoy issues part though I think.

The first issue is to resolve envoys and empower them with the ability to fix real problems, but often they do, which hits the "admin barrier". Why does it have a name? I am not going to make this some kind of flaming or ranting. But essentially anything you envoy hits a wall which ends up in the following:

- Most requests of actual change are rejected. Most common.
- Admin interpret the slot differently than intended and create a solution that does little to nothing for the issue.
- Least likely, the report is accepted as is and the best solution for the matter is selected.

Other issues faced in envoys:
- A report is forgotten, that choke report from November is listed as "forgotten" as is the oothai report.
- Bugs have to be envoyed, when is it an obvious bug? When things do not work at all or are missing part of what they should do. If we buckled down on bugs and slightly opened the gate on examining what is a bug we could fix several issues. ( I am wont go into lists on those).

If you want to "reduce griefing" look where "grief" is happening assuming the definition is of the line: "killing non coms in their territory with no goal as of the moment". We assume essence stealing kills are griefing unless its like... smob is down or something of that immediate nature. Adjust mechanics like shrine invasion to assist in fixing this.

I would say create penalties for people killing others in their own org territory who are not enemied to you. I can kill Nydekion on water just fine, but Jhen should cause it. Due to random enemy status (did you know attacking certain people in fulcrux enemies you to a god, nightspirit, a guild, and a commune all at once?) this becomes unusuable as you can enemy whoever you want for no real real reason at all. Might is not a good measure because if someone 10% of my might raids Nil I should be able to kill them. The issue of determining grief is going to be the main issue, if you can define that I can work on a solution otherwise its taking shots in the dark (hey we are making an envoy report I guess).

P.S. My humour is bad sometimes but none of the above with said with malice.

1. Epic Quests are epic and mighty hard to do (comparatively). This includes being foiled by enemies. It makes success so much sweeter.

2. The "Diplomacy" thing Xenthos was talking about regarding Hallifax didn't mean "seek to be unenemied". It means having your leaders talk to Glomdoring's leaders and working on a non-aggression pact or something. It is possible to be relatively at peace with two separate and opposing parties.

3. The PK deathsights have spiked lately because people are at home, etc., and have more time to spend on Lusternia.

4. It's not completely one-sided. Glomdoring is not the paragon nor the spearhead of this perceived issue.

********************************************************************
Bully Status Days Left
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lothringen Suspect 28
Lilian Suspect 28
Ethelon Suspect 30
Fillin Suspect 30
Ixion Suspect 25
Akyaevin Suspect 25
Raeri Suspect 28
Donovain Suspect 28
*******************************************************************************

2 cents!

Griefing isn't a huge issue in this game. The last thing we need are more admin 'fixes' to keep all of us in check. What fun is that? Fix what we have. The one suggestion I have is that karma curses remain for the entire duration. Or be very difficult to remove. As if it's hard to get karma in this game, ha. I often feel bad telling little ones that they shouldn't karma curse their bullies as it's easy to remove and makes them a target again.

...

*rereads thread*

That's some bully list, Alacardael.

I think they've been trying to make me lose Demigod. But then again, I've lost Demigod three (I think? Can't remember!) times now, and it's not a big deal anymore.

I just find some of the names on that list to be... interesting, given this thread and certain comments made. Most of them are unsurprising, but there are a few stand-outs.

I kind of feel like if you are trying to make someone lose Demigod, you don't have a leg to stand on when you complain about griefing.

The tether idea is growing on me, but I'm not sure I like its current form. I am under the impression that people do not use vitae (correct me if I'm wrong). What if vitae was reworked, based on the 'tether' idea?

- If you die to a player whilst under the effect of vitae, you will conglutinate at your nexus with minimal xp loss.
- It costs 10 power to sip.
- It will have no effect on you if you performed an aggressive action on a player in the last 3 rl days.
- Performing an aggressive action on a player strips vitae.
- It can only be used once every 15 hours.

Vitae is the elixir of life, the most powerful potion in existence. It will protect you against death itself. It will, however, have no effect on those who wish death on other adventurers.

people use vitae, leave it alone.

I'm just going to say that for anyone who isn't completely blinded by bias or just playing innocents, Alacardael's bully-list is meaningless. The people who attacked you on that list did so because of who you are, and what you CONSTANTLY do. You know this, despite the pretenses. You've consistently attacked novices and non-coms on faethorn and have even entered etherwilde, killed one, and ran out. You dreamwove killed a system-less novice and killed him again after we killed you for it, and you're the most common perpetrator when it comes to epic quest harrassment.

So this post here:



Makes me feel pretty annoyed, personally. Xenthos, this kind of defense is what enables him to keep doing what he's doing. Please tell me you are aware of the things that Alacardael does and has done.

Also FYI: These aren't people trying to make Alacardael lose demigod. These are people attacking Alacardael because he walks into faethorn/etherwilde, kills people, then when we come to get him, calls his friends and champions and runs away to prime. I can't say I blame anyone for feeling the need to risk the bully-status to get back at him. (Especially when his own people don't police him and never have.)

He is, always, the initiator of the conflicts he brings.


But of course, whatever. We're the bad sportsmen here, and you guys aren't that bad. Look at Lilian and Donovain. Those griefers! How dare they kill poor, innocent Alacardael.


PPS: I'm not very fond of lies, as you can tell. If you have legitimate complaints like Vadi has, then show them. But you know better than to use that "list" as proof of anything.

I think xenthos was just implying that no one should be able to arbitrarily decide who is and isn't a griefer. Neither should you, really, heh.

The ones there that say 28 days? That's the group of us that got him seconds after he stepped out of the Prime exit as he finished raiding Maylea's Godrealmbubblething. Shouldn't just assume we jumped him when he was being all peaceful and innocent! (That point 4 is very misleading!)

I'm not a moderator, and I'm not Estarra, but the last page was just filled with ban bait. I don't know if you guys are just tired of reading forums or whatever. Also, I missed a Maylea realm raid? God dangit. /sadface.

Alright - I'm leaving the rest, simply because it's too interspersed with genuine commentary, aside from a comment or too which was just venom.

I didn't have to switch pages, so consider this a warning (particularly you two, Ethelon and Vadi). Don't flame-bait one another - next time I'm going to give bannings.

(Please don't make me give bannings.)

(Please.)

EVE Online being the other game that eats up my time, I'm used to some very harsh situations. A group of 20+ people making sure you cannot go anywhere for several days in a row? Yep, experienced it. Jumping "innocents"? Yep, done that. There's even a similarity between EVE highsec space (CONCORD police) and our prime plane (Avenger), which while not totally the same still offer a lot of similarity.

Having looked at the Lusternia policies I feel they are terribly vague and open to interpretation. Nothing explicitly prohibits griefing, but there is the bit about innocents. I assume that covers that when someone has grace that may not be worked around by things like forced drowning? To be honest, I can live with that. Maybe it is the whole being used to a harsher environment. In EVE you can lose weeks of effort if you're not being careful, or just unlucky, heh. You lose material possessions, which translate to real money loss, because of the ability to legally purchase ingame currency. In Lusternia you lose some experience, and that's it. Yeah, it may be painfully slow, but you can make that back on Prime, or even just through influencing guards at your nexus.

I'm probably still out of the range of what is interesting to "grief" for the opposing orgs (maybe not anymore after writing this, lol), but I have been jumped when on enemy territory. At first I was pretty careless, and learned it the hard way, but I should really thank those that did jump me because that gave me the motivation to get sorted with countermeasures and actively pursue combat training.

"But Calixa, I don't want to be involved in combat, I don't like it, it does not interest me". Good on you, really, but since this game revolves around conflict, that ain't an excuse to not know how to defend and escape, imo. A group is only as strong as its weakest link. So make sure if you are that, then at least you are not a bring pink link with golden sparkles on it. Again that is something I learned in EVE. Always prepare for the worst, and have a healthy dose of paranoia. And play smart. Someone jumping you over and over? Learn their login habits. Have an alias to window / scry them and use other tracking abilities. Work together with people, as it is a multiplayer game! It may sound silly, but if I'd get hit badly I'd pay gold or credits to a bunch of people to either diss out revenge for me, or protect me.

As for a policy change, in the end I believe it is the admins right to change it how they feel it is best. But as outlined above, I am of the opinion that players can police themselves, and do a fair share to ensure their own safety should the policy stay as it is, for example.

How a person perceives those things has a lot to do with past experience, that's true. Before Lusternia, I played a mud where you lost a whole level on a mob death, 1% of your total xp (not the xp for the current level) on a player death and dropped all of your inventory, so your enemies (or friends, if you're lucky) could mostly just pick it up (banking illegal). Such environments, if you can (and want to) cope with them, will harden you against anything Lusternia can fling at you. But I can also understand that some players find such a way of playing too irritating (and time-consuming). In the end, it amounts to what the owner of the game wants to offer and what the players want their experience to be. It should not be dictated by people who just tell others to 'harden up and learn to fight', nor by those who just whine and don't want to take any effort to accomodate at all.

Long before Lusty, my home mud was one where the exp loss per death was ten times as less than what I experience here, but... the whole entire realm was open pk. It was fun and it encouraged a lot of people to take up arms to participate in the free-for-all frenzy because everybody had nothing to lose but an hour's worth of mob-farmin' exp.

I support the idea of lowering the loss of essence on enemy territory and finding a happy medium between making raiding hard and not too hard. Implement anti-pk rules and safety nets all you want, but when you implement combat mechanics into an mmo, you're going to get conflict, and there will be griefin' due to the competitive nature of a game such as this one. It's all in the combat.

If there's an imbalance of players getting killed far too quickly, then maybe you want to check on what is enabling individuals to do it so easily and quickly without risks. *pokes envoys* Listen to the envoys and help balance out combat if you think there is an imbalance of players bein' killed and feeling grieved due to being jumped or whatever.