Eyes very rarely last more than a day or two, can only be used by a Crow in their nest (which... I don't ever want to do? I have better things to do than sit idle). I sometimes use Spy, but only for my amusement in overhearing conversations at the Nexus. Melds are far more useful for keeping an eye on who is where, and every org has this ability. I feel this edit was misinformation. It's not such a leverage.

EDIT: Meep, before I'm accused of spreading misinformation -- you can keep watch outside your nest, for an incredible tax on your available carrion, such that no one does it (that I'm aware of).


It's not extremely rare. Today I used up two powerstones just carving elders. And we don't all have powerplex jewels. Artifacts are great, but they shouldn't be used as the standard that your everyday player is expected to live up to (in this case, at least). The equilib loss on carving that many trees makes it enough of a chore that I would happily swap statues for totems if you gave me the option.

This said, when someone enters Glomdoring with the intent to chop elders and other trees, as some have in recent weeks, and they don't happen to walk into one of our (very few) bonded totems (which is very easy!), we have a very difficult time preventing them from doing the damage they want to do. They don't have the chance to be hit by a totem whenever they move rooms (as one would if they moved about in an enemy city properly covered with statues). Cities have an excellent mechanism in deterring intruders.

BUT -- going back to an original comment -- it would be nice if the GC/Security/Protectors of melding guilds had a function to check what totems/statues were bonded where and what their status was so people could manage situations that Morbo described. So in favour of this.

Totem upkeep isnt hard, I used to do it by myself before you could use powerstones. Is it extremely boring? Yes. Is it taxing in any way shape or form? No.

It takes 30 minutes to replace a statue that is wrongly enchanted, wrongly runed, wrongly tuned or whatever other reasons that may make it neccessary to replace it. (15 to destroy. 15 to enchant). The OP asks for a way to ensure that wrongly tuned or unruned statues without the original enchanter around no longer require them to be destroyed.

This is an entirely reasonable request blown way out of proportion by people who have no idea what they're talking about.

I'd agree with it, but that would question how it would work? What statues should the champ be allowed to control in this way? What justification (beyond the "it'd be a neat removal of some pointless grind") would there be for the champ to do with a snap of his finger what it takes an almost trans spellcrafter a quarter of a day to do? Could he just designate a tuned bond without an enchanter blowing almost half a powerstone enchanting it? There's also the risk of the champion utterly destroying all of the city statues should he leave in a hissy fit. Those kinds of questions need to be answered first.

The proposal in the OP is that champions would be able to change who is boned to a previously enchanted statue. So, they'd do GUILD STATUEBOND and then that person could affix runes and tune the statue. Possibly, the person would have to have the statues skill in enchantment, but it's not really specified either way.

A later suggestion was to just let champions use the Affix and Tune commands on all statues in org territory, regardless of bond status.


At no point has anyone suggested that statues be made to generate power, or that totems be easier to upkeep. This thread is not about that, and I would like to strongly encourage the people that want to debate that topic to GTFO and make their own thread.

No, the suggestion is that statues should be made easier to upkeep when they are already far easier to do than totems.

There is some disapproval of this notion.

PS: Yes, people have suggested that statues produce passive power. In this thread, even.

Also: Frustrating, tedious, chore-like; I believe those are the terms I use to describe totem maintenance! Hard has never really been the case. Boring, tedious, repeated, and lengthy chore-like duties do not fun game-time make.

Presumeably this would make it so any champion in a city could reassign statue bonds for statues that stood within that city. Not that the champion could enchant unenchanted statues easily, nor (I imagine) would he be able to change the runes etc. I don't really see how the champion could destroy all the statues easily, since he would still need to actually spend the time destroying the statue, and in the meantime other champions could redesignate the bonds as necessary.

There are ways this could be extended to totems.

It doesn't seem to me to be entirely unreasonable that city security should have some control over statues as part of city defences. Particularly in the smaller cities, where the brunt of the weight is carried by a handful of people, and when one of those people leaves there's suddenly a lot of problematic statues that need to get destroyed, resculpted, and then reenchanted.


Passive power arguing people shoo. Go make your own thread. Leave this one for the people trying to discuss ways to make defense maintenance easier, which can be for both cities and communes.

The only feasible way to extend this to totems in any meaningful way would be to let people bond to more than one totem (which is unlikely to happen), and / or not making bonds decay every 12 RL days (also unlikely to happen). In the current case, if you leave your forestal organization you're going to lose your one totem in a maximum of 12 days as you cannot renew it without bonded power. If you maliciously attune your totem and leave it tends to get itself destroyed by divine mandate (and the person punished).

I'm actually kind of curious why that doesn't happen for city-folk as far as that goes, tuning statues / totems against novices inside their own orgs is pretty frowned on.

Beyond that; I see no reason not to bring up totem vs. statue maintenance in any discussion involving making statue upkeep easier, when they have so much going for them already. There needs to be something frustrating about statues simply for the sake of letting everyone be miserable! Because having to deal with such things is so much fun.

Wait, Serenwilde gets 1k extra power per day?

QUICK, THEY HAVE MORE PASSIVE POWER GAIN, OMG, I'M SO PISSED, THIS IS SUCH A BIG DEAL, SOMEONE CALL ESTARRA AND GIVE US MORE PASSIVE POWER! OMG, IN THE YEARS OF TIME SINCE GLOMDORING WAS CREATED, SERENWIILDE HAS GOTTEN A COUPLE MORE MILLION POWER THAN GLOMDORING!! I DON'T WANT TO NERF THEM, I JUST WANT MORE PASSIVE POWER! IT'S PASSIVE, NOT ACTIVE, YOU SEE?!

Sarcastic caps aside, it looks like from the general consensus of city people in this thread agrees that totem upkeep is pretty much a walk in the park (literally, haha, get it?) so I really don't get what the big deal is about spending 30 rl minutes to upkeep a statue in the once-every-1-month or so that it requires upkeeping, especially when compared to the 5 rl days to re-plant a totem. It certainly is a reasonable request to make upkeep easier, I mean, dmplist, itemlist, etc etc are all stuff to make life better, but I don't get the people who are claiming that totem upkeep is easy AND asking for easier statue upkeep in the same breath.

Statues are easier than totems to upkeep. Statues provide no passive power. Which is better, it's opinion based. Is there a need for change in the status quo? I doubt it. Should statues be made easier/more convienient to upkeep? Not really, especially if forests can do something harder with enemies trying to screw them actively.

This isn't a problem for the bigger cities. It is a problem for small pea Hallifax (and Gaudiguch, too, I'm assuming.)

Putting aside the fact that changing a mechanic to favour small-sized cities/communes is flawed (when they grow big, then what? Do we revert the change? How big is big enough? What if a lull in activity happens again?) I don't think size has much to do with upkeep. I'll stop comparing with Glomdoring, but how many people does it take to update a project about who bonded with which statue? Less than it takes to screw in a light bulb is my guess, really. Bonded statues don't unbond by themselves either, so all it really takes is one big effort to get a list... then keeping an eye out for when people quit the city to update it.

Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe I have a misconception about how statues work. Maybe I'm making a mistake somewhere, and statue upkeep is a great deal more tedious and difficult than totem upkeep. Maybe the size of the city does matter, and maybe Hallifax and Gaudiguch really are incapable of keeping an updated list and then putting in the 30 mins for statue maintainence, and maybe this change really needs to be put in. I really don't know for sure, but that doesn't sound right to me, is my opinion when I read through this thread.

I'm in favour of keeping it, regardless how little or big the org gets. I don't see the what the issue is with letting statues crumble upon departure (aside from it being a pain to code.) If it's "not fair because totems upkeep sucks", then people can make a thread about making totems easier if they're really that annoying.

Totem upkeep is really, really annoying. People hate it. It's not actually bad, but because people hate doing it, they're inclined to make it sound worse than it is.

Having played since Lusternia's release, with only a break for that last couple of years, it has always seemed to me that communes were always intended to be nigh-impenetrable fortresses. Originally Fury instakilled everyone in your demesne, including yourself. That was changed, of course. The lore of the vernal wars tells us that Kiakoda was practically invincible whilst in the forests, but much weaker outside of them, which also makes me think that forest are meant to be super-defensive.

Just to be pedantic, Serenwilde gets 2844 power a day from totems, unless we've added more forest rooms since my tenure as power minister. I've got the spreadsheet and all.

Upkeeping city statues is easy (it takes an artist 1 balance and some marble per room)

Replacing mistuned (whether maliciously or not) statues, and statues enchanted by people that have gone inactive/left the org (and therefore are not updating their statues to changing org alliances) is hard. It takes 30 minutes per room (15 from an artist to destroy the old statue and 15 from a trusted enchanter to enchant it). For Gaudiguch at least, we have maybe two people that are active and able to enchant statues. Neither of them wants to spend upwards of 16 real life hours enchanting the statues in Gaudiguch if it can be avoided, even if it isn't all at once. Imagine the hassle involved in trying to coordinate getting gateweaving done, except with half the population and you have to make one in every outdoor room. That's basically what it's like to redo statues.

The people from Celest and Magnagora that are dragging the thread offtopic with their inane requests for power from statues don't actually have to put up with this, since they have enough artists and enchanters that they can distribute the workload to the point where it's no big deal. But for Gaudiguch, and I assume Hallifax, this is a real issue.

It was Xenthos that first compared statues to totems after Morbo's initial idea. Then another city player made mention about the power from totems in an attempt to dismiss Xenthos' statement and it carried on from there. Things derail, it happens. It's been a sore point for a long time. So instead of whining about a derail, focus on the idea. With that said, you're wrong. Celest has maybe 3 regular enchanters on hand. Gaudiguch has about 15-18 people logged in at times. That's about the same for Celest. The main benefit for Celest is experience: older players. The idea would benefit all cities, I imagine- not just the fledgling ones.

wtb older players.

A simple way to have something like a statue/totemlist implemented is for some rogue Hallifaxian/Gaudiguchian to attune the statues that they're in charge of against their city's populace then jump ship to a rival org. Granted, might be a good way to get shrubbed, but abusing mechanics is sometimes what it sadly takes to get a fix.

My lawyer would like me to add that I am not advocating that this be done, that I am merely discussing it in a hypothetical scenario that may or may not ever come to fruition.

It's already happened in Serenwilde. Think it ended up even harming some newbs. Was lots of drama on the forums.

Nope! It just ends up with said totem getting nuked, in practice at least. It's happened before, in Glomdoring too. May have been a shrub involved, though.