I'd rather read a list of top 7 **** Lusternia events.

Stroking the Megalith.


Wait...

So lets put together a list, and submit it to the IRE website for something Lusternia related for once!

All 7 of them would be hai'gloh.

I'd like to think Hai'gloh would at least be 1 or 2 of them, yes. But I was hoping for more!

Mutton: you used to get free mutton in the introductory sequence. Some brain decided that a never-ending renewable resource like that was ripe for abuse, and made a bunch of alts to nab all that tasty sheep-flesh and sell it in their shop. I'm fairly sure they were shrubbed for alt abuse.

Annabelle: Annabelle was an annoying, obnoxious Aquamancer who tainted Celest with her presence. She (if it was indeed a girl) grubbed around for credits and made passes at virtually every male character available. She also had about fifty different goddamn alts hovering about the place. I don't know the specifics, but I do know that Arix and Kaileigh in particular were baying for her blood.

Nikua: Nikua was the first Marshall of Serenwilde back in the day. He was notable for being a pretty unbalanced kinda guy, and committed a few minor acts of abuse (like arranging to buy something from Guido on the alabaster road, then tackling him into the totems and killing him, necessitating a change in the way enemy territory boundaries operated). He really jumped off the deep end when he knew he was going to be ousted, though, so he kicked out three GMs and ran off to Magnagora. Particularly funny was the fact he tried to defend his actions on the forums. "Well, OBVIOUSLY the commune leader can kick out all the GMs! He has jurisdiction! It wasn't an oversight, I don't deserve to be shrubbed!"

Valek: Valek was pretty much the biggest combatant at opening. (Though take that with a grain of salt; nobody had curatives, and most of the good fighters from other IRE games gravitated to Magnagora during closed beta, so we tended to steamroll everybody else with our combo platter.) He was pretty egotistical and went OOC a lot, but it was tolerated because he could tank ten Serens at once and sometimes pulled off sixteen hour sessions to help out. Naturally, the combo of ego and obsession eventually backfired in a big way, and he went berserk over something and killed Daevos (the Emperor at the time), and was summarily kicked out. (A lot of more RP-conscious Magnagoran fighters took the opportunity to put the boot in, and killed the orgless Valek a few times.)

The Megalith Seal: the first Soulless event involved Kethuru sneaking out from behind one of the seals (courtesy of Raezon) to possess Viravain. (Which is why she's so nutso nowadays compared to the sweet Viravain in the histories.) The Vira/Kethu hybrid took the shattered seal (I think it was the Nature one?) and hid each piece in an Astral node. Cue one of the most tedious but awesome hunting sessions in the games history (keeping in mind this was pre-insanity, so we could stay up on Astral as long as we wanted): staying up for there for hours at a time, all organizational issues put aside, draining the nodes as fast as possible and killing hordes of Astral beasties, since only an empty node would yield the Seal fragment within. Eventually the fragments were united and the Seal completed; Daevos promptly plonked it in the Megalith, under the mistaken assumption that it was a necessary part of the process. It... was not. Fortunately, one of the Divine recovered the Seal so no damage was done, but it's fondly regarded as a moment of legendary silliness.

Barry breakdown: Guido was one of the dudes in the Disciples of Crow back in the day. They were the pre-Glom clan trying desperately to get it revived. Nothing came of the first effort (though some superb RP abounded) and Serenwilde (rightfully) hounded the poor buggers to non-existence (with some borderline mechanical abuse on Nikua's behalf; see above). Anyway, eventually Guido got fed up of his character, suicided, and created a new one called 'Barry': a more light-hearted character concept, he was a furrikin aether correspondent who briefly kept us up to date with events. Lingering resentment for the character of Guido coupled with justifiable RP reason for wanting a reporter dead (he's disseminating our information! GET HIM!) led to Barry being castigated, too. Frustrated, Barry proceeded to shout the entirety of that old "END OF ZE WORLD" flash animation in-game and then committed suicide as well.

Did I miss any?

EDIT: Oh yeah and I guess Yrael garnered a bit of a bad reputation. Obviously I'm biased (he was one of my homeboys, along with Guido and Torak), but it wasn't really justified: he was as creative as Narsrim in stretching (but not abusing!) the mechanics of the game (in order to better steal things, naturally), but it was all for the kick of the thing. He almost always gave back the majority of the items taken if the person asked, and on the occasions he didn't it was because he felt the person in question deserved it. And he was a pretty solid roleplayer.

Good post, every man Jack of you.



I'll throw in a few details from memory. Consider the following to be all purely speculation. Annabelle reportedly was actually a guy who at some point may have developed an axe to grind against the game as a whole. The weird thing about him is that he rigidly followed the exact same modus operandi for every alt. He'd make a female character, try to sex up every male character online, marry a city/guild higher up within days, try to become a culture aide or equivalent then immediately shoot for Steward, Ambassador or Treasurer. Like clockwork. He had a particular fascination with the Estebar quest I think, and I know Narsrim was decently successful at sniffing him out on more than one occasion because of this. I wonder if he was OCD.

I recall once Anabelle's recent alt showed up with a bunch of credits and started randomly giving them to everyone online. These credits were removed by the Admin within a day or two. Rumor had it that he acquired the credits through credit card fraud, but who knows?

For some reason I want to say some of his activities were tracked to New Zealand.

On Yrael: I met late in the game (ie he jacked/attempted to jack me) but I got to say from my brief encounters he wasn't a bad guy. He was witty, a solid rper and returned what he stole unless you were a jackass. Unlike another individual mentioned previously. Personally I think Yrael is one of those dudes with the soul of a hacker. He doesn't see theft or breaking and entering as taking something from someone, but more of a system to be tinkered with, its parameters defined, then broken and exploited. He was more a Captain Crunch than a Bonnie and Clyde. Totally a Taffer though.

While an IC event rather than OOC idiocy - I seem to recall in the early days of beta or just after beta a Celest that was getting beat down pretty bad by Mag pretty badly having the bright idea that by feeding Gorgulu dead fae, they would weaken him. Needless to say, that didn't go over to well for them - I seem to remember some hilarious shouts from Lisaera saying "You're idiots" before causing huge tidal waves in Celest or something like that.

Damn straight. You could throw words of the order of "rogue" and "rascal" at Yrael - but "villain" would never stick.


Certainly an IC event, and one that defined the early roleplay of Celest, in my opinion: while most of the (Shallam-reject) citizenry rejected Erion's actions as repugnant, a good portion of the zealots rallied behind him. It was refreshing to see some grey morality, to see the quote-unquote "good guys" unabashedly saying "yes, we would kill innocents to take down a monster". It's just a shame they kicked Erion out of Celest. His roleplay got campy and self-parodic afterwards, and he turned into Snidely Whiplash.

8D I'm imagining a caterpillar-to-butterfly type metamorphosis, of someone going into a cocoon and emerging as, literally, Snidely Whiplash. It is amazing.

I have a soft spot for stereotypical villains.

I'd have to disagree with your takeaway from the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies. The studies didn't show that a huge chunk of the human population are stupid, gullible or cruel. In fact, they were trying to show that despite the fact that these participants were normal people like you and me, the power of the situation can be terribly hard to resist.

You've got the right of it. When I studied Social Psychology (back before I realized I would go absolutely crazy if I had to take even one more psych class), the one concept that we went over more than anything else was that the situation is more important than the individual. No matter what a person's individual beliefs or morals are like, the situation can and will influence them. Some more than others, but there really is no escaping it assuming you have a normally functioning brain, whether you realize it or not (and it's usually "not"). Mob mentality can be taken as an example of that, as can falling too deeply into a given role like in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Good note, but it's more like a salt lick rather than a grain of salt. He was very good back then but I have little doubt he'd be steamrolled by many even if he stayed and kept up with combat nowadays. I was there when he and Daevos sparred and it was certainly entertaining nonetheless. He still has the original Ur'Guard combat clan that he stole with his departure long before deeds were introduced.

Edit: his motto ist just annoying. Quoting Riddick (evan as Vin Diesel's best role).. blah.

Annabelle made an alt in Achaea named Ialie Starfall and told people she was the Ialie Starfall from Lusternia and would ask people who knew my character from Lusternia if she could borrow credits. Random alts would then sign in Lusternia and demand that I owed them credits.

http://forums.lusternia.com/index.php?showtopic=7938

I was so pissed I made one of those online petitions.

I vaguely remember this, now that it was mentioned.

Also, thanks Jack.

Thanks for the stories, everyone While there is a focus on the "negative" here, I do think events like this are important for a game, as they shape the dynamic. Mutton-gate really made me laugh too, damn!

There was also that one time a bunch of Magnagorans and their Seren alts discovered how to use negative clan fees to make billions of £s, and then some of them tried to lie about it as if you weren't going to just check chat logs or something... Though I think they just copied that from Aetolians or something the previous week...maybe it was the same people.

EDIT: And to clarify on that one Megalith seal event, it went something like...

"After hours and hours of mindless grinding, including by some of the Divine, we finally got the seal!"
"It looks like it's still out of power though."
"Hmmm..."
"Maybe we should put it in the Megalith! It's a Nexus of power, after all, we can just infuse the Seal with its energies."
"NO WAI-"
*crunch*
"..."

EDIT: Also I forgot what trying to argue with Daganev was like, wow, that brings back some trauma.

I think that was copied from Achaea.

Some of those religious debates...

I think the treasurer or steward or whatever that stole a ton of stuff from Celest was Shoki, but I could be mistaken.

Which was really depressing, because pre-shrub he was my friend and I never saw it comming