Vadi:

I disagree with the 'mix up alliances' argument. All it says to me is that people on the, well, clearly losing side want to see the winning side squabble with themselves, or get on the winning side without changing orgs. Thanks but no thanks.

You know, I usually don't agree with Vadi on the forums. But when I do, I drink Dos Equis.

Wait, I messed that up. Anyway, I agree.

Ultimately, it isn't the orgs that are clumped together, it is the players. Players like playing with people they've become close to over the last, well, soon half a decade for myself. More for some. You stir the pot, you stir the players. You piss off players with entrenched RP who feel they either have to sacrifice playing along side people they want to, or sacrifice their RP.

Remember the raging forum hate during the Hai'Gloh (sp I think) business? Raziella in Muud? The Thornroot movement? They were neat from an objective standpoint, yet they made a lot of people unhappy.

Furthermore, within the last week I can think of several instances of intrigue and politics within the alliances, and those are just ones that I'm privy to.

Lusternia has a tough niche, but you can survive in a niche. The learning curve is insane, the effort required even apart from that to advance is harsh. The lore is a grey area- you don't just grab a pointy stick and go fight the evil goblin hordes every friday when the admin launch an invasion.

Honestly, I think the problem we're having is one of misplaced marketing. We occupy a niche the way high end jewelers occupy their own building or boutique. However, the most recent marketing strategies feel like we're pretending we're the jewelry/electronics counter at a big box store.

You can't live on the same clients forever. You need to slowly work in new blood. This is true of any business. The problem is, we're selling saffron and tuscan wine and advertising it like a clown pushing fried chicken bits. When people want fried chicken bits, and look at our price tag, they balk and walk away (price tag in this case being time/effort investment as much as anything else).

We need to identify our niche, and own said niche.

I was thinking a good thing for Lusternia's retention rate might be the availability of a free updated system again, mostly to start people off. There's lots of people who want to get into combat and while making credits to buy a system isn't too hard, I understand that some people may want to just jump into things to test the waters.

I know a lot of people who are just busy with life now too, and there's a good few who have gotten bored of the game too and moved on to new ones. A lot of the same happens day to day and there comes a point where you want something fresh and exciting. There's also, I suppose, people who feel bitter about the status quo and became apathetic. Who knows what to do to kindle their interest again, though.

I don't think changing alliances is necessary, but it would be nice to see some 'new-blood' like Akui said. Just to keep things fresh.

I'm not a big fan of forcing a change of alliances. Every time the admin have done that it has backfired on them and on us, and I don't think trying to force it to happen would work. But I do want to say that, for the record, the idea of changing alliances is not about "getting to be a winner without working for it" (as Vadi so dismissively suggests), or any of the other reasons people have suggested. It's solely about making it so that the fights have a possible new outcome, and therefore, matter. People who watch the Super Bowl do so because either team could win. If the Super Bowl was between a team that had won the last 20 consecutive Super Bowls and a team who had never won, no one would care, and no one would watch. If you want people to care, and to watch, more than you want simply to win for the sake of being able to think you're hotter than sliced bread, you'd be happy to see the teams shuffled around enough that there was a question about the outcome. (But forcing shifting alliances won't do that, which is why I don't think it's a solution. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be good for it to happen if there was a way to make it happen, I just don't see that there is one.)

Turnus:


As much as I like conflict quests and wouldn't mind more of a return for them. As a Seren, I really selfishly don't want to have to deal with Hart dying constantly because he wasn't empowered once. If there's an issue with org momentum (remember, one of those things on the special report?) adding huge repercussions to conflict quests is not going to help.

I don't mind quests with an ebb and flow between the sides, like sea battles. But I really don't want to see -huge- repercussions. Keep it small or RP ones.

Yeah, I'm going to agree. I feel like we have too much stuff to stress over as is - no resurgence of this, please.

I think Xikue sort of hit the nail on the head. Her point also ties in nicely with Rainydays's post.

The people who are frothing at the mouth about top-tier combatants vs. cannon fodder wannabes are talking about the stuff that Shuyin rightfully pushed aside-- this is a thread about how dismally low our population is, not a thread about keeping the people who are IRE junkies perfectly content and adequately pampered in the world of Lusternia. They (we) are too jaded to really see the bigger picture now, anyway, unless we actually try to see past our nitpicky angsts.

When I started paying IRE games, it was 2004, I was in high school, and I was a huge fan of Aetolia. I fell into a pretty clique-y crowd of Occultists, got chummy with some other players, and eventually found myself totally engulfed by the different storylines and plot twists players threw at each other, with help from the enigmatic God roles. When I moved to Lusternia, it wasn't because Aetolia became boring or outmoded. It was because Lusternia had one of the most promising and detailed histories, which I believed could launch me head first into a new wave of lush MUD entertainment.

Now I'm a college graduate working on a master's degree. Time sure flies. I'm still here.

I'm conspicuously leaving out combat. It wasn't until 2010 that I really ever bothered to become a member of raid parties. It's also true that Lusternia has a pro-national support expectation of all its players, but that doesn't mean the singularly biggest draw to everyone entering Lusternia revolves around how to rapidly gain levels/artifacts/items/power/e-peen. New players - the ones we desperately need - don't even know this stuff exists, and fortunately for them, Lusternia is FULL of things to keep people wildly entertained for hours and hours without really burning them out. I also don't believe that after a few weeks through portal, they all suddenly QQ in frustration at being ill-equipped to participate in 1vs1 with Shuyin/Viynain/Ixion/Munsia (if this does happen, we probably shouldn't lament the loss of people who are so easily flustered by this sort of challenge--those aforementioned players are old and have worked for their reps, and if Joe Newbie wants to take them on, it'll take some effort).

The problem, in my mind, is a snowballing of the stuff Xikue pointed out. There are no more real ambassadorial players who are constantly looking out for newbies. Why? This was always the case when I first joined Lusternia. It was still the case when I became an undersecretary, and then a guild administrator. In fact, I remember THESE VERY FORUMS raving about how well Lusternia treated newbies. Then something shifted. What was it? Too many conflicts? Too much upkeep? I know that in Glomdoring, the motto "if you want something done, give it to the busiest person you know" is true; Glomdoring doesn't stay on top because choke is OP, guys. it takes massive planning and teamwork to execute a perfect village conquest, we're all constantly encouraging each other to stay up on culture stuff, we have people (well, one brilliant person) who are fueling up/building/piloting aetherfleets to make sure aetherflares go off without a hitch, and so on. When it's time to fight, we can get scrappy just as well as Magnawildefax can, but for the sake of this thread, get over your weird obsession with choke. It's the game's oldest scapegoat, and it existed when Glomdoring was on the bottom. Your argument, in the face of what it takes to keep Glomdoring "on top", is bunk. But I digress. Back to the motto I mentioned, which is the real problem: the busy players are fading, and the "new generation" never really had to step it up.

I've had discussions with the people who are among the "busiest", and it's a startling number of people who have all fallen into a job-like routine when they log on. The people I'm referring to help prepare the orgbix quests, they traipse around the mountains in search of scholars/bards, they keep alive the aetherfleet, they monitor and track totems, they keep their ministries up to snuff, they plan events and contests, they make sure shrines are current, they write things for culture scores ad nauseum, and so on. They are - we are - getting tired, but we're addicted to our routines. Nevertheless, the older players are burning out and the newer players are having to fill these roles.

The thing that's missing from this transference of power, though, is Lusternia's once-renowned, unspoken Law of Novice Retention. From what I've seen, it's still the older players who are on the look out for true newbies (when they can get around to it), and like I noted in a few places above, hanging out with newbies is, sadly, slipping further down on our collective lists of priorities.

Even the newer generation of players, which is starting to obtain the keyholder positions (guild positions, Order positions, and so on) is feeling the heat from spreading itself too thin. These are the busiest people, and if that motto is true, one of my theories about our low retention is that the playerbase is just tired. After performing the duties to stay "on top", who wants to pause their routine in order to answer the helpless cries of newbie after newbie, who all have NO idea what it means to "grab more corpses for x quest" or "go on a run for x" or "you said lol in public, five points from Gryffindor", especially when stopping could be the difference between keeping x or losing it to a group of people who are going to immediately screech LOLOLOLOLYOUSUCK for a few days? Ouch, my e-pride stings just thinking about it! Meanwhile, those newbies fend for themselves, walk around aimlessly, bash a little, and then log off. They do not pass go, they do not collect $200.

Without a player as a guide, they don't get to see how incredibly lush and fantastic Lusternia is because they don't know where to look. How could they? The collegiums were a great idea, initially, because they sort of shoe-horned people into the lore that centered around their nation. It's kind of like taking driving lessons or doing college class shopping. If you like what you see, you might dig deeper, and if you don't, well, move onto the next org.

But what will keep them around after?

We're back to the beginning, and this still has nothing to do with artifacts/lesson gain/bloody warfare. Rainydays, I think, has the right of it when she talks about marketing strategies, but Lusternia is also running out of people who bother to coax the niche-oriented players into sticking around. To a new player, the game called Lusternia is completely saturated with complicated lore, enough twists and turns to give Tim Burton nightmares, and several days worth of reading straight history texts to get to a comfortable base level of understanding. A very niche group of people used to flock to Lusternia, however, and they stuck around because the game delivered what they wanted, and the people who already played were happy to bring them aboard this complicated bus.

Are the routines - and the duties that create these routines - too much? If you aren't fighting, you're either furthering your own evil schemes, chatting with friends on an OOC clan, or scavenging for more ways to make your org look better when you log on tomorrow. Is there just no incentive to focus on training new players?



I also sort of think it's worth noting that my insistence that we have a very specific kind of playerbase does not mean that I think we should cater to potential non-com players exclusively. True newbies can very well develop a bloodlust. I also don't think that players can't be pro-combat and pro-RP at the same time (look at Talan, who is equal parts combat-oriented and super-politician/roleplayer). I am suggesting that you cannot possibly think that people who hop out of the portal are going to immediately cry foul when they can't accessibly afford gems of cloaking, Runes of Absorption, gripping runes, pig noses, and 7 trans skills after hanging out for a few days, before they're having fun. If they're true newbies - the people we actually need - they're going to be too busy figuring out how to move around, learning who to talk to, and determining what a 'nexus of power' is before they go gunning for combat guru status.

As a random aside, I had a blast for years in Lusternia before I even knew what a RoA was. I have one now, along with all of the other artifacts and trans skills (and even a system!) you all mentioned, but they haven't transformed me into Shuyin or Munsia.

A ) Nobody has discussed choke in a serious manner in this thread.
B ) You are absolutly wrong if you think people don't get frustrated and quit because org stagnation, or that losing for several years straight doesn't engender bad feelings. I personally don't have fun either losing or winning all the time; org movement keeps the game interesting.
C ) I work with new players all the time, and I know how most people respond when they ask me what it takes to enter combat (and remember, I'm the one with the conservative estimate). I know more than a few players have quit due to cost of entry. I do agree that more players working with true novices would help wit retention, but other things must be examined as well. This is not a purely player-based problem.
D ) Your anecdote is inappropriate to many novices who, having experienced PvP in other MMOs, and lured to Lusty with the promise of wonderful skill based PvP, are disillusioned by both the cost of entry, and for at least two people I have worked with, the banality of group combat. These two enjoyed sparring in the arena with me as I worked with them, and they even bought credits and got all of the basics I layed out for them. Then, when introduced to group combat, they found it highly frustrating and uninteresting. When I told them that most "real combat" revolves around these mechanics, one eventually stopped logging on, and the other became a non-com. Certainly, some things could be addressed.
E ) You seem to point to unpleasable players a lot when you point out problems. It's pretty easy to be content when your org has been on top for several real life years.

I think I'll list a few reasons why I believe people are leaving... at least from my point of view/experience. And no, I'm not using spellcheck and there are probably going to be grammatical errors. To those who nag about it: deal with it. I'm not interested in your corrections at the moment. It's 3am.

1. The game is too heavy in PvP. It requires a significant investment to learn all the affliction lines, what skills to counter with, what cures to use, and how to create a curing system that will compliment Lusternia's combat system (timers, queues, coding languages, scriptings, etc etc etc). Without it, your character will die... over, and over, and over, and over. Which brings me to my next issue.

2. One prime location in the game (Astral) is a free PK zone and upper level hunting ground... not to mention that sparkleberry is located there, and sitting there slowly harvesting as an enemy to X org is NOT the safest thing ever. Other locations are in zones where enemyship can be gained... thus making them unsafe... and thus a combat system is required to survive. Hunting = xp = easier bashing/more loot = expensive credits = etc etc etc.

3. Org requirements. By that I mean the requirment that you must be in an org in order to draw power and use important skills. This game is very very unfriendly towards rogues. Show rogues some lovin' too!

4. Manse shops. While I love the idea of being able to have a personal shop in a personal manse... I can't help but feel that there's no point when there are many more selling the exact same things. The in-game market is ridiculous. There's little chance for starters (without a huge investment), and the competition is lacking. Let's not even mention the firm holds some people have managed to establish on certain trades...

5. The very heavy credit requirements. Sure, they're never officially stated (and some will say never intended), but to achieve much other than bardics and RP you're going to need credits. Combat? Better get those runes and vials. Trade skills? Better get those artifacts too (and a manse shop). A manse? Yep, credits, credits, credits.

6. Can't afford credits for real $? Go farming! No, wait, 20 other people are farming the same hunting ground... Maybe you can catch it during off hours if some Demigod doesn't run through and clear the place out just as the area is respawning. More areas, please.

7. Respawning rates. Seriously... who doesn't have something, anything timed? I know I had a few quests timed, and I think at one point I had a hunting spot timed too. Make them random, please. Perhaps make the hand-in quests a daily or every 4hr thing?

8. And this one probably doesn't apply much to new people, but I know it left me a little bit put out because I missed it and will never catch up. That event a year or so ago where credits and expensive artifacts were given out like... well, idk, but it was absolutely absurd. People made small fortunes with that. Unlucky me, I happened to be taking a break from the game. Now, why bother coming back other than to check announcements for something hopefully beneficial to me.

9. This weather system. Now this... I'm definitely not going to seriously play until that gets tossed. Really, the food requirement was inconvenient enough, but now I have to buy clothes?! I don't even log in long enough to hunt. I guess I'll have to buy credits to sell for in-game currency to afford clothing so that I can go visit some new area without hinderance.

10. Orders and Divine are far too involved with the public. I once thought it was 'awesome' that Elcyrion popped in to talk to Zacc long, long ago. The idea that a Divine interacted with a character was something I thought of as a really neat perk. Then time goes by... orgs and Divine are swapped... Divine disappear, new ones appear... Then it's do this and do that. thinks this, so the city must do that. Etc. Needless to say, that was very not-so-'awesome'. Divine patrons need to be tossed, and Divine RP and stories slightly changed so that anyone and everyone can follow whichever they please. You're in Serenwilde? Sure, follow Viravain, Nocht, or Raezon and dislike Charune and Lisaera.

11. Certain 'conflict' quests need to be removed. That broadcasting one comes to mind. Here I am trying to collect mob's for coins, and sure enough, I can't. Poor newbies...

12. My final grief with the game, and the thing that really wore me down... The entire story/theme/whatever of this game is, you guessed it, conflict. Divine vs Soulless. Taint vs Everything. Commune vs City. Commune vs Commune. Order vs Order. Guild vs Guild (envoys, anyone???).

13. Oh, oh! One last thing that I never quite understood as it only resulted in grief... grief... and more grief. Envoys. Seriously? With such a conflict oriented game, it's quite obvious that Org A is going to try and either buff their skills to counter Org B's or nerf Org B's skills to begin with. And, of course, once that's done, Org B is going to do the exact same thing. Add a bunch of griefing and org swapping, with a pinch (more like a handful) of forum whining/trolling, and a dash of , and you've got the perfect recipe for "Hey, let's play another game!"

Now I can't blame everything on the game. A lot has to do with the way players play it. This ranges from facist org laws, to constant griefing/PK, to characters taking their zealous beliefs to the next level to the point it seems almost personal. I find Lusternia's gameplay and environment to be very... stressful and exhausting.

ps- Please bring back lack of rants threads and allow for complaints. Notice how after that stopped things sort of went down hill? The censored, g-rated forum is utterly boring and oppressive. I'm not promoting or asking for the allowance of obsene or insulting language, but for the ability to voice complaints and discontent with the game within reason. Come to think of it... this post will probably be viewed negatively after the forum patrol sees it and either locks the thread or removes the post... Oh well, at least someone read it! Thanks for listening!

I agree with the 'OOC anger and hatred' remark Shuyin raised. This is a game, folks. That I (and I hope you!) play for fun. Do stuff for fun, not because you feel 'you have to' or 'you're expected to'. Sure, there's times for that (jumping headfirst into the cannon-fodder line during a revolt or defense, for instance), but if players aren't creating fun-- if the roleplayers, Divine, and Combatants aren't having fun, or folks aren't helping them have fun, then everything falls apart.

Take, as an example, Galaphyrae or Brylle. 'Paragons' of their respective Seren RP flavours. I thoroughly enjoy every time Brylle comes around and berates the circle about selling to Magnagorans, or sets the only thing they can buy to bowls of gruel soup. But it feels like I'm the only one who appreciates it these days. There's a focus on 'winning' (made clear by Vadi's 'Joining the winning team' reamark, regardless of its accuracy), when the focus should be on fun. Winning is fun, sure, but if the fun isn't carefully cultivated, folks won't stick around.

(This is why lack of active divine has a correlation with organazational weakness, in my mind-- Divine play a huge role for the RP-centered folks, who find the game less fun when they're not around.)

How this 'fun first' concept plays out with combat: If one team always wins the fights, the other team slowly stops playing, and then the first team has less fun because the fights are even less balanced. This leads to things like Shuyin/Viynain/etc jumping ship from Seren to Glom. Why did they leave? Because there was less (no) fun on the winning side anymore. And for a while, when the fights were even (and one Avatar raid would be met with a counter-raid, and both would partially succeed), and everybody had fun. Then, slowly, one side got better while the other side got weaker, and we're back where we started.

An example of how powerful a factor 'Fun' is, in conflict. Things like Aetherflares are 'no fun' in Seren, in part, because nobody knows how to do them. If we get lucky, and the few of us who enjoy aethercombat (who have fun in aetherfights, win or lose) are awake at the same time, then maybe we'll win a fun, contested bubble someday. But we're a limited population, thus far, from Seren. We have fun when we do aethership spars, when we study maps of how to get to bubbles, when we develop and test strategies. So we look forward to bubbles, because they're an opportunity for fun. But for those who don't enjoy aethercombat, there's no incentive to practice or learn. For many Serens, it's a chore that they do 'because they have to'. it's not fun, so it's not a priority. This means that I can count on one hand the number of Serens who actively work towards aetherbubble readiness. Which leads to combat inequality (perma-distort in raiding territories), which leads to less fun.

Fun is a major part of why poetry contests usually fail-- if you don't already have poets (people who find poetry fun), you're not going to get any poems by running a contest. If you don't already have playwrights, you're not going to suddenly get a whole host of plays. Sure, people try things (and encouraging this is key!), but there's not magically a host of poets or playwrights or aetherfighters that suddenly appear when you need them. They appear slowly, as they find something fun. Seren has the most plays because we had the 'best' playwright, which really means we had the person who had the longest-lasting fun writing, directing, watching, and/or performing plays.

With regards to leadership, it's more fun (I think) when alliances are on the move. Will my digital little-old-lady get her head smashed in by an Ur'Guard out for revenge? Sure. Will my digital organization get smashed to pieces? Possibly. But will (the OOC players) have a fun time as we change who (the Characters) are, stand up for what (the characters) 'believe', and develop a greater sense of identity? Probably. The biggest resistance to the shifting of alliances always seems to be fear. Fear of what? Fear of getting beaten? If you're losing already, there's not much more to lose, is there? Fear of losing the respect of the OOC population? Fear of having your character exiled from their organization? Jozan (Jozen? I get them confused) pulled some ridiculous shenanegans, got 'punished' (his digital chatacter got punished-- it's an important distinction), and in the end, pretty much everybody (OOC) had fun. Separate the In-Character from the Out-of-Character, and suddenly it's okay to make mistakes, okay to break alliances, okay to enact sometimes-risky changes or suggestions. It's a game, people! If you really feel that much stress, walk away! It's okay! This should be a source of enjoyment, not a source of constant stress!

Treant was one of the best things that happened to Lusternia, because it made more elements (exploring, combat) fun for more people. Shuyin moving around had this same effect, increasing the fun for players who previously had been having less fun. Things like OOC hatred, stagnation of roleplay (due to lack of Divine/Others to RP with), one-sided fights, these decrease the level of fun.

So, to me, that's been the biggest change: More people playing to 'win', and less people playing 'for fun'. There's probably a demographic shift, as well (I'm this close to leaving for OOC reasons already mentioned by other folks)

tl;dr: Play for fun, not for winning.

Zacc:

stuff

Most of your suggestions are at odds with the basic principals of the game, or would ruin the buisness side of what is ultimately a for profit game. The largest barrier to entry into ANYTHING in Lusty is the lack of level up lessons. Either level up lessons need to be increase dramatically, else lessons need to be made for sale with gold.

More than anything, Lusternia is an org based game; this is a basic principal. Rogues aren't really supported because we don't want people to be rogues.

Finally, yes Lusternia is a conflict based game. I can hardly think of a game that is NOT conflict based. I can hardly think of a story that isn't either.

I think that your problems may be with the central concept, rather than implementation. Either that, or you're being overly negative.

I am tired, but two of the complaints you made were sufficiently egregious that I feel the need to comment on them. Or maybe I feel this need because I am tired. Who knows?

Zacc:

3. Org requirements. By that I mean the requirment that you must be in an org in order to draw power and use important skills. This game is very very unfriendly towards rogues. Show rogues some lovin' too!

The game is designed around organisations and nexuses and the mechanics and player interaction that stem from them. There is absolutely no reason to expect rogues to be treated as first-class citizens in a game specifically built so as to discourage being a rogue. If you choose to play as a rogue, you do so knowing that you're going to face several disadvantages. This isn't a fault of the game, and there are myriad reasons to disincentivise roguehood which I'm not going to bother elucidating upon right now because it's 2am and I am tired. Additionally, the particular gripe here (needing to be a member of a nexus organisation to use certain abilities) is incredibly necessary in addressing both major combat balance and roleplay issues, and changing this would be a severe detriment to the game's atmosphere and playability, and would require a fundamental shift in the game's direction and just about everything else.

12. My final grief with the game, and the thing that really wore me down... The entire story/theme/whatever of this game is, you guessed it, conflict. Divine vs Soulless. Taint vs Everything. Commune vs City. Commune vs Commune. Order vs Order. Guild vs Guild (envoys, anyone???).

Conflict is the lifeblood of interesting, engaging, and sustainable storytelling. Of course a massively-multiplayer game made for roleplaying (i.e. storytelling) is going to feature conflict in rather large amounts; the only alternative is a single player game, and even then you're not necessarily going to get rid of conflict in its entirety (only conflict directly with other people).

Why is the game PvP heavy? Revolts, doing power quests, the whole giant aspect of culture, a good deal of family honour - is not PvP-based at all... I disagree with you.

Revolts aren't PvP-based? What?

(peaced revolts)

(peaced revolts are incredibly boring)


There!

I love peaced revolts. :( I think debating is so much more fun than combat.

Its not so much the peaced part that's boring as the fact that they never end. My attention span doesn't last long enough to go through 3+ hours of peaced revolt!

Edit: and this is totally off topic.

The death of the Lusternia playerbase has been greatly exaggerated!

As someone who looks at the numbers every month, the playerbase has not been "tanking" and there hasn't been a constant drop off since X event (lack of rants? really?). The figure I look at is total online minutes, not average players online--that's what Mudstats records which isn't the most accurate indicator of activity. It has always been a constant ebb and flow, sometimes the numbers are up and sometimes they're down (we're currently on an upswing).

Indeed, parts of 2010 were very good numbers-wise (yes, we had some of our best months that year), I think a lot of that was two new player orgs and, even so, in many months that year, the activity level wasn't that different (or even lower) than some months in 2011. Since we opened, it is like clockwork that the myth pops up every so often that Lusternia is somehow "in trouble" because of the admin, the avenger system, karma, affinity, the conflict system, top orgs, complexity, need for credits, group combat, etc. While I think we can always improve and I always try to look for ways to improve (contrary to popular opinion!), I really don't believe any of the above issues is responsible for the playerbase shrinking because I don't think it really has shrunk in the big picture (taking into account the constant fluxuations).

That said, I definitely would like to see the playerbase grow. I do think we've been static and want to make us more accessible to new players. No, we can't do anything like selling lessons for gold (want to see me get fired fast?), but I do like some of the ideas on autosipping and other automating features (we were the first to do first aid!).

Maybe I am feeling particularly sore about these two points of yours, but I would like to address them, from an administrator's standpoint.

Zacc:

6. Can't afford credits for real $? Go farming! No, wait, 20 other people are farming the same hunting ground... Maybe you can catch it during off hours if some Demigod doesn't run through and clear the place out just as the area is respawning. More areas, please.

Lusternia has tons of areas for many different levels. Lately, we have been releasing quite a few higher-level ones to meet the demand for - surprise! - higher-level areas. It's simply a matter of not looking around. Some area are more well-known than others - something I distinctly remember from my player days. I have never been to Shallamurine Cathedral and couldn't tell you how to get there as a player. But plenty of others can, and do, and do bash there!

And we are constantly building new areas. I am rather perplexed, especially after releasing a 1000+ room area (Icewynd) and a 60+ room area (Waste Storage Facility) right after it, that you think we are lacking in that respect.

Zacc:

10. Orders and Divine are far too involved with the public. I once thought it was 'awesome' that Elcyrion popped in to talk to Zacc long, long ago. The idea that a Divine interacted with a character was something I thought of as a really neat perk. Then time goes by... orgs and Divine are swapped... Divine disappear, new ones appear... Then it's do this and do that. thinks this, so the city must do that. Etc. Needless to say, that was very not-so-'awesome'. Divine patrons need to be tossed, and Divine RP and stories slightly changed so that anyone and everyone can follow whichever they please. You're in Serenwilde? Sure, follow Viravain, Nocht, or Raezon and dislike Charune and Lisaera.

I'm surprised that you say this, because the prevailing complaint among the playerbase at this time is that the divine aren't involved enough. The divine conflict is a huge part of Lusternia's history that translates seamlessly into the game conflict now. It makes little sense for a Serenwilder to follow Viravain or Nocht, whose ideologies are opposite that of Serenwilde's (and of Serenwilde's pantheon). I, for one, would love to butt heads with Charune one day.

I almost feel like what you want to play is a different game, story-wise, than the one we offer.

No, I'm pretty sure the majority of complaints about Orders (affinity aside) is that they are -too involved- with combat. Instead of being a cool religious thing that's separate from the day to day fighting that pretty much everything else in the game is about anyway, many people see them as nothing more than another weapon to be used.

I was alluding specifically to complaints about divine not being around for general interaction/RP/helping out/feeling good.