Yes, but at that point I can at least retreat. I at least have a way out. It's not "oh, RNG hated you there, you're dead".

Nocht:
Again, my question is do you really need all that to just begin fighting? Is it truly impossible for you to participate in any combat without those things?

In any meaningful way, yes.

I mean, technically, you can participate in combat with zero skills and a webbing enchantment, but if that's our base we're in trouble.

Well, if you want a defensive build, put skills toward green/gedulah. If you prefer a more offensive group combat build, and feel like you can spare it, do without it. I would like to note that few fights ever are 1v1.

If you want to run from an opponent of relatively the same strength, you could do so before you were locked.

If the complaint is he has several times as many transcendant skills and is several levels above me--I can't win. I think that's silly.

In a fair one versus one, you could run if you wanted without green/gedulah.

I mean, technically, you can participate in combat with zero skills and a webbing enchantment, but if that's our base we're in trouble.

That's a bit hyperbolic. Strength in numbers--that's the general rule of combat. We've all seen this mantra in effect several times. I've also seen skill and curing win against overwhelming numbers. Strategy has a place, but it only goes so far.

Lothringen, you've been in plenty of fights with me as your ally. Sometimes, we take pick-ups. You've seen the devastating effect of several warriors focus firing one target.

@Nocht: Theoretically, anyone can join in a fight. However, from experience, to be able to appreciate and enjoy a fight (survive long enough, do something substantial, etc.)... yes, you do need those skills. Otherwise, you're fodder.

Enyalida:

Prime cities are safe, but forests aren't, that makes me sadface.

You could build some swanky walls and buildings to increase your forest's safety. Why we'd be quite happy to help you knock down some of those old trees and put them to good use!. :)

I don't really understand what you mean by "survive long enough, do something substantial."

I remember when I was just starting three years ago. I certainly was not omnitrans or arti'd out, but I went on raids. I didn't even have a great curing system. I died a lot, but I showed up and fought. I picked up things as I went along.

Granted, things were a bit more lively in those days. It's not the entrance into combat that most of you are complaining about. It's the attitude towards combat. The bar for "substantial" or "survive long enough" is distortedly high. This is partly a product of the player base dynamic--saturated with arti'd combat veterans.

If for instance, the player base was relatively spread even with a cast of assorted combatants ranging from novice to seasoned, this wouldn't be an issue. Again, the treatment of the "cost of entering combat" is really a blanket statement about many problems all at once.

The way I see it, this broad complaint branches into 3 main groups
1. demographic of our player base (novice/veterans)
2. the credit market / gold inflation
3. penalties associated with death.

As for credit requirements, it's extraordinarily easy to gain credits. Bardics/artisanals are free, as are quizzes by the divine, city/commune contests, Gnomes are handy during the season, and you get randomly lucky from Ironbeard. There is always -something- happening that you can profit from. Blackjack is good if you're lucky, and it's not hard to save gold for credit sales.

If you don't think you can improve your skills without OOC money, you're doing it wrong.

Jozen:


Each time I want to fight offplane for fun must be calculated with the risk of massive essence loss. You are looking at a solid 2-4 hours of nonstop bashing to recover what may take seconds to lose. The opportunity cost is too high.

Personally, part of the problem is here in this calculation. See below:

Cons of raiding:
-Essence loss

Pros of raiding:
-???

What exactly do you gain by camping an enemy's plane again? If they use a discretionary, some minor power, assuming they aren't conquest (they should be conquest.). If it's Celestia/Nil, some power for every demon. If it's Continuum/Vortex/Elemental/Ethereal, they lose nothing. You gain nothing. You aren't going to kill Smobs, so why bother?

If you're risking essence loss to gain.... nothing, is it surprising that people don't make the effort?

(And personally, causing an enemy to lose something is not the same thing as gaining something anyways. They evoke very different types of emotion. If a Serenwilder went and killed the fleshpots, they still gain absolutely nothing.)

EDIT: You CAN raise your skills via in-game rewards, but it can take many years. My character isn't omnitrans yet (near to it), and got most of her skills through winning events. However, that's over playing for 4 RL years. That's an incredibly long time, and it depends on things like participating (and ranking high/winning) in death challenges and the like.


EDIT2: In short, see previous threads about generating meaningful raids and conflict for more info. Pointless PK gets boring fast and leads to this thread's topic.

EDIT: You CAN raise your skills via in-game rewards, but it can take many years.

Work hard enough and do the right things and you can do it in no time at all.
It certainly took me far less than a year to omni and build a decent set of artifacts.

InsertRandomNameHere:

As for credit requirements, it's extraordinarily easy to gain credits. Bardics/artisanals are free, as are quizzes by the divine, city/commune contests, Gnomes are handy during the season, and you get randomly lucky from Ironbeard. There is always -something- happening that you can profit from. Blackjack is good if you're lucky, and it's not hard to save gold for credit sales.

If you don't think you can improve your skills without OOC money, you're doing it wrong.

-Bardic/Artisanals are excellent credits, but it's not something everyone can do. There's only so many winners you can have a month. Not everyone is artistically gifted enough to be competitive either.

-Quizzes by the divine only happen a number of times a year and a beginning player honestly does not usually have the lore background to compete with more experienced ones.

- City/Commune contests depend on the city/commune to actually hold those. Some really don't do this very often.

- Gnomes and ironbeard are great, but very luck-based and they certainly don't give crazy artifacts to the extent that they used to. Profiting credit-wise from either just means you're lucky now.

That said, everything I have is more or less without having spent any money and I'd say I have a fair amount of combat artifacts and transed skills (and am also a warrior!). Though I'll say that it's a -lot- harder to make credits now than it used to be given the credit economy. I can say with firm certainty that I didn't have it as hard as people who are starting now.



Also, something to think about: Lusternia is an aging game. People who start playing now have far higher standards of combat to live up to depending on where they're from.

Just to clarify, I didn't mean that large groups should band together and kill individuals. I mean large scale raids/battles in which BOTH sides are grouped together. Hell, if it has to be offplane, so be it. To encourage the offplane conflict that Lusternia seems to be more geared to, I'd suggest that distort and whatever the other skill is that makes leaving impossible be deleted.

In my case, it isn't necessarily the cost of credits. I was planning to go with the elite membership and slowly work my way up to more skills. My larger problem is the feeling of having nothing to do that holds my interest so that I would invest in a membership. RP is fun. But, excitement is what I need to remain interested in a game. To me, excitement includes the heart-pounding thrill that you get from pk. I don't mean that players should grief one another, but players should understand that losing or winning is not everything. No one kicked your dog irl. Trust me when I say that I tend to lose more than I win when it comes to pk. In the long run, though, the conflict is well worth it.

Players bore easily and will go to other games that foster environments that keep them interested.

The problem is that there is only one place in the game that's freePK that isn't someone's territory, Faethorn. And it's not a particularly good place to fight either.

If it's their territory, they will never fight fair, and no one should ask them to. Then you run into the aforementioned essence loss problem.

Yea, that's basically why I didn't renew my IRE membership. There doesn't seem to be a reason to get credits or lessons. I'm just going to wait for something to shake up and I might log in. I'll keep tabs on forums, but that's about it.

Distort is fine, in fact, it's actually a good thing. However, the essence loss is the problem. Nobody wants to bother offplane raiding for lols when they have to spend the next 2 weeks grinding back all the essence they lost in the span of an hour. The penalty is too heavy-handed. I already suggested one potential remedy to impose a more reasonable penalty.

But as mentioned before, mechanics are one thing, but temperament is another. Even if the climate is ripe for warfare, if people are only content to defend then what's the point? There has been a lot of metagaming and griping about the perceived exploitation of conflict mechanics. It's a cardinal sin to chop a tree or continually bash godrealms for gold. It gets to borderline cyber bullying on Facebook. I have screenshots and logs of this happening both in and out of the game.

Magnagora was basically the only one that really gave any opposition during conflict events for awhile. However, the activity within that city has steeply nosedived in the last few weeks. This can be attributed to a variety of factors that include those that lay outside the scope of gameplay. Nevertheless, there's not a strong pull to log in anymore.

In the last few weeks since I came back from a multi-year hiatus, I have led many raids, big and small. It was fun for awhile, and we all had our thrills, but it'd be nice if there was a shakeup.

Jozen:

It's a cardinal sin to chop a tree or continually bash godrealms for gold. It gets to borderline cyber bullying on Facebook. I have screenshots and logs of this happening both in and out of the game.

Correction: it's a 'cardinal sin' to chop trees or raid godrealms for gold when it is done during a time that purposefully avoids defenders.

IMO:
No one sees any big raid fights these days because 1) smobs (Night and Moon Avatars, Fleshpots, Spheres, Demon Lords, Supernals) have been buffed too much that you need 15+ chunky demigods to successfully pull it off, 2) defensive planes have been buffed too much (shrines, stronger mobs, buffed discretionaries, cheap discretionaries, passive plane effects such as insanity) that to succeed in a raid, the raiding party must horrendously overwhelm the defenders, and 3) raiding costs have been raised too high, in terms of personal essence/experience.

Changes to the raiding scene were made due to 1) 'steep' loss for defeated orgs (but really, what's a few thousand power in the Age of Million-Power Nexuses?), 2) camping the defeated org's plane to increase that org's losses, and 3) 'psychological scars' left on the defeated org that made people in that org quit/alt/move.

The changes all sought to address the above issues, and they were successful - too successful, actually, that it ground most raiding to a screeching halt (yes, there have been some raids on smobs, but compare that to before...it's really scarce nowadays).

I'm going to use org names:

It did stop Gaudiguch, Glomdoring, and Celest from pulling weekly smob raids on Hallifax, Serenwilde, and Magnagora. Camping Elemental planes to stop the re-raising of smobs was curbed; now, we can only scry known essence-gatherers once in a while to see if they're getting essence (and since basically anyone in an org can gather essence, that gets tiring). However, it also stopped any retaliatory raids by Hallifax, Serenwilde, and Magnagora - because the defenses that helped their planes are similarly used against them when they raid. If it took the full combined forces of Gaudiguch, Glomdoring, and Celest (they being the stronger of the two parties) to break through Continuum, then certainly the demands were even greater for the other side should they wish to hit back.

Team Aironhart, being unable to launch raids of their own, slowly fell into defensive decay. Team Gaudequinox grew tired of the high-cost (in terms of essence/exp/stress to keep things together in an angry enemy plane) of raiding. Conflict, as far as smob raiding is concerned, has stopped. And honestly, it's the smob raids that are really interesting for me. Villages, domoths, flares, wildnodes, etc. are cyclic things that are prompted by the game, but it's the smob raids that are really led by the players.

Ideas:
1) When an smob dies, the associated upper planes (Air/Continuum, Fire/Vortex, Earth/Nil, Water/Celestia, EtherSeren, EtherGlom) the experience a 'lockdown' - OldShrineGravity, Distort, and Invasion-type defenses become active. The lockdown becomes active twelve hours (half an IG month) after the first smob dies, to allow the raiding party considerable time to take down as many as they can and for the defending party not to suffer too long until they can safely rebuild. This makes it safer for an org to collect essence to raise their smobs. In the case of the communes, their respective Ethereal counterparts also experience the above defenses, and 36 of the mobs that normally appear only after influencing fae (possums, peacocks, spiders, centipedes, etc) auto-respawn. All of these effects remain active until all the lost smobs are returned. When the smobs do return, they experience the 7-day invulnerability.

2) Remove the passive insanity in enemy planes. The construct effect can remain. The insanity effect was added to discourage camping, but with the lockdown above, it won't be necessary.

3) Shrines have been dealt with, for the most part, so that's nifty.

4) Keep the discretionary powers (but maybe up costs?), but open up new offensive discretionaries for raiding orgs:

• NEXUS DAMPEN DISTORT ON
  
• NEXUS DAMPEN SURGE ON
  
• etc. etc.
  

Dampening a discretionary would render that power only half-effective (surge would only buff mobs by half of what the original buff is, distort would only slow down magic movement and not stop them outright, liveforest and complementary power would tick twice as long, so on and so forth). Each offensive power would cost 250p (discretionaries are normally 500p, right?).

Ideally, in the case of a large raiding party vs small defending party, the defending party can raise powers to strengthen their side of the fight (hopefully they have to think about whether it's worth to spend x power against y number of raiders); similarly, the raiding party can dampen discretionaries (hopefully they have to think about whether it's worth it, as well).

Maybe shrine effects could also have offensive counterparts (lesser/weaker invasion mobs, etc.) but shrine mechanics are different so I'll come back to that later.


---

Ultimately, the thought is to encourage more raids but not omgoverwhelmingadversaries, winner/loser scenarios but not overlord/peasant ones. Conflict is fun!

It would also be dandy if the hard locks on smob conversion (only Supernals can take DL corpses, forest v forest, sphere v fleshpot) were removed, so that theoretically anyone can raid anyone. Conflict is fun; dynamic conflict is even more so!


EDIT:

* chunky demigods refer to those that actually know how to survive

* upon further consideration, maybe the discretionary dampen powers should cost more than the defensive discretionaries. From experience, no one really raids until there's an advantage (that's only logical and sane); thus, defensive discretionaries would be of greater help to defenders than dampeners would be to raiders. Besides, if the raid's successful, the raiding org would see an influx of power.

These all seem like good fixes.

However, offensive discretionaries should cost the same or slightly more than the defensive ones. The choice then becomes using them and spending more power on the raid than your opponent to give yourself a larger chance at achieving an objective with your raid. You trade off upfront power loss to open smobs. I liked the ideas being thrown around on other threads about quests being done within an org to 'unlock' or facilitate attacking the smobs of another org. That other org would get some amount of warning to organize and fight back, and friction can be introduced to stop repeated stomping. With changes like that, the smobs could be made less tanky (assuming you've done the requisite quests).




I like the idea of making meaningful raids more available and frequent, while at the same time making sure that the downsides to losing said raids aren't crippling. Encouraging people to participate in war mechanics without being creating slash-and-burn, total combat situations should be the goal. Indeed, doing so makes losing an easier pill to swallow.

When you continually lose fights, die, and are occupied for no reason, it's very easy to become demoralized. If you know that your enemy is there for a reason other than to spit in your face, it feels less like harassment and moves back into the territory of 'our characters are at war'. Furthermore, if there are lower risk (and lower payout) objectives and safeguards against run-away escalation (which are lacking with totems and the like, hence the pressure to not use those systems), 'losing' players have a reasonable chance to fight back.


In addition to changes such as these, I also suggest making Elemental Lords/Aspects tankier/tougher and giving them a quest type thing that must be done to raise them again. This should not be gathering essence, especially not for the forests. That way, raiders have more than one objective to raiding an orgs plane. If they do not have enough people to have a chance at taking down an Smob, they can go for a more medium-level raid against the weaker mobs.


EDIT: Looks like you reached the same conclusion as I did on the dampening discretionary powers. So, never-mind that paragraph!

Jozen:

It's a cardinal sin to chop a tree

I just want to comment on this... Chopping Elder trees (feel free to stir things up by chopping saplings!) is a "cardinal sin" because A) it takes a couple of seconds for you to chop it down, and there's absolutely nothing we can do to prevent you from doing so unless we keep constantly scrying you (and no, it's not feasible to have every Elder carved into a totem at all times, given the lack of players), and B) because it first takes (I think) three hours of questing to get enough nuts planted to regrow it, and then five (I think) RL days to actually regrow the Elder tree again. There's a reason Glom and Seren has a gentlemen's agreement not to chop eachothers Elders down.

As far as I'm concerned though, feel free to raid godrealms as much as you want though, and even chop saplings. Although if you're doing so to stir conflict, it'd probably be more effective if you did so while there were other fighters around to actually have a conflict with.

It's ~4 hours. Not particularly arduous questing, but you have to wait for respawns enough to gather up 50 shadows/pixies. Then it's 3 RL days, assuming no trouble.

Otherwise, spot on. There is absolutely no way to stop it, or defend against it, and it's a real pain to get them back. Someone with a bit of dedication can also come back and chop down the newly-growing trees, which sets back the time in RL days. The gentleman's agreement includes the fact that if chopping starts, there is absolutely nothing either side could realistically do to stop it before all of the totems in the game (on both sides) were clear cut.

Yeah, raiding godrealms is whatever. For the most part, they are too difficult to defend once forces are entrenched there (which they can do before kicking mobs), and have no impact on the game, really.