Best Of

True, except this is an OOC forum and the "must make others lose" mindset has thus far been displayed as an OOC thing.

Edit; As an example, I was privately messaged by a player detailing reasons why Ixion getting TA is a terrible thing. Specifically, it would allow Ixion to grief better. The messenger went so far as to say that Ixion getting TA was a bad thing IC and OOCly. That seems like a straight contradiction to what Synl is trying to claim.

Edit2; I can provide screenshots, if necessary, although I will not divulge the identity of the other person in the messages.

Both sides complain. It's incredibly disingenuous to sit here and try to take some high ground that you don't 'complain half as much.' You don't personally, but that's not even remotely true of your side.

Some of you 'persistently remained calm' regarding the 2v4 alliance. Others did not. Very loudly did not. Again, you did, others did not.

Again, accusations of bias and doing this specifically for one person. How many times have we heard these same accusations regarding Glomdoring and Xenthos in particular? We didn't favor Glomdoring and Xenthos back then and we're certainly not favoring Magnagora and Ixion now. 

I'm sorry that we're not perfect and we're not omniscient about every issue that occurs so we can jump in and fix it right away. I'm sorry Glomdoring's epic quest was bugged and not fixed. I'm sorry that we did not realize there was a quest that could be abused and fix it sooner. We strive to make things even and fair for all parties but we're limited. We're doing the best we can, and we'll continue to strive to do the best we can.

I'm sorry that we wasted your and everybody else's time by allowing the lag to occur during the Final Ascension trial.


 

Maybe it's because I'm on the younger end of the player spectrum, but this mentality of "My main goal is to make others lose" seems incredibly destructive.

Enero said:

I might be making things up, but I imagine that for majority of Equinox the goal was not to make Choros TA, but to prevent the enemy alliance from getting one, regardless if it was Ixion, Uzriel, Malarious, or anyone else, really.

Thing is, TAs don't necessarily stay put. In fact, one of the mainstay features of TA that really, truly separates them from the VA is their ability to move around to new orgs without losing their status. I can see this from the "strictly competitive" angle, but in the long-run of the game and from a roleplaying angle its just bad business. If Parhelion moved to, say, Gaudiguch in two months time, would that also devastate your sense of accomplishment?

This is also not something limited to you - Serenwilde had TAs that hopped over to Glomdoring. These things happen. I think this sort of framing and attitude is just not a good approach for the event.

I write this post only in the hopes that it will help admin in the future. I have already retired Ciaran and I will not be returning to play Lusternia.

I tried to use Lusternia as a competitive outlet since a chronic injury to my ankle has taken away my ability to play competitive sports. I don't really play Lusternia for the roleplay, or for an escape from reality. I just enjoyed competing.

To that end, it has been made clear to me over the last week that one cannot simply play the game as it is and maximize success. Equally important to your actual actions in the game is your ability to 'work the refs' as it were. This isn't only with regard to the latest events, it also is a critique of the envoy system approach to game balance as a whole.

There has been a narrative woven over the last week that has gone largely uncontested. This narrative was woven on discord, on the forums, probably in game, probably on envoys, and likely in emails, issues and messages. I cannot say for sure about private channels.

That narrative revolves around the idea that IHC would have been able to win had it not been for the lag. That their winning the event was robbed of them because of the lag. It was at least implied that the sharing of ascension was in part due to the extremely competitive nature of the event. I could have contested this narrative, I SHOULD have had I ever considered that the whole outcome would be wiped away by the admin.  It is my view, and the view of many of those who were involved in the inner circle of planning for ascension, that we likely would have done much better were it not for the lag. We had plans in place to bypass any fortress that IHC could have set up. I was set and had tested a pather to capture the staff anywhere on astral in under 0.5s, we had the whole alliance set to regroup on the leader quickly and efficiently, and so on. All of this went out of the window because of the lag. Our main leader, Snald was completely incapacitated. For the first 5 minutes of ascension I was stuck in the lag-queue (as I took to calling it) because my pather spammed into the lag and locked our whole alliance out of what should have been one of our main advantages, having a near optimal, if not completely optimized, staff runner.

All of these preparations were made in the competitive spirit. We put everything we could forward to win the event, then when faced with the extreme conditions of the event I didn't throw my hands up and say, this isn't FAIR! Anyone who was in our group chat can attest to the fact. I dug into my system, ripped out the parts of it that were spamming, re-wrote my pather quickly to increase the delays between commands, and we got to work trying to recover in the event.

We were faced with Ixion fortified in a meld with the lagbeast in full effect. We killed him some times, there was some back and forth, and IHC recaptured the staff.  Ixion took to running from our group whenever we pushed in and escaped via empress to another node. Due to the lag, we had extreme difficulty regrouping and/or chasing to the next node, giving IHC a tremendous advantage with regard to racking up time while we were simply battling to get ourselves organized. Again, the lag very much leveled the playing field in terms of staff-running. It was far more important who was near the staff when it reset, than who was the faster runner. With 7 seal holders, this slanted the whole event moreso in IHC's favor. In a normal ascension it's a race between the fastest runner and the second fastest, the rest are mostly irrelevant.

In the end we managed to grab the staff, but they were still able to force Choros to drop it twice... We managed to get the staff and deny Ixion even a mere 4 more minutes of holding it, I was dealing with the lag just as much as the 6 other runners that IHC had to get the staff. We still did it.

I would have loved to have present the case for why it is not in the competitive spirit to raise Ixion as well, before the decision was met, but alas, I was not asked. Choros didn't know any of this, I don't harbor any ill-will toward him or his role in this decision, but it is a simple matter of fact that he wasn't involved in the planning and preparation on that level.

In the end, my voice was never heard nor sought out because I didn't wade into the arguments waged on discord/the forums/etc. This allowed a dubious at best narrative to continue to evolve unchecked. Whether the admin consider themselves to have been influenced by this narrative is beyond my knowledge, but from now on the assumption is that with a concerted campaign of 'working the refs', the entire outcome of an event can be altered.

I no longer have any interest in competing in Lusternia. I would have to be afraid that every victory may be relitigated and that I should make sure to post-factum argue why the outcome was justified. I hope that what happens in Lusternia in the future is more clearly bounded to what is done INSIDE of Lusternia the game. I don't know how other people feel about it, but arguing about everything on discord and the forums isn't fun.

That's not a game any more.

I strongly disagree with the idea that Equinox was rewarded by Parhelion becoming true ascendant. That was not a reward to our organizations, that was earned by having the most points when it finished.

Also, an exodus of players was mentioned, here’s the only person who won a seal from Shadowlight pre Halli:

I've held off on posting because I admittedly needed to cool off a bit after the announcement. I'm not going to give my own thoughts here, as I think at this point it is a fairly circular argument. But I do want to pose one question which I think is the real cause of the pervasive frustration among our side of things after reading over discord etc.

There is a very wide spread belief that if this had gone the other way, we would not be having this conversation. Some people will say that is because Ixion gets special treatment. I think that's nonsense, its an easy flag to wave and you can fit evidence to support it: its low hanging fruit. Ixion is a very capable player who works hard and his stats reflect that. The real reason people believe this is because we were expected to lose; we went into this 7 seals to 2 with a new group and very scant experience fighting alongside Hallifax for the vast majority of us.

If the admin can honestly tell us that if Ixion had won and Choros had lost that Choros would still have been raised even though this was the expected result, I think that would put a lot of minds at ease among whatever they're calling the Glomdoring/Celest/Hallifax coalition now.