Best Of

Don't actually live in the forests so not really my org's roleplay (and I assume this is more a Serenwilde thing than a Glomdoring thing), but one lore thing that bothers me is that the fae generally seem to lean much more heavily on the silly whimsical side - at least from what I've seen.  I would love to see them a bit closer to the real life stories that have inspired them. Amoral while not necessarily being malevolent, its just don't really care if their pranks happen to hurt people along the way, but with a love for deals and trickery.

Misericorde said:

Time to be Controversial on Main...

I despise Raziela and feel like she kneecaps New Celest, since all anyone ever interprets her teaching as is 'you have to do no harm because love'. I also lowkey dislike that the org is New Celest instead of having an original name. It always feels like as a result of the naming convention the org is constantly on the apology for whatever happened in the past, and it feels like everything is a memorial as a result. Every time we get a new memorial or preservation garden or statue to the dead I quietly cry a little inside. I don't want to live in a graveyard

What I do love though are the Saints! I hope we continue to get more information on them and better insight into Unification and what that entails for someone who has achieved it. I also really enjoy the Tide Lords/Ladies (especially Sarye), but wish they had a little more personality overall. I feel like sadly all of the elemental entities kind of all into this category? It feels like they originally had big ideas attached to them that never came to fruition?

For me, as someone on the outside looking in, New Celest being named New Celest is what occasionally makes me consider rolling an alt there! Not because of the guilt - I'd want to play someone leaning hard into the imperialism, who's like "Yeah, we made a mistake once and it was pretty bad but look at all our glorious history!" Someone who's like, "All you other cities are rebelling against your protectorate but that's okay, one day we'll welcome you back to the empire where you belong." (So uh, I guess y'all will know who my alt is if someone comes in with that mindset).

I can definitely see how the guilt angle would get old, though - in Serenwilde, we've got all this history too, and we don't ever feel guilty for anything (even abandoning the innocents of Celest!)

That lag in the second half was really frustrating. Worse than I remember seeing in previous Ascensions. At one point I was killed and couldn't reincarnate for nearly three minutes. Even after I turned off my system (which wasn't trying to do anything anyway as it clears when I die) the game was spamming me with 'You are dead and cannot do that.'

It was weird how it wasn't consistent. That time Shango died about a minute after me and reincarnated way before I could get the command through.

I enjoyed the fights in the first half when we could move. A lag of 5s or so actually gave me time to think about what I was doing and shielding against the bombs was ok.

Well done Parhelion (good name) and team, I liked the celebratory lego cake from your child!

I feel bad for Ixion.

Brawrur said:

We've literally had multiple discussions with Oraeal over the course of like months telling him how bullshit this thing is. 

It's not that it hasn't "gotten to the people who make the decisions" or somehow slipped by. We've literally had him tell us that it's very fair and balanced and right.

"Do reports" is a shit response. We may as well tell IHC to just not do any combat for the next year until those open again. 

I remember being deterred away from touching the whole race thing as an envoy report and had my hands too full of reports to actually make some of Gaudi's classes not as much of a joke.

I don't know why you're calling anyone liars, there are logs of this.

The problem seems to be expectations.

There is absolutely no way that a special report was going to happen without the involvement of the other side's braintrust in the leadup weeks to the biggest event of the year. It just couldn't.

No matter what you think of Wyrdenwood, no one can object to calling it a major part of our plans. We had eight of our thirty people in that class by design. If that was upended without a formal process in the twilight hours of the Ascension buildup, the outcry would have been so much worse than this.

We just finished a report cycle with over 100 reports, all of which were given consideration and feedback by both sides. I'm sure you had multiple discussions, just like we did, about which abilities need work and which are pushing out of bounds. That no one addressed Wyrdenwood during that window meant it was going to make an impact on Ascension, because that is the toolkit that we were handed for Ascension. To do otherwise would be to break the process entirely.

Aoe and passives win Ascension, because of how they scale to groups and lag respectively. It's unfortunate, but unless something dramatic happens like a cap on the number of players hit by an AoE, those skills will always win you events like this.

I know my tone is abrasive and this is intentional; from experience in IRE, in general, only the biggest fires draw admin attention in a timely manner. You saw how quick the admins tried to slap a band-aid on Ascension woes with a truefavour.  With that in mind, I'm going to keep pushing until some real solutions are enacted. I do acknowledge that those who aren't on the receiving end of Creeping probably don't realise how frustrating it is to deal with. All I'm asking is that you acknowledge that our concerns are real, even if you don't feel them yourselves.

Aeldra said:

I am sorry if I came across as saying things are fine, I never meant to get this across. I don't have the knowledge to gauge whether doom has the kind of impact on this ascension that you claim it did, I can literally say next to nothing about it, aside of it being a wyrdenwood bomb. I can only say from what I've seen of this ascension,  I doubt it is the case. That doesn't mean its fine, again, I don't have the expertise to make that kind of call. If you think that was the point of my post, then either my english is seriously failing me or it is what you want to read into it.

Your first paragraph disregards the issue of skill balance and instead chalk it up to better strategy; it argues that the Ascension was won solely because of better play by the winners and not because of mechanical issues with abilities and how they translate in actual game combat.

This position is supported by your second and third paragraphs. You even stated that issues of skill balance only come up when you lose to it, thereby implying that it is irrelevant to how Ascension played out. You cap this off by making the argument that Wyrdenwood did not win Ascension, despite it alone taking way more than fifty kills (according to my records; I didn't see deaths which happened when I was dead/did not have deathsight up). You'd expect combat to have kills from different sources; toading, decapitation, deathsong, perhaps. But in this particular instance, Creeping bombs literally caused the majority of deathsights.

You cap this off with an anecdote on lag, which is increasingly looking like the scapegoat that's going to be sacrificed instead of taking an actual review of wood bombs and their overall design. While lag was indeed equally horrendous for both sides, the fact that woods can natively stun and access bigger damage with their bombs means that they are less affected by it (the lag). Chems needed to make sure their bombs went off within a split second of each other in order to outpace serverside autocuring (and thus, also get access to bomb stun and big damage); woods don't have this problem in the same order of magnitude.

In conclusion, it's great to be on the side of Creeping. We know.

Parhelion said:

Mboagn said:

 You saw how quick the admins tried to slap a band-aid on Ascension woes with a truefavour. 

I'm not sure how much experience you have with Ascension, but pretty much every year, our admin hand out favours like candy after ascension, win or lose, because we work our asses off. That isn't them pandering to us, that's them literally icly saying, "you mortals are alright, thanks for not letting Kethuru eat us."

Except the TF came with a ‘hey sorry about the lag, sucks. Have a tf.’ System message which is what a lot of people found pretty poorly done. 

Mboagn said:

 You saw how quick the admins tried to slap a band-aid on Ascension woes with a truefavour. 

I'm not sure how much experience you have with Ascension, but pretty much every year, our admin hand out favours like candy after ascension, win or lose, because we work our asses off. That isn't them pandering to us, that's them literally icly saying, "you mortals are alright, thanks for not letting Kethuru eat us."

Ascension this year: See warning about creeping. Enter command for shield. Wait 10 minutes. Wait 10 more minutes to phoenix/return to Astral cause I'm already dead.

Bombs generally are a ridiculous "strategy" in events like this, and chemwoods are worse than others. Added with the lag, and this was unplayable. There was no strategy to overcome it, and we did try everything available to us. All this posturing about "well maybe you could have done..." No, stop. Anything after that statement - I tried that. Repeatedly. I tried everything suggested, either from people here or from people on our side during the event to adjust for the bombs and the lag and the difficulty of moving people out of the room, and there was nothing else. 

We worked with what we had, and we did damn well at doing so, and nearly won. All the suggestions of how to "git gud" is just as absurd in this case as it ever was in the past. You want to pretend like you'd have done better in our place - BS. You'd have lost, and whined about it. 

Of course our side of things would be mad if we'd lost. Losing sucks, and sucks even more when there are elements out of your control which fundamentally alter the nature of the contest. The lag was absolutely infuriating and it is impossible to know how things would have gone were it different. We can speculate all we want, but unfortunately we will simply never know. I was one of the people suffering from multi minute lag bursts (it seems like some of us maybe got it worse, but maybe not?).

Precision was out of the question in this event. The lag was unlike anything I've experienced in past ascensions: obviously everyone knew it was going to be rough because it is just the nature of the beast, but something definitely wasn't quite right this year. I literally entered my doom alias half way through and went to make a coffee. I got back before it went through. There are few things more rage inducing in text pk than knowing what you have to do but being unable to do it due to lag.

I'd personally have supported a woodbomb report, but am not an envoy and do not participate in the public discord so have no idea what the discussions here have been.

Congratulations to Parhelion and Ixion for making a fight of it even so.