Best Of

Devora said:

Noob question. Is there a particular reason to design classes from different orgs in the same archetype with mechanically different skillsets?

This seems to be common and it seems like it would make much more sense to have 5 to 8 thoughtful, synergistic, well balanced skillsets, and then just change the flavoring but give each archetype the same mechanics. If there's genuinely a different skillset for each class, that's crazy. That's up to 30 skillsets needing to be balanced within and against each other. No one can expect that kind of wizardry from a handful of staff. 

Or so I would think. But again, noob question.

Flavour. Lore. But....actually, why can't we say, give opposing orgs the same stuff with a different skin? Don't have to say, make Illuminati and Celestines the same, but we can make Illuminati and Researchers the same, and Nihilists and Celestines the same, and the two Wiccan classes. Why not make them reflections? If Trueheal is as broken as people say, give Sacraments the ability to turn people into sainted who work exactly like lich but you glow with holy light and resurrect on death like a lich. Just invert how they are affected by divinus/excorable, and then, give Astral beasts identical weakness to excorable and divinus, because, apparently, they are somehow linked to some old vernals and are corrupted by Kethuru, so why not? You can justify any mechanic if you are just creative enough, even with in game events to explain it. 

Yeah, you can poke a bunch of holes in this, and probably will, but the option is there.

Esoneyuna said:

There is a difference between critique, and being consistently negative. It was also directed more towards behavior on clans, discords, tells, IG conversations etc than  it was to this topic.

OK, long post incoming, skip to the bottom if you want. I think that, in general, the discussion about negativity vs positivity is a red herring, and not just because it presumes that something is wrong with the player instead of wrong with the status quo. It says, essentially, why are you like this? Why can't you smile? And if you can't, leave the game. But Lusternia is no longer in a position where it can tell players to leave the game, and I think we all understand that.

The real question is, what do players want from a game like Lusternia, and what aren't they getting, that is causing them to leave? I can only speak for myself, of course, but I've looked through some of the responses in this thread from people across the divide.

Lavinya said:

I no longer have any (expletives) left to give and while I was passionate about helping my org and being dedicated and putting in a good showing, in reality losing sucks. I have never liked combat but I was always willing to give it a go and learn to do things better.

Now the two arguably strongest orgs in the  game are a massive wall that I have no real life desire to even engage with, because there's no fun in that.

Tarken said:

I log in to play with friends and to help them succeed, not for any particular desire to shake people down for their lunch money. 

This also concurs with my own experience of the game. Lusternia has gone free to play, and we're getting wondercrystals, leprechaun events, daily credits, and all manner of shiny things. And those are all good things, but I think it's a mistake to focus on them as a path towards retaining players. I'm as fanatical of a curio collector as the next person, and god knows I have way too many artifacts, but at the end of the day, a curio is just a line of text. Credits are just a number. They mean nothing to the player, unless Lusternia means something. And what gives Lusternia meaning?

For my part, it's exactly what @Lavinya and @Tarken said. I played this game for my org and my friends. I wanted to help them succeed and to make a difference. It's what made me force myself to go from a noncombatant who only did design and stage writing, and whose hands shook IRL every time I went into Faethorn, to become a mostly consistent combatant who would reliably show up to defend and sometimes even to raid. I didn't do it because I wanted credits or rewards or bragging rights. I did it because I felt my friends needed me to help them turn the tide.

That's why I take issue with some of the advice given here, which boils down to "move to a different org if you don't like your org's skillsets", "have a better attitude and do the things in the game that don't require you to be good at combat" and so on. Because it's not about me. I couldn't tell you when I became a demi or when I became omnitrans or how many credits I won in events, but the things I remember clearly are my friends and people I helped learn combat telling me that I made a difference.

But the mechanical imbalance is too much. There were instances of then-North nerfing their own skillsets because others, Glomdoring among them, argued they were overtuned. But when it came time for Glomdoring to take an honest look at theirs, the distraction and deflecting was disheartening. So things got dragged out, and change never happened, and combat vs Glom continued to be an exercise in futility. One by one my friends left because they were burned out and didn't want to deal with it anymore, and I stopped feeling like I could make any difference at all.

No one is asking to be handed wins on a silver platter, or not to have to work. Quite the opposite, in fact. @Lavinya famously got 250k power for Mag, I contributed to grinding up over a million esteem so Shevat could get Most Honourable House, and many other players have consistently tried to work on goals for their orgs. But combat is not an area in which we can succeed just by hard work, because no matter how hard a Nihilist works they'll never have Night. And that is discouraging, and it's one of the main reasons I quit the game for over a year, because what people want isn't even victory. It's hope.

I'd prefer a 6-org solution rather than a paired opposing orgs solution, as I said in the other thread - people are attached to their orgs more than to their alliances, and should be able to access skillsets without moving, even to "allied orgs".

This thread is depressing.

Dys said:

I don't think that's true.

I work with Glomdoring because I like them. They're fair, they don't throw their fighting weight around in the alliance. They offer combat advice when asked.

This, and the fact the alliance with Magnagora we had before was not like that. Gaudi is a small org compared to both Glom and Magnagora and so it is logical for it to chose the one that does not throw its weight around whenever it is time to divide the spoils. It is no secret that my character hates Magnagora, however it also doesn't like Glomdoring all that much. If a Celest-Serenwilde-Gaudiguch alliance was viable I would have pushed for that ages ago. But its not

Ellowyn said:

Saran said:

Okay, so if I message an admin directly and voice my concerns to them about a game mechanic, are you going to be all up in arms because you weren't part of the conversation?  That could inform their choices in the future!

The forums, discord, whatever - they're all tools for data collection by admin, you're right.  And that's awesome, it gives the admin more avenues to see what the players are thinking about.

And not everyone on the discord is on the forums, and not everyone on the forums is on the discord.  So why get rid of a helpful tool like that?  There's no need to blame discord.

Personally messaging the admin is a tool that everyone reasonably has equal access to, it's also pretty unlikely that the admin will send out a group email to a couple of people to see what they think about a game wide issue. In fact, my experience is that the support box is pretty much a black hole that you sometimes get, effectively, a "we've received your message" response from.


The discord, however, is an avenue that is moderated by a group of players which in itself isn't great given the complaints mentioned about people not feeling welcome and the like. Aside from that, in a smaller server that I admin we've become really aware that discord is terrible for actually communicating about important issues when you want feedback from people that might not be online at the time.

For example, I happened to be online when Orael was talking about the melder overhaul so I was able to send through a log of another chat from the Serenade about what would be cool for the Hartstone part of that. If I was not online at that time I wouldn't even be aware that apparently there wasn't really any Hartstone stuff for the overhaul. If this was on the forums then not only would it be unlikely to be missed, even more people could have contributed their ideas.

So yeah, I don't actually think discord is as generally helpful as it might feel to people engaged with it, it just splits off communication to an unofficial channel which is harder for people to follow if they're not online when things actually get discussed but if you want to be sure you know what's going on you've gotta consistently check in on it because there's no guarantee the info will cross over to other mediums. 

Noob question. Is there a particular reason to design classes from different orgs in the same archetype with mechanically different skillsets?

This seems to be common and it seems like it would make much more sense to have 5 to 8 thoughtful, synergistic, well balanced skillsets, and then just change the flavoring but give each archetype the same mechanics. If there's genuinely a different skillset for each class, that's crazy. That's up to 30 skillsets needing to be balanced within and against each other. No one can expect that kind of wizardry from a handful of staff. 

Or so I would think. But again, noob question.