Best Of

Silvanus said:

And finally, at one point I heard the last competitive mode that saw any kind of competition was Orgcredits, yet since that comment, Ironhart has came in 1-2-3 place every single year. Perhaps the issue is not mechanical related at all since any area where competition has been in the past few months has been conceded, even ones that were not mechanically overbearing as PK.

The trouble is, the lower morale from losing battles also hurts the motivation to compete in orgcredits. They may not be directly related and a lot of it isn't combat, but consider: OrgA is winning the fights and has a lot of people showing up to every event. All of them are excited about the victories and the feeling that their org is the best. Some of them will also be willing to create designs or write books/plays about how their org is the best. If OrgB is constantly losing and people aren't logging in as much and everyone feels like they're failing = a lot less motivation to get involved in other ways.

Hey Orael, thank you for being open to letting us talk it out. 

Like I don't think there's a perfect solution here and it's going to take work to trying to improve our morale on SL side. Again, this isn't something the -admin- need to do, but our current gods can help with the small RP events they've been doing for us which is really appreciated. 

I know a few people have looked at alting just to help out which is nice - I think a culture of trying to work together is needed. I think this is a player problem, and there's only small things the admin can do for us. 

Xenthos said:

Yes- delete the "winner takes all" mechanics.  Incentivize trying; if you try, you get something portion of it (kind of like wildnodes, but even then it's only generally 2 orgs that get anything instead of all participants).  Work on addressing the so-called snowball effect (the more you have, the easier it is to get more right now- it should function the other way).  Lots of little details and such that can be gotten into, but we've even written envoy reports to try to address some of it that are on indefinite hold.

An actual alliance mechanic system could also be leveraged to share earnings from events.

I like the idea of this, but not sure how this would work for things like villages and flares. I think I or someone else suggested at one time the idea of making it harder to capture villages the more you have, with the idea that no one likes huge empires.

It was brought to my attention that there was some good discussion going on in this thread prior to the re-hashing of Ascension outfall. I've decided to re-open the thread but want to say a few things about it.


I understand that the Ascension decision was not a popular decision for a lot of players, especially those on the Shadowlight side. I do earnestly believe that we made the right call in raising Ixion as a result of the lag issues that everyone agrees were a prevalent problem. We didn't take anything away from Shadowlight in doing so.

I also understand that it was not a perfect decision and there are parts involved that we could have done better. We could have tried to put more effort into listening and trying to come to an understanding with the other side that made everyone feel more invested and involved in the decision. We likely failed there trying to get the buy-in so that it was felt that it was fair and equitable.

We're not perfect and we don't pretend to be perfect. 

There are two things that I do promise to always do, and these are things I know Aonia believes in.

1) We genuinely do our best to make the decision we feel is best for the game overall
2) We will learn and improve from our mistakes.

That being said - I'm not interested in further posts calling us out for what you feel was a bad decision. I've already heard it all at this point and know how you feel. The decision is made. We'll work on learning from it and trying to make decisions that everyone can be on board with in the future. We'll work on moving forward. Any posts bringing it back up will be removed.

Mboagn said:

TL;DR - break off hard alliances; admins pls send help

I hate the treaties more than I could probably coherently type right now. They're restrictive to a ridiculous degree, forcing orgs and players into positions that don't necessarily make rp sense, and I don't see why it's necessary. It ends up meaning that any change in alliance takes weeks, if not months and is a lot of tedious legalizing. Down with the paperwork, I didn't move to Gaudiguch for this!

@Nelras, there are rp justifications for orgs choosing to break off from more powerful ones. Yes it might also be good for the game, but that doesn't make it bad rp. Plenty of people in real life choose to root for the underdog, whoever that may be. 

I think an underlying issue that causes a lot of problems is that people fight to win. They will garner every advantage they can, be it cheesy strategies or calling in reinforcements. This isn't a critique on a particular side, as I've seen both sides do it without hesitation whenever they can or need to. People aren't as interested in fair play and even fights as they are in winning at any cost, and it's not really a mindset that can be avoided as it is a competitive game, so it kind of is what it is. 

Orael said:

The primary thing I'm seeing here is that people are complaining about population sizes?

That fights end up being one-sided to the point that it's not worth the effort to even try?


What exactly do you all think we can do to fix that besides continue to work on improving the game and making it something people want to play?

Here's a few things we have done to fix it to encourage participation and encourage people to play. Every decision we've made it to encourage the participation of players.

1) We've added in alternative conflict events and removed xp-loss (timequakes and death-karma)
2) We've put in a lot of work to making each side feel like they can compete with the skillsets they have (I'm not seeing any complaints about one side being so OP here, mechanically speaking)
3) We've directed volunteer effort to improving orgs and org outlooks. Celest in particular has had a lot of work put into it to encourage players to play and participate. Those volunteers have done a fantastic job. We have other things here in the works as well.
4) We've been open and transparent about the decisions we've made and why we made them.

I agree that the admin have done well to improve the game and the actual mechanics of combat. And the improvements going on in Celest and rp there is really cool and the volunteers deserve a ton of praise for it.

Personally, I don't know that there is an administrative or mechanical solution that wouldn't make this or some other problem worse. There's a lot of orgs for the population we have, which means a lot of pressure for people to keep logging in during conflict events. If you don't, you might be letting down your people. That's good in terms of keeping people playing. But if all you login to is another loss, it's demotivating. At some point it will be even for the winners. And yeah, as Thalkros says these things go back and forth. But the time in waiting for that to happen or waiting for those few times when numbers+ability are equal is incredibly frustrating and exhausting.

But the only solution I can think of to that problem is to delete orgs. Which I don't think most people want, including me. All I can say is here is this problem, can someone think of a way to fix it?

Orael said:

Xenthos said:

Okay, you're deleting on-topic posts now because you don't like them?

I'm removing posts that are continuing a topic I said it's time to move forward from. You were sent a message explaining this.

It's the same topic.  It's this topic.  The morale of your players is shot, and thus the participation in conflict events is skewed.

Thalkros said:

Conflict has always been a revolving door of numbers/leadership/unit coherence. This has been a thing for the 10 years I've played around on Lusternia. Alliances have also always shifted, more often than not it has had the opposite effect than the 'lets split things up to shake it up and balance out' desired.

I hear a lot of complaints about the lack of team understanding/workability from the other side. I'm not saying people aren't being team players for Shadowlight, I just mean that you guys don't have a solid number of strong leaders/teachers to the degree we have. You have a few that try very hard to lead and train, but it seems like if one of them isn't around you guys fall apart. That used to be a severe Mag issue after Akyaevin's Ascension when all our old guard quit for most of the next year. Hell, I quit playing during my first stint as a Vernal Ascendant just because I was the ONLY one leading combat for Mag for months and people would always bombard me with hatred for not waking up at 3:43am to defend a Domoth Absolve. So I know that pain.

tldr: conflict sucks, don't know what to do to help

It is largely a numbers issues. We can muster 5-6 to fight, sometimes evening out the starting enemy forces that went to the timequake/whatever, but when you guys then call in 3 times as many then it just becomes pointless for us to try with those numbers imbalance.