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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.

Ex: Morbo's master plan for Mag, Seren, Halli to split to force Glom/Gaudi/Celest to all split up that backfired the moment Seren voted to side with the Halli plan. 

The tide always turns, especially post-ascension however it was a bit more of a dramatic shift this time. Granted there was plenty of engagements pre-ascension where we would be vastly outnumbered but our unit coherence won the day. (I remember an almost 3:1 advantage to Shadowlight in a Rikenfriez revolt that we swept them out multiple times while a lone Seren did all the influencing as that's all that was online until Sondy showed up).

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.

I think one of the big issues, in my mind, is that the conflict avenues we have do not generate a lot of worth. Outside of Wildnodes which typically sees a lot of back and forth more often than not. Revolts/Flares are always a toss up on timing, they can literally pop at the worst or best time for one side, and very rarely at an even playing field time. Timequakes are all but pointless at this point, how many guilds are actually not at level 5 with years worth of surplus in reserve? I think Society is a few bits behind, and maybe Serenwilde has a guild or two not max? Not sure about Shadowlight guilds. 

Domoths tend to be mostly evenly spread out, but thats the nature of how the opposing system works, and I hate to say it given how much I hate the Domoth structure, but Domoth's seem to be about the only fair and balanced system these days.

I think if we had more conflict routes it would go a long way to encourage people to be active and do things. Because honestly, for those of us who enjoy PK, Quakes are our only outlet especially since theres no xp loss. And lets also be honest amongst ourselves, those of us who were hardcore raiding all day every day (Myself, Ruiku, Melech) have mostly stopped that outside of very random bits of boredom. I mean really, aside from maybe Rastamutti, Mag doesn't live in peoples territories like we used to/are still able to. We did take a sort of unspoken gentleman's agreement to slack off a LOT. But there is an extent to what we as players can do outside of just not playing the game. That is not a solution at all. Admin force breaking alliances and making it a forces 1v1 1v1 1v1 between all 6 orgs is also not a solution. That right there would drive more players off in my opinion.

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

I can't see that really helping in terms of things, because it'll just mean the same five people making up death squads and that excludes people. 

There's probably a ton of small things we could do to make conflict less 'urgent' such as each org having one village that is always naturally aligned with them and it's only the others that go up for conflict. It would less pressure to try and secure something and making them less screwed when they don't/can't. 

I love combat, but I think timequakes are the -best- way to get that combat itch scratched and we could and should look at other mechanics that are less numbers mean all for the overall enjoyment and health of the game. 

Mboagn said:

EDIT! Some conflict systems should be reworked a bit so that losing isn't so bad. Right now, for example, not having enough villages would absolutely suck for your commodities because there's no real way to get comms outside of villages.

They also suck with villages. We are completely, utterly riding out on our stockpiles on the idea that the admin can just flip a switch to up production at any time, and I'm not necessarily looking forward to how necessary villages will feel once we get to that point (unless the economic revamp just swerves in a totally different direction). But for the time being, if you can't actively produce it through active player inputs, it is a trickle.

Uzriel said:

How accurate are the activity scores in CULTURE for judging playerbase distribution?

Right now when I check I'm seeing:
Serenwilde:   14%
Magnagora:    22%
Gaudiguch:    15%
IHC:                          51%

Glomdoring:  15%
Celest:          20%
Hallifax:        11%
Air + SL:                    46%

Someone said the other day the score is based on novices rather than player activity overall but I don't know if that's the correct answer either. 

Also I would say a lot of our problem is that even in Celest as our most active organisation, we have a higher percentage of people who don't do combat, or are playing on their phones as compared to Magnagora. It's not a cut and dried 'people mean activity mean combatants'. That's not saying this doesn't happen in other orgs, just that when I jump across all my characters I have noticed the difference between Magnagora and Celest. 

Yinuish said:

Kethaera said:

I do like the idea of non-comm ways to help, like influencing villagers in-between ways. Only... actually make it effective. Generally, maybe a push toward conflicts that require/encourage setup that anyone can do? With conflict currently whoever has the most people logged (or can be dragged in from discord) is going to win nearly all the time. If there was something else that could be done to prepare, maybe it'd encourage people not to just wait for those pings.

I've always thought that influencing villages should have more an impact than it does. At the moment it's a pointless exercise. But I also think it's just another conflict point while villages 'belong' to orgs while they've been claimed. I mean, some of us are going to do it anyway if it has an impact, but again it's unlikely to be real non-combatants who risk getting caught and killed. I mean, I would 100% influence villages myself. (Also why weakening, eesh. Makes more sense to flatter them to your way of thinking in the meantime) 

Yeah, and the other problem is that there is a numbers imbalance, not just a combatant level imbalance. All three IHC orgs have plenty of people, whereas on the other side it's often just Celest. I do think influencing should do more, but changing that probably won't change the imbalance. Even if I did bring it up.

Kethaera said:

I do like the idea of non-comm ways to help, like influencing villagers in-between ways. Only... actually make it effective. Generally, maybe a push toward conflicts that require/encourage setup that anyone can do? With conflict currently whoever has the most people logged (or can be dragged in from discord) is going to win nearly all the time. If there was something else that could be done to prepare, maybe it'd encourage people not to just wait for those pings.

I've always thought that influencing villages should have more an impact than it does. At the moment it's a pointless exercise. But I also think it's just another conflict point while villages 'belong' to orgs while they've been claimed. I mean, some of us are going to do it anyway if it has an impact, but again it's unlikely to be real non-combatants who risk getting caught and killed. I mean, I would 100% influence villages myself. (Also why weakening, eesh. Makes more sense to flatter them to your way of thinking in the meantime) 

Saran said:

Kethaera said:

I do like the idea of non-comm ways to help, like influencing villagers in-between ways. Only... actually make it effective. Generally, maybe a push toward conflicts that require/encourage setup that anyone can do? With conflict currently whoever has the most people logged (or can be dragged in from discord) is going to win nearly all the time. If there was something else that could be done to prepare, maybe it'd encourage people not to just wait for those pings.

hm, I think the issue with prep to impact the actual combat event is that both sides can generally do it and the more impactful it is, the more likely they will? 

I was more thinking like... claiming an aetherbubble gives your org... idk, bubblum every weave.
Performing a quest in an aetherbubble also gives your org an amount of bubblum. 
Every construct after the first in your nexus world requires bubblum to maintain. (At most equal to what you get from a bubble, or could be less than that)

This way, non-comms can contribute, if you don't win then you can focus on questing. If the winning orgs are also questing they'll likely have lessened need to actually claim the bubbles. 

Maybe there's some kinda theft mechanism so orgs that start stockpiling could be hit somehow.

Something like this is going to turn bubbles even more into a conflict zone. I've been jumped gathering power on bubbles before. If there's a material benefit to questing on a bubble, it's not going to be something a non-combatant can safely do if they're looking to opt-out of conflict entirely. 

This also ignores why combatants participate in combat. It's not usually because they -have- to, it's because they love combat. Generating an additional feature is not going to lessen them turning up. 

I realise this is just an example, but I think sometimes ideas are being generated based on the idea that people combat because they have to. It's a conflict game and people love the conflict. It won't actually do anything to address the issue, which is simply numbers and the -result- is lessened access to commodities. The suggestion of something like a village is just to remove the malus from not winning, not introducing more mechanics that can cause a conflict point. 

Right, this is not the fault of any one org or player(s). It's a combination of a lot that happened since ascension. My biggest concern is that it's a problem that lingers for a long time before it ever gets better, as it did when I was on the losing side. I don't like that the game, mechanically, rewards conflict that isn't really challenging and that there's no real incentives for people to spread out across orgs. 

But I don't know what the right answer is to that. The only ideas that have come up before were unpopular ones that made just about everyone angry. And no one should feel forced to alt or join an org if that's not where they want to play. I'd do it myself before I told someone else to, and... I don't want to. The imbalance is still a problem, though.

Edit: Added to this, @Sapphira, is I completely understand where the "pkers" are coming from in going to conflict events, too, or in raiding. No one should feel bad for playing a game in a way that's fun for them (provided they aren't breaking the rules or deliberately harassing other players) but if the end result of doing that is fewer people engaging(either side), then there's a problem.