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Saran said:

Alexandria said:

Neladahi said:

Does Hallifax lore not follow the cast system, or just the players? I think it's a good push to move away from the caste system as players, but it might be a good idea to go through and see about getting NPCs to also change their minds about it before not including it!

It's not been something that the admins have been amenable to changing in the past, and we haven't tried since the whole admin shakeup. 

Just thinking about it, if castes aren't going away adding "guild paths" to hallifax's city ranks could be interesting.
(The issues when I was in Halli weren't about being lesser but just really mechanical, like caste being tied to cityrank meant not many people hit cr6 so people were doing villages with only two influence attacks)

We don't gate cityrank like that. We have a peerage system that was implemented to move away from it, and it's completely outdated and basically unused, especially due to lack of... well, the system being finished. At all.

@Cheliyi Why is your RP so dang BEAUTIFUL

I'll throw a quick comment about a couple of things

Re: combat spam - one of the things I would like to look at is reducing 3rd party messages in an effort to also help reduce lag. If you think about it, sending the first and second person messages only involves two people, but the 3rd party message could be up to the 40-50ish other people in the room we saw during Ascension. That's sending the same line 50 times, so you can imagine removing some of the extraneous lines from that situation may help reduce how much we're processing at a time.

The question becomes what information is important to convey to everyone in the room and what information can we get away without broadcasting to everyone. We have some options here and there's probably obvious ones (like what's been mentioned already, song effects, gems etc) but others may be tricky. It's something that we'd need to put thought into (and likely get feedback on)

It's also not something we'd be doing right away.

Re: other conflict events - I'm generally not opposed but it's not something we have room on our plate for at the moment. In general, these things would need to avoid some of the issues we run into currently with conflict events. Like a ranked war teams event encouraging people to actually compete against their enemies (the same issue we run into psychodrama). We'd have to figure out guidelines and rules that encourage that while not making it detrimental. As has been noted time and time again, anything that can be gamed, will be gamed, so we would need to reduce what can be gamed as much as possible to produce legitimate conflicts such as that. Otherwise, it would just fall into another mechanic that doesn't get used.

There seems to be a huge timezone issue with the current alliance set up, which may be exacerbating the issue of neither side getting a "good fight" often. The MagSerenGaudi team is active from 10PM (GMT) to 10AM (GMT). The GlomCelestHalli side is almost exactly opposite that, with a couple of hours overlap on either side. 

Not something that can easily be fixed, either!

Conflict certainly can feel like a numbers game, and often if a few people in your group feel down about the odds then it's more likely that one side will suffer more people who agree with them -- which is why staying positive about your chances or espousing the enjoyment of it is really important!

I don't believe that you need certain things (trapping, aeon, monks, group healing) to thrive; there have been lots of instances where Magnagora has had subpar numbers by a great deal and a limited repertoire and done very well. The biggest, most important part of conflict is being aware of the situation. Being able to regroup, being able to switch targets easily, being aware if you're forced to move and have to move back, all of these are super important to ensuring one group thrives in combat over another.

This is also true in instances such as revolts. Serenwilde won Rikenfriez the time before last with 1-2 influencers while their allies fended off a group of combatants that were larger than their own.

Combat can be incredibly spammy, and I personally feel that if players are forced to create system-side gags for a great deal of information to make it manageable, then something is wrong there. I think there are definitely ways to look at stuff (researcher entities, songs that have frequent room echoes, demesnes, etc.) to condense and eliminate some of the spam to make it a bit easier for those who struggle with the spam.

I definitely believe that encouraging healthy conflict would go a long way to eliminating greater toxicity and general negativity in the playerbase. Ranked arena events with limited sizes (War-style team games, sparring), perhaps influence/debate contests, an improved psychodrama, or even other conflict options would be really great.

A few key skills also make a - huge - difference in group combat.

-Empress & rad & wisp & other adjacent summons
-melding
-trapping
-Aeon
-Firm blocking
-perfect fifth
-Group healing & Curing abilities

I'm not an expert by far, but these and many more key abilities can often make or break group combat in my eyes....not the least of which is the difference between organised target calling and chaos.

Edit: Oh and having a monk

Most of it comes down to the attitude of the players. There have been many timequakes and even a domoth we stole, where we were outnumbered but were willing to give it a crack anyway. Sometimes we succeeded. Sometimes we managed a couple of anomalies. Sometimes we failed terribly and called it a day. 

Having a go should always be encouraged even against bad odds because sometimes you do better than you expect. On the flip side, if people don't feel like an uphill battle sometimes and would rather spend their play time doing something else, not going to hold it against them! Seriously though, TQs you lose nothing by dying. Huge kudos to the people who still try, keep trying, or even just try to hang in long enough for participation. Also TQs happen more regularly than anything else. Best practice is to dive in and try things.