Best Of

I think what most people are saying is, if not for lag they would have been able to counter the bombs. But with lag, any sort of set and forget powers that hit multiple people for massive damage from a distance that get through with people unable to react are going to be incredibly powerful, and bombs are a powerful less-than-10-second ability that can get through and hit multiple people at once while they helplessly stare at their screen, hoping the command they entered 5 minutes ago will send - let alone react in a timely manner. Logging out and restarting every 10 minutes shouldn't be necessary to hopefully have a few minutes where commands go through. Where's the real competition in that? Where is the victory?

People know how to counter the bombs/protect themselves/stay alive. They didn't lose to these powers by being poor players or less skilled or by making tactical mistakes, and that is what really stings. Being told to just get better for next year is a really big kick in the face. No one says the other side didn't also work hard and plan and try hard and spend credits (everyone did!), and it seems no matter the outcome, it was going to be unfair because ultimately lag won the day. Anyone who poured their heart into it would be (and a lot clearly are) upset with being unable to play and perhaps everyone saying prettily to get good or maybe you should have envoyed should consider how they would feel if the outcome wasn't in their favour.

Maybe if there had been no lag, Choros would still be triumphant, and I truly believe most (most, not all, most) would still be satisfied knowing they tried their utmost best and gave it their all and were just unfortunately outplayed, as opposed to what ultimately happened. I think we all need to look beyond 'they are just being sore losers'. 

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.

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.

Terentia said:

Outside @Lantra's great question about hearing what players like about game lore for building purposes, I am wondering, in order to think about org roleplay: What is one thing that irks you about your org's lore? What is one thing that you love about it? This isn't a question about what you would change, by the way. Simply, I want to know what are the pressure points. 

I'm disappointed in how the caste system was used in Hallifax. Early on after Hallifax was released, it was used to keep warriors/merchants from getting favors for defense or other things aside from making art, even preventing some players from advancing past CR4 if they weren't part of a special clique. There's a perfectly good way to rp the caste system being a way to make sure people understand that all parts of Hallifax are needed to make the city function, but it wasn't presented this way at first.

Terentia said:

Outside @Lantra's great question about hearing what players like about game lore for building purposes, I am wondering, in order to think about org roleplay: What is one thing that irks you about your org's lore? What is one thing that you love about it? This isn't a question about what you would change, by the way. Simply, I want to know what are the pressure points. 

With Gaudiguch, my biggest issue is the lack of outlined depth. There's very little to be said of liberty aside from 'we liberate people sometimes because good', and Enlightenment has been historically lorded over by gatekeepers who really had nothing of value behind the curtain of FAINTSMILE and madlibs strung together. With our cosmic plane just being a squelching mess with no figureheads, there's nothing to really aspire to as an embodiment of the org beyond the often flimsy 'For Freedom!' rallying cry.

Even Hallifax, who shares our lack of mobs to emulate on the cosmic level, has embraced the Higher Emotions as a very successful teaching tool. While some would say (and I agree, to a point) that part of Gaudiguch's charm is revelling in that chaos, the lack of a mold, and blazing your own trail, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of how to appropriately build a character around the love for their org. 'I do what I want and also I drink a lot' just doesn't float my goat, you know? Everyone should love their own people, everyone should love doing their org's version of the Right Thing, but what's beyond that?

There's a lot of really good tidbits lying around, but I've yet to see someone who can bring them together into something that truly is and is of Gaudiguch, at least not without heavy reliance on divine-specific roleplay.

First of all, congratulations to Parhelion and friends for enduring that truly awful dumpster fire!

I don't normally have a problem with chem/wood bombs, to be honest. They're certainly a little crazy, but it's easy enough to shield and avoid them under normal circumstances.

That's the problem with today's event, though- they weren't normal circumstances. The only counter-play to those bombs (and no, I don't think it's reasonable or desirable for the whole game to flex to one class for every ascension going forward) was nullified by the game's inability to process the load, and that doesn't make for an engaging, entertaining, or thoughtful experience for anyone involved.

I have zero desire to participate in another ascension and that's really unfortunate because it's such a big deal in the game sense.

Bombs suck, sure. But the fact that in 2020 a text game event isn’t stopped in the PRE-start pit battle when the lag starts and simply delayed 24 hours is mind boggling. I understand that Lusternia doesn’t have the resources as some big ticket MMO but I just cannot fathom how the Staff event was allowed to proceed past the moment it was realized there was an issue of this magnitude. 

This entire thread assumes we had any ability to act how we wanted when we wanted. In the last hour especially, most of us could not get a -single- command off anywhere near when we wanted it (even when I was almost down to 0 insanity, I had command lag anywhere from 30s to minutes at a time), much less trying to coordinate anything. The method to get Choros off the node was easy if the game didn't completely crap out. We knew what to do, and what to expect in full. It was quite directly the inability to input commands that decided it today.

Now, the bombs made it harder and more of a pressure cooker in the latter half, sure, but conflating bombs with today's outcome doesn't track. We had no realistic chance at the end because we literally could not act at that point, period. 
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If you want to analyze bombs under non-ascension conditions, the +2 free racial affs make woods incredibly superior to the mage versions (and bleeding from Creeping on top that others don't get, for example), and I'll say it again, having X number of people being able to reliably room+ranged wipe with fire and forget skills is not good design. 

Getting the staff towards the end and being so lagged that none of my commands went through was probably the most frustrating experience of the ascension for me. I had zero ability to walk to a node despite no enemies being on, hindering, or attacking me. I got the staff and lost it entirely because I had no ability to input commands before it poofed on me for not being at a node. Ciaran got the staff after it reset on me and we never got it off Choros again.

I'm not saying we necessarily would have won, but its beyond frustrating to feel like the lag kept us from really even competing properly in the end, it felt much worse than it did in the beginning of ascension. I paused triggers and was closing the mud client and relogging every 5-10 mins at the end because that felt like the only thing that let me have any ability to input commands.