Best Of

Eritheyl said:

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.

I think Gaudiguch's biggest hindrance is that so much hinges on secrets. One of my most memorable Lusternia experiences is still maneuvering around with Alaksanteri and Dys to extract added Xeeth lore as surreptitiously as possible (I still have massive respect for the admin that was just kind of making it up with us as we went). The manuscript is out there somewhere, but you'd need to know where to look for it, and the political controversy around anything Xeeth means you can't really reliably talk about it with anyone. When you get to share those secrets with some select people, you make it really special for them, but everyone else out of the loop just wind up with the sadly distorted view of party-central. There's definitely other things in Gaudiguch that would often leave me going "Hmm!" and I just never got answers for them, or knew where to look or who to ask.

Hallifax has this issue as well, but I guess their epic quest secret is at least more shareable since anyone finishing the epic will have it placed in their lap. It's a pretty solid vehicle for encouraging sharing of that knowledge. But as a counterpoint - Plaxios Lowlands. This is like an even more extreme version of the Xeeth Labs, wherein we had a quest chain introduced that was apparently so controversial, no one ever got to work out all the bugs with it. So far as I know, the quests here have never been completed and are too broken to manage, and the difficulty in trying to get them done surreptitiously likewise foiled many attempts to properly document and bug them. If there's any hidden lore at the end of that rabbit hole, I doubt it's to be found.

This sort of stuff can be nice for now-and-again, but when a huge part of an org's identity hinges on it, well... yeah.

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.

Ascension this year: See warning about creeping. Enter command for shield. Wait 10 minutes. Wait 10 more minutes to phoenix/return to Astral cause I'm already dead.

Bombs generally are a ridiculous "strategy" in events like this, and chemwoods are worse than others. Added with the lag, and this was unplayable. There was no strategy to overcome it, and we did try everything available to us. All this posturing about "well maybe you could have done..." No, stop. Anything after that statement - I tried that. Repeatedly. I tried everything suggested, either from people here or from people on our side during the event to adjust for the bombs and the lag and the difficulty of moving people out of the room, and there was nothing else. 

We worked with what we had, and we did damn well at doing so, and nearly won. All the suggestions of how to "git gud" is just as absurd in this case as it ever was in the past. You want to pretend like you'd have done better in our place - BS. You'd have lost, and whined about it. 

Kaizynne said:

Choros definitely was not trying to talk himself up and make you all feel worse. So please don't go attacking him for that, even if it seems like he did. 

This.

I'm fully aware that my team carried me. There's not a single person in the group that didn't help make sure this win happened. All I did was work my ass off to make sure they had something they could work with. What I wasn't going to do was go out of my way to make their work any harder than it had to be. I invested in myself, asked for help and advice, tweaked my reflexes, and tried to earn their support. I wasn't owed their support, and both Ixion and Ciaran deserved this more than I did.

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.

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.

Treehug and Noose both do that, though, right? That is, deal one aff on their 10-p bomb list? It's broken bones for Treehug and entanglement for Noose.


edit, I don't usually notice the bleeding because I'm dead before it ticks

edit, I also don't find broken limbs to be as hindering as entanglement, although that may be mage bias.

Try this: Next report cycle, submit a report.

Problem: Wyrdenwood and Wildewood race give too large a benefit to their class.
Solution 1: Change the -Wood races to be a cosmetic only change, with the character keeping the benefits of their current race (functioning similar to race hats).
Solution 2: Same as solution 1, but make all bombs across all specs mirrored in damage type percent (ie. all non-physical, 33% physical, or 50% physical) and effects where relevant (all do the same amount of bleeding mana drain etc just change the relevant affs for the org).

I don't know what you mean when we "started exploiting" creeping. That was legit our strategy from second 1 of ascension. Yes, if you had 8 wildewood, it would have been the same effect on us. Brawrur, you got 26 kills by yourself as a chem doing bombs (including a few multikills). If you had 5 pyrochems doing your 10p bomb, even without affs, you would have had the same result. 

Do I think wyrden/wildewood are a lot stronger than xyzchemantics? Absolutely. I absolutely think they're more powerful with the +2 "affs" and the 2s faster bomb time. 

If you had all flexed to your respective chemwood classes, you would have had a very similar result to us. 

I understand that you are all, for the most part, unhappy with the turnout of ascension and the way things went down. I retired my old character because of an Ascension event. 

Choros definitely was not trying to talk himself up and make you all feel worse. So please don't go attacking him for that, even if it seems like he did. 

For the most part, IHC did really good. I definitely think there are things that could use improving, but that goes for both sides. 

Tl;Dr - ascension sucks, we've all been there. Could you have done exactly what we did? Yes, even without the xwood racial. You guys did really good. 

if the stuns are stacking you should definitely bug that.

I'm on the record as saying that stuns are cheap and the admin overuse them.

I'm still waiting on melds to be fixed.