I think the reason stage 3 is boring for Morkarion is that he is an ascendant warrior with nightkiss. Particularly at crown level, it can be pretty challenging for softer classes. It used to be pretty common to see repeated death for people the first time they did stage three at orb/crown. You don't see it so much anymore, cause it's only the same 10 guys who ever claim anymore, and they're pretty well practiced by now. They've all done it scores if not hundreds of times.
I've done it as a Demigod tracker, your point is irrelevant, your general passive-aggressiveness is however, adorable.
Stage 3 is boring as hell, the mobs come so slowly it's basically a very very slow paced version of stage one. It offers no challenge and nothing new mechanics wise that is different to stages one and two.
The divine voice
of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations,
Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
Uhuh, sure. Pity none of you ever approach the subject ICly and left Her to do all the detective work. Anyway we're veering off topic, and I'm tired of dealing with that subject in non rp situations.
Going back to a previous point you were making about how it's the same people doing it constantly. Isn't that tends to be because the people you want running domoths are constantly active to maintain/upgrade said domoth so it doesn't fall into a state of disuse, and said people tend to be ideal VA candidates regardless? We've used Demigod claims and upgrades several times, chances are those people are likely going to be the main candidates for any up coming VA elections, because we raise people based on their reliability. Yes Ascendants have advantages, personally I don't think they need as many as they have, but should still retain some, you just proposed normalising the process entirely, and I'm a massive objector to homogenisation in any game. "Let's make everyone the same."
Except not everyone is the same. You could make every attack do the same damage/damage type, have the same set of afflictions and same crowd control effects, and still one side would do better than the other, why? Because player mentality, attitude and approach to this game matters more than people are giving it credit, and instead people are trying to pass off as many mechanics as possible for the reason this gulf exists. Granted some of those mechanics could do with a look over for various reasons (mostly the fact some of them simply aren't fun, such as stage 3. Note the non Ascendant without Nightkiss mage who also spoke about the tedious boredom of it. People die in stage 1 when it's faster paced spawning sure, I'll give you that. Stage 3? No, sorry, not buying it.)
Besides going back to your idea of "homogenisation will make it better!" you're still going to have a small core number of people doing it, why? Because you need people who can bash out stage one without dying horribly at orb/crown level.
The divine voice
of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations,
Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
Except not everyone is the same. You could make every attack do the same damage/damage type, have the same set of afflictions and same crowd control effects, and still one side would do better than the other, why? Because player mentality, attitude and approach to this game matters more than people are giving it credit, and instead people are trying to pass off as many mechanics as possible for the reason this gulf exists.
Can we please avoid this law of attraction stuff? It tends to quickly lead to victim blaming, which is non-productive at best. While there is a definite issue involved with the reward-hit of winning leading to more winning, it's because people will tend towards an org that is winning as they seek out that reward-hit. It's not because the people in the winning faction are thinking positive thoughts and therefore winning, or that people in the losing orgs feel like losers and are therefore doomed to be losers until they stop.
Discussion about how to attract new players who want to participate at high levels in the combat scene are productive. Discussion about how xyz person needs to "just buck up", and that it's only their own fault they are losing tends to not be productive.
This is tame, you getting absolved everytime you hold a domoth. Been there, done that.
The thought that one side is 'continously losing' is false. You wouldn't hold a domoth is that was true. The thought that we only absolve with 4:1 odds is also false, In the past few absolves, the numbers have been much much closer according to farscout/clair etc than 4:1. The time they did fight the numbers were 10-8 and after Elanorwen summoned our group past the greatpent, you guys gave up. That was like 10-15 minutes into the absolve.
What's happening is people care too damn much about losing.
You got absolved, who cares? You don't have a ton of villages, whoop de doo. What you should care about is trying, having fun and trying to get better. Stop putting all your cards on winning. You don't need to win to have fun, you don't need to win to feel good about your efforts, you don't need to win to figure out how to improve, get better, synergize more. Talan can vouch for this, but we've had fights where we were so beaten, we'd head back up with the entire goal of just killing one person. If we killed that person, call it a success. Yeah, the rest of us all died in the attempt, but we accomplished what we set out to do.
My Final Ascension track record is 1-3 (I missed Xenthos ascension). My War Seal record is 2-3. I've lost more times than I can count. I've lead people to their deaths without accomplishing anything more times than I can count. I've made stupid noob mistakes and died to people I had no right dying to more times than I can count. Anything you can do and lose at in this game, I've lost at and I've lost -bad- at. The same goes for Shuyin, Silvanus, Kelly, Talan, Akyaevin, Thoros etc. There are no undefeated players in this game and there isn't anyone who only loses.
Yeah it's a bummer if you lose, sure. It's much more fun winning typically, but the best kind of winning is winning when you should have by all rights lost. The close ones where you really aren't favored. All it takes is 1 clear during a domoth, 1 really good wipe during a wildnodes, 1 really good sweep during a village revolt to change the flow and the direction and the morale of a fight. You can't do this if you give up after 1 or 2 rounds though. You got to keep trying, something didn't work? Try a different plant. Didn't execute the plan properly? Give it another go. The 'we're going to lose, so why bother' mentality hurts conflict far far more than anything we'll do to you and that mentality comes from banking on winning everything all the time.
The idea that the 'winning' side needs to take responsibility and control their actions is stupid. Why is it our responsibility to back off and give people slack? What's stopping the losing side from learning, improving and eventually starting to win? As has been said before, this is tame, every org has been curbstomped into the ground at one point or another, yet they've all managed to bounce back, and it didn't happen by the winning side 'letting up'. That's my take on it, it's probably a bit harsh, but I grew up in Lusternia in a harsh world, much harsher than it is today. I don't feel like I need to let up because you can't be bothered.
What's stopping a losing side from just picking up steam and winning? Not enough new people.
What 'losing' orgs tend to need are fresh waves of new combatants, people who join the game and decide to make being competitive in combat a major part of their gameplay. However, it is very hard to attract someone like that to an org that is not already competitive. It is very hard to maintain an atmosphere of fun combat when your 'team' is consistently or systematically downtrodden mechanically. Compound this with the fact that you're not necessarily looking to attract existing combatants to your org, but that the real deciding factor tends to be new combatants. The new player is much less likely to be deeply invested enough in an org to stick around through enough disastrous fights to build up to a decent tier of proficiency. This is all without even considering the before mentioned issues with a progressively creeping feature ceiling, of course.
Why is this different from when the game opened and griefing was so much worse? Well, part of it could be what @Silvanus mentioned in his post: Most of the 'griefing' is now being done by the system, not necessarily by a small-ish subset of players. This means several bad things, the most obvious of which is the shifting of animus generated by losing away from "KillMonk McEvilFace, the tainted asshole, is defiling our forest constantly, but one day we will destroy KillMonk his family" to "KillMonk is taking full advantage of the system, which we cannot do. One day, the system may change, and we will then win instead".
To cut the long spiel short, this means that there is less motivation generated by the system of conflict to participate for anything but participation's sake, especially when you take into account the relative insignificance of most benefits to what I'd guess is the majority of players. Their nation having slightly more commodities or power in their bottomless stocks of either resource means little to Joe Blo, aspiring novice. Having an extra statpoint is a nice boost, but its loss leaves Joe relatively unchanged.
Not to mention that consistently being rewarded for 'effort' without any bearing on success doesn't lead to good motivation. While it would be mean spirited to give no reward for participating, relying on 'good effort' backpats to rally troops leads to a legion of fighters who are in it for the personal reward. If that's the motivator, why bother to improve your village capturing combat skills? Winning the village will not benefit you personally, except in a possible nebulous way by proxy.
No, IME, the motivator for really strong combatants tends to be the thrill of well-executed strategy and tactics. If you get that thrill only very infrequently while you're forming your core proficiency, you're not very likely to be motivated to stick with it and improve, and that's that. No amount of friendly cheerleading or helpful hands solves that fundamental issue. I have no idea what would.
(mostly the fact some of them simply aren't fun, such as stage 3. Note the non Ascendant without Nightkiss mage who also spoke about the tedious boredom of it. People die in stage 1 when it's faster paced spawning sure, I'll give you that. Stage 3? No, sorry, not buying it.)
You should, because they did.
However, you will also have to stop for a moment to remember that we are talking about a different Lusternia. This is the Lusternia that attracted Celina, and in which she was quite successful with basically no artifacts.
Off the top of my head, I can definitely recall this happening to Lehki and Urazial when they were ascendants. Lehki I'm not so sure about, but Urazial I'm quite sure had pretty much no artifacts. Now, you might say that's an example of raising someone who is unprepared, but you must understand that this was common back then! Very few people had level 3 life runes, maybe level 2 at most. Crit runes? Probably not. Magic rune? Even less likely.
You know what else they didn't have back then? Kirigami, darkbeer, amberbeer, razing on beast aggressive, devout shield, Project Eternity (they might have been running with a Tosha blessing if they were "dedicated"), curio genies, curio damage buffs, curio damage resistance, tattoos of any kind, or damage shift (!). Not sure about attune.
I know people in general complain about how tame the world feels now, and this lends itself to some of the feelings of boredom and ennui that occur in modern Lusternia, making it feel more boring as an all-around experience. As Daevos (or was it Xenthos) said earlier, we need to stop adding more little buffs, and should probably scale back on a few to boot.
5
Cyndarinused Flamethrower! It was super effective.
I just want to point out that stage 3 is a lot less boring when you're not a super buffed warrior. As a Wiccan that maxed out dmp, some stage 3s still kicked my ass. Some domoths are rough. I don't remember which anyone. Chaos can kiss my ass, I remember that much.
Yeah, some mechanics could change, sure, I agree with a lot of the stuff mentioned, feature creep etc, Yeah, change it.
The 'losing' side has been complaining about mechanics as long as I've been playing. They even removed Nexus weakenings because of complaining and the complaining just moved to something else. So that whole argument is not something I'm really buying. It's as common as delete choke/monks whatever. It's not solely the mechanics of the game that's an issue, and belaying such is just distracting from more, real issues. There really isn't any more conflict mechanics than back in the day either. Flares came into the picture (they really replaced weakenings) and epic quests came into being. There may be a few others I'm not thinking of, but more or less, they same conflict mechanics are around, albeit changed to make them more 'fair. While they are definitely more abundant today, power/comms etc weren't that much harder to get back in those days either.
Anyway, Downtrodden orgs -have- maintained an atmosphere of fun combat. There's all sorts of stories from before my time, of people logging in, deffing up and defending etherglom for a few hours, then qqing, and a lot of them thought it was great. Can it be hard, sure, but you know what makes it real hard? The 'why bother' attitude of leading combatants. As I said, too much stock is placed in 'winning' and 'losing' and not enough is placed in 'having fun'
Edit: Knowledge is by far the worse domoth, it's the one I learned on and I died all the time
Edit2: You win villages, because that's what you work up to, That's what goals are, something you keep working on and keep making bigger so you get better and accomplish more things. Just because you don't need to win to have fun doesn't mean you shouldn't aim for it. You just take what you can get, and work your way up
To add to my prior post, I also -definitely- remembering times where someone would stand in the main fulcrux during crown stage 3 to maintain aegis for whoever was doing the claim. And for crown stage 1, you'd have 4-5 people in there all killing at once just to ensure the one claiming didn't have to leave the room (also to farm tons of gold).
To add to my prior post, I also -definitely- remembering times where someone would stand in the main fulcrux during crown stage 3 to maintain aegis for whoever was doing the claim. And for crown stage 1, you'd have 4-5 people in there all killing at once just to ensure the one claiming didn't have to leave the room (also to farm tons of gold).
You are remembering wrong, because unless it was changed before I started playing, Aegis has never worked cross areas. I've definitely been aegised for stage 1, but stage 3 would never have worked.
To add to my prior post, I also -definitely- remembering times where someone would stand in the main fulcrux during crown stage 3 to maintain aegis for whoever was doing the claim. And for crown stage 1, you'd have 4-5 people in there all killing at once just to ensure the one claiming didn't have to leave the room (also to farm tons of gold).
You are remembering wrong, because unless it was changed before I started playing, Aegis has never worked cross areas. I've definitely been aegised for stage 1, but stage 3 would never have worked.
Domoth farming was awesome.
It might be, but I'm pretty sure the domoth fulcrux was considered same area at some point. I could simply be remembering someone thinking of it and attempting it instead, though. I'll admit, my memory isn't always spot on!
I just want to point out that stage 3 is a lot less boring when you're not a super buffed warrior. As a Wiccan that maxed out dmp, some stage 3s still kicked my ass. Some domoths are rough. I don't remember which anyone. Chaos can kiss my ass, I remember that much.
I love me some chaos hammies... but I absolutely despise Knowledge paradoxes... especially at crown level where they can insta-aeon/stupidity/blackout you, it gets ugly.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
I will fix combat (and maybe player retention too), watch this:
Imagine that credits were available at 6000 gold per, like the old days (or less, depending on how old-as-dirt you are) and that everyone therefore has access to their skills and a few nifty artifacts to get them in the game.
Serenwilde has a decent foundation. Nature holds the world together, fae are embodiments of Nature, cities destroy Nature, protect Nature, hate Cities, rah rah rah! Once upon a time, Serenwilde had a booming atmosphere, lots of happy, friendly combatants, RPers out the wazoo, and active Divine that harmonized with the forest. Basically none of these things exist anymore.
Point one: Atmosphere.
When you log into Serenwilde, if you greet people on the commune aether, you're lucky to have somebody respond to you. If you check communetells, you are likely to see the same three people saying hello and goodbye over the last 3 or so RL days, with hardly any other communication. If you walk around the forest, it's pretty empty, and the nexus may have one or two people standing at it, but they are most likely AFK, and if they aren't, they probably won't acknowledge that somebody showed up. Most of the time, it's somebody influencing guards. If you check CWHO, there's always people sitting in a manse doing nothing except maybe chatting on OOC clans (every org has this, I'm not saying they don't, but it's more noticeable in Serenwilde because of emptiness.) There is no camaraderie, no sense of community. There are a few small clicks, but for the most part, there is no sense of being part of an organization with a common cause, more like a bunch of disparate people that happen to live in the same place.
Point two: Combatants.
I am not trying to call anybody out, but the few combatants that are currently in Serenwilde that can be considered top tier hardly interact with those trying to break into combat, from what I saw and experienced. I tried to dip my toe in, but as I was trying to pick stuff up, the person who would actually be able to help me figure out MD combat went away for about a week, and then was on opposite timetable from me. Another MD wanted to learn combat, but there was nobody to teach her. I watched the shofangi go through baby champion after baby champion, fighting with other newbies in the arena, but from what I could tell, (as an outside observer, mind you) there is not much passing of knowledge from top-tier combatants to the low ones. Not a lot of discussion of strategy and how to work together, and not much effort to try to get people to learn. The few times we got raided (when I was online) I watched people log off rather than deal with the raid, and the few people that finally mustered to go meet the raiders (ether seren or that wonderful attack on all the guard stacks) were midbie combatants who had no idea of strategy or how to work together. This is frustrating, additionally, because there is no rallying cry. When your org at least gathers together to work for a common cause, even if ultimately a losing one, there is a bonding between those that participated. From what I observed, there was a whole lot of 'lay low and let it happen, eventually they will get bored and go away.' Yes, I was guilty of it too, because I was one person, with no clue how to use my skills, facing 3-4-5+ top tier combatants, so I did not jump in because futility.
Point three: Roleplay.
There are many ways to roleplay in Lusternia, and it's awesome. Personal roleplay when you are in a room by yourself and just want to do things the way your character would, which is alright for a while. Most RP is interaction style, such as guild-level roleplay where you interact with your guildmates, org level, with your commune/citymates, family RP, and Order RP, to name a few. Roleplay depends on multiple people for participation, a minimum of two, and it's very draining for one person to be doing all the effort, seeking people out, finding reasons to interact, etc. From personal experience, the current Serenwilde population does not seem to be interested in RP as a general rule. I tried, with several people, to get roleplay going, and then realized that I was the only one making any effort in furthering the roleplay, so it was discouraging. It was likewise the same in the Moondancers. There were a few people interested in RP, but one of them quit suddenly, another was on a bad schedule (comparative to mine) and another logged in maybe once or twice a week. The others that were around regularly showed little interest in guild RP, even when I would try to initiate group events. As far as Serenwilde as a whole, people only seemed to show interest if a guild rite or a prayer or a ritual were to be had, and then would get bored partway through and vanish, or wait till the end and disperse immediately, with no interaction aside from polite observation or participation. For the most part, there is a lot of manse-sitting, mudsexing (what else is new) and lets-snatch-novices-right-out-the-portal-and-make-them-family rp. Not really a lot to get into, if you want more than that.
Point four: Divine.
Looking at HELP GODS lists both Hoaracle and Maylea as active gods. They both have Orders, and both have guilds they Patron. However, there has been no interaction from either of them in quite some time. For a while, Parua tried to get some sort of interaction with the Order of Hoaracle, she prayed a few times, offered a lot, spent a lot of time in the Godrealm, and tried to understand the philosophies expounded in the newsposts. The one time she got any sort of response was when she prayed for keys to the guild teacher shop in the MD, and was sent a letter, with no writing in it, with 3 keys to the shop. That was all she got from the Divine she had pledged her allegiance to. The Order did nothing, said nothing, furthered nothing. Not even the active ordermembers really did anything Order-related, except for use the Order emote sometimes. There was absolutely no reason to stay in the Order except for the h/m/e blessings from empowering guild mobs.
All of these things together made me vastly unhappy. I was logging in, and spending all of my time doing things solo. I was writing guild stuff for uninterested guildmates, I was trying to make a story with people who didnt really care if the RP continued or not, I was trying to help make a change that (it appeared) most people really didn't care to actually work toward, just slap a slightly different title on, and pretend you are helping. It also did not help that I was listening to OOC clans where people were unhappy with status quo, and complaining a lot, which also brought my morale down on an OOC level.
There were a few people trying to help push the org in a better direction. @Hiriako was posting about Winter Court stuff, but got discouraged when he asked for responses, and got none. RP stuff pushed out another person who was actively involved in writing and RPing, (but this post is not about those circumstances.) A small handful of people trying to push for change and activity can't accomplish anything when met with an immovable wall of "not interested." I vaguely remember some months ago, probably October or November, @Enyalida talking about rewriting some laws, but nothing ever came of it.
I RPed a thing for over a month before moving Parua to Gaudi, and in the short 10 or so days I've been there, I've had guild, family, city, and order RP out the wazoo. I've seen the city actively work towards a common goal, watched people practice and get ready for combatty stuff (but we all know this stuff happens here, no surprise.) There is a very different atmosphere in Gaudiguch, and it's not just because the city is currently one of the winningest. There is pull, there is cohesion, there is fun.
The biggest difference I notice between the two orgs, is that people seem to be happy to log in and participate with Gaudi stuff.
How is this relevant to the topic at hand? I think this is the bottomline problem with most of the North. The burnout is palpable. The org, to me, felt dead because nobody seemed to want to interact with each other except the newbie-pouncers (for the sake of furthering bloodlines) and the mudsexers.
From my point of view, the mechanics had very little to do with why the org felt like it was failing. The heart was gone. How do you breathe life into an org that has no soul? I don't know, but I feel like it cannot be easy.
A whisper from the trees and a frosty presence tells you, secretly, "But you are strong, little
flower, and wise." The voice shifts and expands, becoming more real. "And everything you just said
in the ritual made me feel safer. You should, too."
@Lothringen Sadly I doubt that the days of "cheap credits" will ever truly come back, due to people wanting to play the market and having triggers set so that when someone mentions "credits" they instantly BUY X CREDITS AT (whatever their maximum is, probably 25k at the moment), then putting them back up at a higher price
I'm not saying everyone does it, but there IS a small group of people that do it, I have my own trigger that when someone says that there is cheaper credits, I do CREDITS FOR SALE to see how much they are selling for, only to find they have already sold and the cheapest ones are 25,000 gold or more.
Taking into consideration the fact that 1 credit typically costs around 25,000 gold, to buy enough credits to transcend a skill, ignoring the 2.5 lesson bonus you get for the first X credits converted, you need approximately 7.15 MILLION gold to transcend a single skill from inept. (at the old price of 6000 gold, it would cost only 1.7mil gold to transcend a skill)
Never put passion before principle. Even if you win, you lose.
If olive oil comes from olives, where does baby oil come from?
If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?
This. So much this, except replace "Gaudiguch" with "Glomdoring" for me, with an added factor there were people in Glomdoring who were eager and happy for me to come on over. In Serenwilde, I often felt like I was somewhat IC when I wasn't interacting with, say, my family, or a small group of people. There were people I tried to poke into RPing with me who I saw AFKing a lot, and it just didn't happen. It was depressing at best.
As a character, as a player, it is so awesome to log in and feel like there are people waiting for you, people who are eager to see you. There are a couple of mostly non-family people in Serenwilde who evoked this feeling for me as well, such as @Aramel and @Riluna. Gods, they were awesome to RP with if you could catch them awake. But in Glomdoring, in my experience, there is no time you stop RPing. If you are on Prime, you are RPing. At the tree? RPing, typically. Even if you're alone, you have the chance and likelihood of some self RP. In Glomdoring, I've felt like my character's part of something important, even though she holds no commune or guild positions. In Serenwilde... not so much. And my alts I've had in each of the orgs now reinforce that feeling of "why am I logging in" only in Serenwilde and Celest. In Hallifax, RP. In Gaudiguch, RP. In Magnagora, RP. Serenwilde and Celest... it's like I'm starving for it. I've not given up on my Celestian alt yet because I'm praying someone will appear and do something magnificent with RP, aside from the snugglies - no really, there may be more snugglies in Celest now, Celest, what happened?! - attempting to classify their cuddles, pounces, and over-the-top PDAs at the Pool as serious RP.
I might have ranted, likely did. In short, yes, I agree with @Parua.
Give certain entry level artifacts (vial/pipe runes, lips, L1 runes of various types) a fixed gold cost as well as retaining your credit value.
You've just automatically created a cap to the value of credits, where it would become cheaper instead to buy these artifacts and convert them rather than go on CFS.
The divine voice
of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations,
Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
Uhuh, sure. Pity none of you ever approach the subject ICly and left Her to do all the detective work.
We don't look a gift-essence provider in the fangs.
Everiine said: The reason population is low isn't because there are too many orgs. It's because so many facets of the game are outright broken and protected by those who benefit from it being that way. An overabundance of gimmicks (including game-breaking ones), artifacts that destroy any concept of balance, blatant pay-to-win features, and an obsession with convenience that makes few things actually worthwhile all contribute to the game's sad decline.
2
Cyndarinused Flamethrower! It was super effective.
It is very true that an org with a active group of combatant will create new combatants. Glomdoring has cranked out several high tier combatants in my time. A lot of this is circumstantial, does the person have a natural talent for pk, do they have the RL income for credits. Some is not, such as the access to a number of successful PKers with the knowledge to develop the new guy's skills and take them out to pk in group settings. It is true, and I'm not sure Sidd takes this in to account when he discusses org attitude, that getting train wrecked over and over because you don't know what you're doing doesn't actually make you better. Combat is complicated, spammy, and confusing. It's immensely more difficult to break in to it without help (though not impossible.)
I will be blunt, seren has no top tiers and has had none for a long while. A couple high tiers, successful group PKers, but none that are considered authorities on pk. Even their pool of capable PKers seems to be very shallow.
As another note, Seren'a bad attitude is legendary. They don't have an active divine because they drove hoaracle off. This is an unfortunate fact. Now, I don't know if attitude is as all consuming as Sidd implies, but I think he has a point that it is does matter. Serena's environment is not a healthy one for new players, despite the efforts of a small handful to change it. They aren't the first! Don't take it as an attack on seren, as glomdoring has (as everyone knows) been subject to divine intervention to get it on course. (Aka Estarra herself.) Will you suddenly start winning if you change the attitude? No. You will lose still the way things are set up. You will, however, set yourself up for success with new players, which is the foundation of org growth.
3
Cyndarinused Flamethrower! It was super effective.
I always got stuck with knowledge because I was a healer.
(mostly the fact some of them simply aren't fun, such as stage 3. Note the non Ascendant without Nightkiss mage who also spoke about the tedious boredom of it. People die in stage 1 when it's faster paced spawning sure, I'll give you that. Stage 3? No, sorry, not buying it.)
You should, because they did.
So because things were difficult in yesteryear we should retain outdated mechanics now?
Anyway the North has a time window where they do well in, build on your victories there, and try not to rely on the age old "Numerical superiority and rush" tactic.
One of the best examples of outnumbered fighting recently was Maligorn's displacement field absolutely screwing up our side at Rikenfriez and making numbers count for very little. Throw in some runists or beckons and you could pull people into a killbox and we could have been taken apart piecemeal. Numbers mean squat if either misused or the opposition counters with effective teamwork. And as you (currently) don't have numbers outside that time window, learning and employing other tactics isn't a bad thing.
Sure it takes time to learn, sure it's going to come with its fair number of defeats but success doesn't happen overnight. People are too focused on short term solutions to create long term stability, it simply doesn't work that way.
The divine voice
of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations,
Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
A small handful of people trying to push for change and activity can't accomplish anything when met with an immovable wall of "not interested." I vaguely remember some months ago, probably October or November, @Enyalida talking about rewriting some laws, but nothing ever came of it.
That's exactly what happened there too, asked for help/feedback/replies and got zilch.
It is very true that an org with a active group of combatant will create new combatants. Glomdoring has cranked out several high tier combatants in my time. A lot of this is circumstantial, does the person have a natural talent for pk, do they have the RL income for credits. Some is not, such as the access to a number of successful PKers with the knowledge to develop the new guy's skills and take them out to pk in group settings. It is true, and I'm not sure Sidd takes this in to account when he discusses org attitude, that getting train wrecked over and over because you don't know what you're doing doesn't actually make you better. Combat is complicated, spammy, and confusing. It's immensely more difficult to break in to it without help (though not impossible.)
I will be blunt, seren has no top tiers and has had none for a long while. A couple high tiers, successful group PKers, but none that are considered authorities on pk. Even their pool of capable PKers seems to be very shallow.
As another note, Seren'a bad attitude is legendary. They don't have an active divine because they drove hoaracle off. This is an unfortunate fact. Now, I don't know if attitude is as all consuming as Sidd implies, but I think he has a point that it is does matter. Serena's environment is not a healthy one for new players, despite the efforts of a small handful to change it. They aren't the first! Don't take it as an attack on seren, as glomdoring has (as everyone knows) been subject to divine intervention to get it on course. (Aka Estarra herself.) Will you suddenly start winning if you change the attitude? No. You will lose still the way things are set up. You will, however, set yourself up for success with new players, which is the foundation of org growth.
I agree that just running in aimlessly isn't going to make you better, which is why I said set goals and such, even if it's as small as 'lets make sure to kill this person.' I also said one idea didn't work, try another one, or you didn't execute it correctly? Give it another go. I get that people don't like dying over and over. I don't force anyone on my side to keep doing suicide type runs if they don't want to, but I'll always take willing people and we'll keep trying until they aren't willing anymore. Really, all I'm trying to say is that if you want to win, you have to try, and if you give up after two deaths, you really aren't trying.
Think I'm done with conflict when it's one side against another. The other side is too well organised, our side isn't, and I'm not going to go log onto a winning-side alt just to have fun.
Everiine said: The reason population is low isn't because there are too many orgs. It's because so many facets of the game are outright broken and protected by those who benefit from it being that way. An overabundance of gimmicks (including game-breaking ones), artifacts that destroy any concept of balance, blatant pay-to-win features, and an obsession with convenience that makes few things actually worthwhile all contribute to the game's sad decline.
Comments
Stage 3 is boring as hell, the mobs come so slowly it's basically a very very slow paced version of stage one. It offers no challenge and nothing new mechanics wise that is different to stages one and two.
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
We genuinely appreciate the fact that you are using Glomdoring's 2 million power to feed Isune 10 million essence/week.
Vive l'apostrophe!
Except not everyone is the same. You could make every attack do the same damage/damage type, have the same set of afflictions and same crowd control effects, and still one side would do better than the other, why? Because player mentality, attitude and approach to this game matters more than people are giving it credit, and instead people are trying to pass off as many mechanics as possible for the reason this gulf exists. Granted some of those mechanics could do with a look over for various reasons (mostly the fact some of them simply aren't fun, such as stage 3. Note the non Ascendant without Nightkiss mage who also spoke about the tedious boredom of it. People die in stage 1 when it's faster paced spawning sure, I'll give you that. Stage 3? No, sorry, not buying it.)
Besides going back to your idea of "homogenisation will make it better!" you're still going to have a small core number of people doing it, why? Because you need people who can bash out stage one without dying horribly at orb/crown level.
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
What's stopping a losing side from just picking up steam and winning? Not enough new people.
To cut the long spiel short, this means that there is less motivation generated by the system of conflict to participate for anything but participation's sake, especially when you take into account the relative insignificance of most benefits to what I'd guess is the majority of players. Their nation having slightly more commodities or power in their bottomless stocks of either resource means little to Joe Blo, aspiring novice. Having an extra statpoint is a nice boost, but its loss leaves Joe relatively unchanged.
No, IME, the motivator for really strong combatants tends to be the thrill of well-executed strategy and tactics. If you get that thrill only very infrequently while you're forming your core proficiency, you're not very likely to be motivated to stick with it and improve, and that's that. No amount of friendly cheerleading or helpful hands solves that fundamental issue. I have no idea what would.
However, you will also have to stop for a moment to remember that we are talking about a different Lusternia. This is the Lusternia that attracted Celina, and in which she was quite successful with basically no artifacts.
Off the top of my head, I can definitely recall this happening to Lehki and Urazial when they were ascendants. Lehki I'm not so sure about, but Urazial I'm quite sure had pretty much no artifacts. Now, you might say that's an example of raising someone who is unprepared, but you must understand that this was common back then! Very few people had level 3 life runes, maybe level 2 at most. Crit runes? Probably not. Magic rune? Even less likely.
You know what else they didn't have back then? Kirigami, darkbeer, amberbeer, razing on beast aggressive, devout shield, Project Eternity (they might have been running with a Tosha blessing if they were "dedicated"), curio genies, curio damage buffs, curio damage resistance, tattoos of any kind, or damage shift (!). Not sure about attune.
I know people in general complain about how tame the world feels now, and this lends itself to some of the feelings of boredom and ennui that occur in modern Lusternia, making it feel more boring as an all-around experience. As Daevos (or was it Xenthos) said earlier, we need to stop adding more little buffs, and should probably scale back on a few to boot.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Imagine that credits were available at 6000 gold per, like the old days (or less, depending on how old-as-dirt you are) and that everyone therefore has access to their skills and a few nifty artifacts to get them in the game.
I'm not saying everyone does it, but there IS a small group of people that do it, I have my own trigger that when someone says that there is cheaper credits, I do CREDITS FOR SALE to see how much they are selling for, only to find they have already sold and the cheapest ones are 25,000 gold or more.
Taking into consideration the fact that 1 credit typically costs around 25,000 gold, to buy enough credits to transcend a skill, ignoring the 2.5 lesson bonus you get for the first X credits converted, you need approximately 7.15 MILLION gold to transcend a single skill from inept. (at the old price of 6000 gold, it would cost only 1.7mil gold to transcend a skill)
If olive oil comes from olives, where does baby oil come from?
If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?
You've just automatically created a cap to the value of credits, where it would become cheaper instead to buy these artifacts and convert them rather than go on CFS.
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!