Leaving Lusternia
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A volunteer whose primary job is to be there to work to address class and overarching conflict concerns. Maybe reducing some of the monthly slots to free up some space.
i feel like there are at least some players who would be interested in an opportunity like that
More seriously, though, I've noticed engagement in general seems to be really, REALLY low in a lot of respects. Poor Shonjir has been running a contest he's had to extend twice due to lack of entries, and everyone and their sisters has commented to death on how limiting the Family system can be, and how hard it can be to create a family identity while trying to reach and maintain Great House/Most Honourable Family and simultaneously trying to keep poor fits from damaging the family's image.
We can't get people who weren't already interested in combat to be interested in combat, and a lot of the folks who were in it for RP are getting disenfranchised and leaving or going inactive. Real life kicked my teeth in for a while, and I know Lusternia was one of the first things to suffer for that.
So, yeah. I'm not an admin, but I am a city leader and I need to know what I can do to help get people more engaged. (And yes, people includes me. I'll be the first to admit that I've forgotten the window was open a few times lately.)
I'm curious why Roleplay only gods are not considered a desirable thing?
One of the biggest gripes I've heard from players over and over is lack of divine/admin attention. More admin roles and more accessible roles would help with this. It's no secret that people have left orgs and the game for other games due to having inactive admin for the better part of a year.If every envoy was out for balance, the system would be great, but that is sadly not the case.
EDIT: The other thing I guess, it'd probably be pretty obvious if they spent all their time just fixing the classes of their favourite org/alliance.
Which then becomes a discussion for the higher ups cause they're not really doing the job at that point.
I'm imagining that the current, deeply connected to the Elder, order would be one style.
But maybe there could be another, more like MKOs, where it's kinda styled around mortals forming their own order about the Elder but less directly connected to Them. Where it matters it's still the same, but just themed differently to note the difference.
The Elder could still step in if they wanted but the expectation is set for players that they may never do so. (probably also setting an expectation of wrath if you're disrespectful) Similarly, the different setup could make it easier for players to maintain the order without the god being active.
Indirectly, this could also function as a flag for players looking for an "RP Elder". Cause if they've got the current style then that's them saying they're also looking for that. (I imagine it would be obvious looking at helpfiles and when trying to join the order which style the god has picked)
Of course, the God could decide that the order has inspired them so they want to change it and be more involved, or maybe they're stepping away so they change it to help the order continue while they're off in the void.
This sort of thing has been brought up and shot down before, they don't want to be "rating" the admin so that they feel like they're being pushed to do one thing or another.
I'm not sure how well it's really known, but even the RP-heavy Gods have to do a lot of behind-the-scenes work to build up their RP tools. You can't just sit there and RP, or you can't do things like build a God-realm, make a Temple, make neat little order-items, etc. They have to invest a lot of time and energy into the game to make those things for you, too, and your solution would essentially render all of that meaningless.
Note that I say that as a member of an organization who hasn't really had a fully active God in... a very long time. We didn't even get our guildhalls until February. I'd absolutely love more God interactions than we get, I'd love to have a God who is around and RPing all the time, but I can't make / force that to happen. I'm really happy for whatever little bit of time and attention we are able to get, because I know that the God making it happen is going out of their way to make time for us too, with everything else going on in her real life (on top of game duties) and that means a lot to me.
Thax seemed interesting, but absent divine are absent.
Seemed to me like there isn't much point in joining orders since the Divine in question can be removed by events or go inactive at any moment for a really long time. Plus, more often than not the only interactions I see with Divine is a short conversation that ends when someone provokes the Divine and gets god zapped. It loses it's excitement after the hundredth time.
I already knew who was going to win the Ascension event this year, so I didn't bother to show up for most of it. More important things going on in real life.
Everyone here already knows my problem with the combat balance. Envoy system, barriers to entry level combat, outdated useless skills... Others have already expressed those arguments well enough in this thread.
Also, I'm moving on with my life into a much more busy work schedule. I'm going to have more money and too many options for entertainment.
I get it, and I wouldn't want any of our divine to feel like they've been relegated to some sort of rating or percentage. All of the divine we have are pretty awesome in their own way, and I'd love to see them both active and buried under followers. Let's face it, though. There are generally two kinds of people that join orders: Those who are looking for rp/shinies/interactions, and those who are mostly just looking for favors/shrine powers.
Now, let's say that we have a god like.....Jimbob the Tentacle of Holiness. Jimbob doesn't like to RP, he's not really good at it. He does, however, code a mean order mob and he's pretty active. He's just not talkative. He assigns himself a 20% RP/ 80% Code in his HELP JIMBOB scroll.
Along comes Slaughtertooth the Merciful Cupcake. Slaughtertooth doesn't want to roleplay, he just wants to kill people and bake sweets. Pondering his available pantheon, he notices that Jimbob is pretty active and he's probably not likely to stand around prodding Slaughterfish into advancing and dancing in circles. There's no "HOW PROGRESSES?!?!?" here, folks. Sounds like a match made in Celestia. Slaughtertooth kills a bunch of monstrosities, throws them at Jimbob's altar, and BOOM favor.
On the other hand, Princess Cooterglitter is looking for someone with a little more flare. Staring at her local pantheon scroll, she bypasses Jimbob and goes straight to Icebidet, Lady of the Silken Stench. Icebidet isn't really much of a coder; she tries hard, but she's probably made more bugs than she's fixed. On the other hand, she's a whiz at all sorts of emotes, knows all of the social rules, and brews an amazing pot of tea. Icebidet has set herself at 75% RP/25% code.
Now, I realise that the above random series of paragraphs is pretty nonsensical, and is oversimplified. I'd just like to suggest that divine classify themselves where a mortal can look at them and not just find out that order's rp, but what the mortal is likely to get out of that relationship.
I have to say I have more faith in the admin team of Lusty to resolve the issues than I do past organizations in similar situations. I have nothing but positive things to say from my personal interactions with the admin team as a whole and as individuals.
Just my .02
Asking for 'well thought out proposals' like this is all news to you? I removed a lot of details to make the post as short as it is - which is still excessively long - and you chide me for lack of specifics. You focus on one thing, promotions, which I wasn't 'raging' about - merely pondering resource use. If that's non-negotiable, fine. Dismissing one statement doesn't change everything else, nor was that the lynchpin of my meta-complaint.
I've spent more than my fair share of time testing, discussing, reporting, revising, contributing, thinking about SR's, so to suggest "if anyone wants to help" I should give a well thought out proposal is, at a minimum, not more productive than my post.
I'm not raging or threatening at any stage. But if I felt unheard before your post, imagine how I feel now.
I have been thinking about whether or I wanted to weigh in on this topic, and on the ascension topic, because a large part of me still thinks that you'll just ignore this as a complaint from someone who has already retired. However, I know many people who feel almost as strongly about the direction this game is going as I do and they still believe that maybe if more of us actually spoke up things will improve. You can ignore all of this if you want. It won't affect me either way. I just think this game has the potential to be amazing and it would be a great shame if that potential is never realised, or is realised only after you lose some truly great people because they have grown as disenfranchised as I have.
Ejderha is completely right in that I, and others, have left or are considering leaving not because we think the game is broken, but because we have run out of hope that things will ever not be broken. I have personally campaigned time and time again for these things to change already but every indication told me that 1) nothing would ever change, and 2) I was wrong for even complaining in the first place. However, you insist that there aren't enough specifics given (actually read Ejderha's post again - it's really on point), so here are some, of many others I don't have time to go into now:
Announce the rules for competitions ahead of time
Many people know that I don't get along with Veyils (congratulations, by the way), but she was among my favourites for winning the event even before the ascension challenges had started. Yet again, we have someone who would have had a great shot of winning the event on their own (and allies') merits but because of some oversights it just left everyone but trolls who just like to fuel forums drama feeling like they didn't have the best time. I'm sure she's still feeling great that she won, but as someone with a competitive spirit myself, I find it hard to believe that she wouldn't be feeling much greater if she had won without the issues.
Call me cynical, but I don't feel like your post in the ascension thread was much of an apology. Sure, you used the word "sorry", but it didn't read at all like you were actually sorry that so many of your players took time out of their day/evening/early hours of the morning to take part in what many consider the biggest event of the game to be met with yet another bug. It read more like that you were sorry that some players felt disappointed, not that you had actually disappointed them, and that you still thought the whole thing was amazing overall and there was no indication that anything in the process would ever change, again.
Of course, we're all human and can't be expected to always get things right the first time. Unfortunately, just weeks earlier, an almost identical situation happened in Chaos. Again, as I said in that thread, Tarken probably would have won anyway, but we will never know and can only rue yet another competition soured by issues that could have easily been addressed if they were sprung on us a couple of minutes before the event started.
Every time we complain about these issues it always goes back to the same default argument. "We don't have enough (coder) resources". As players, we get that and we don't complain that there aren't enough resources. We complain that, knowing that you don't have enough resources to ensure these kinks are all sorted out ahead of time, you still refuse to engage your playerbase so we can work together to ensuring that when all is said and done, the winning side can take pride in winning a fair contest and the losing side doesn't feel like they just wasted their time.
Stop being so scared of making combat changes short of completely overhauling everything - it is ok if some classes become overpowered or underpowered for a relatively short period of time
This should come as no surprise to anyone, but I think combat is really imbalanced. Many players I've talked to think the same. The problem is that it doesn't matter because the prevailing attitude when it comes to massively nerfing or buffing skills and classes is that the status quo is always preferred to any potential situation where the incumbent users get frustrated. I understand that, but when you have a very large proportion of your playerbase with the perception, even if it is misplaced, that some skills are too weak or too strong, then you have a problem and the onus is on you to fix that perception.
Unfortunately, when we have entire skills, if not skillsets or even classes or organisations, that are essentially off-the-table, there is no discussion to be had. Yes, many people think that twist is a problem. Many people stopped PKing because they felt it to be pretty ridiculous to just be almost instantly put in a state of fighting for their lives every time they faced these organisations. Through the envoy system, and through forum posts, we brought these problems up time and time again until the "solution" we received was effectively censorship.
The solution isn't to want to wait to "gather data". There is no data to be gathered in a game as small as this and there is certainly no data to be when nobody wants to PK in the first place. Instead, what we have is the same overpowered or underpowered skills for years. It's not even about giving other people a fair go at being overpowered. It's that if we never make these small changes that could have a large impact to player perception, we can never improve anything.
These problems don't persist because there are no resources to handle them. As we have seen, the administration team is capable of making sweeping combat changes if given enough time. These problems persist because when it comes down to whether or not to do something that might piss off one group of people or just leaving things as they are and continue to piss off another group of people, it's far easier to just write off the complaints of the latter group as it being their problem.
Stop your administration team from listening in to our clans
I don't even understand why they are doing in the first place but I am pretty sure it didn't use to be like that. A lot of us moved to Discord or other such programs because we were tired of certain admins popping into our conversations, or the general feeling that we couldn't say anything without alerting the entire administration team. As less and less people talked in clans, it made me look at Mudlet less and less until I realised it was actually just easier to not talk at all in-game.
Give more incentive for players to want to do things in the game
I felt like the amount of things I could feasibly work towards in the game when I wanted to just mindlessly do things after long days at work got smaller and smaller. The gold throttle turned bashing into a daily chore that I felt I had to do to keep up, without any potential to bash for more even if I spent an extra six hours on it that day. Offering billions of essence to my god ultimately felt pretty lame because the only feedback I got was a 30-day truefavour every month. We worked hard for months to get most honourable house and then once I got it I looked at how much work we would need to do to upkeep that and I ended up deciding it wasn't worth it either.
There was basically no mechanical reason for me to be logged in because the game had become an entirely social game, and I realised I could get that elsewhere.
Foster a community who actually believes that you will work with them
Many people I know have told me that they believe in the things I say that get me on the wrong side of the administration team. When I asked them why they wouldn't say it out loud, they told me they didn't want to be attacked by the yes men, and even administration team itself, for holding those views in the way that I had been attacked. How dare I think that anything the admins do can ever be anything but perfect? It must be my fault for thinking that.
Of course, this attitude comes straight from the top. When crategate happened, I was the one who, from the very beginning, tried to tell you there was a problem. I took advantage of it, as did many other people. Even you, coming back after days of me trying to get you to fix it, came back and told us that "this is why we can't have nice things". You blamed us for your broken promotion. And because I was the one who was most vocal about getting it fixed, and being open about what I got from it, I was the one who was vilified by the community.
This is why the forums often becomes an echo chamber of praise. Everyone is too scared of being attacked for holding a view that is contrary to what the administration team would like to hear. Certainly, there are some great things being done by the administration team but complaints about something entirely unrelated aren't going to take anything away from that. Every thread that has a threat of talking about certain topics (e.g. twist) that the administration team doesn't want to hear about gets shut down immediately.
Ultimately, as a fan, player, and customer of this game, I never felt that my time and energy were ever appreciated. Many people who I have talked to feel the same way. If you don't want to lose them too then you will actually listen for once and accept that maybe the problem doesn't lie with them.
Sincerely,
Falaeron/Falmiis
Would things be helped by hashing them out in advance with additional testers? Yes, I do agree with that. More people helps find more bugs / potential issues. At the same time, you'd probably have to be willing to sign an NDA for some of it. I'm not sure how many people would want to sign an NDA to be a bug-tester. It could be something worth pursuing, however.
Additionally, threads about certain topics "don't get shut down because the administration team doesn't want to hear about it." They get shut down because they are threads that have demonstrated time and again that they will go off the rails quite rapidly. They're more than happy to hear about it via other venues (and have!).
Mostly what I get from your post is that at some point (perhaps around the time you decided you didn't like talking to the administration in-game) you started treating it as an adversarial relationship. It's "we-the-players vs. the administration". If you view things like that, it's no wonder you're not having fun. They're people too, and they invest their time into what's a project of love for them (and hopefully for their players). There are going to be disagreements (sometimes quite large ones), but I've no doubts that they want what is best for the game.
You also can't just say that everyone who doesn't agree with you is an "administration yes-man". In one of Lusternia's State-Of-Lusternia posts a number of years ago, she actually threatened that she had been considering shrubbing me (hard to get much more adversarial than that). Both of us have worked together many times since that point, though. I'm not shy on pointing out when I think she's done something wrong (usually via an email). At the same time, though, I'm also going to say when I think they're doing things better than they were.
Beyond that, you're even blaming the administration for your choice to abuse something that was obviously broken, as if you have no form of impulse control and simply can't help yourself. You were vilified by the community not because the promotion was broken, but that you decided it was okay to tank the game economy by not just giving yourself goodies but then passing them around-- free stuff hauled out of thin air might sound great, but it's not good for Lusternia's health. Should it have been released that way? Absolutely not. Were you right to abuse it as heavily as you did? Equally no.
Smaller tweaks & fixes to address things: That's the point of the Envoy system. If you want a larger revamp of something, it needs a larger scope.
I know I didn't really respond to your points in any real order, but... I feel very strongly that Lusternia has had issues with an Admin team in the past who was entirely hands-off and never discussed anything, and what we have now is orders of magnitude better. It's something that should be embraced and cherished, not derided and pushed aside. Not having an Admin team who is willing to talk to the players is terrible.
I find it interesting that you felt the need to defend yourself from the accusation of being an administration yes-man even though Falaeron didn't mention you in his post.
People gave you grief for knowingly abusing something you pointed out as broken, but gave other people grief too. You painted the target on your back the minute you tried to justify it with b.s. about the economy and it being better one person abuses it excessively as opposed to many people benefiting to a lesser extent.
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!
More generally:
But when you get certain quarters - and you know what, I'm seriously not just talking about one person here - stating that "If something's broken it's okay to abuse it as long as I say it's broken first, but if Glom skills are broken then Glom shouldn't use them" it becomes clear that the deepest problems don't lie in bugs, promotions, or economies but in basic psychological processes that all stem from one place: "Us" and "Them" mentality.
The problem with Lusty isn't Lusty. It's that people are too invested in the meta and not invested enough in the game itself. It's that the fourth wall has been eroded to the point that what you see walking around in the game are not characters but players in characters' clothing. It's the forums-jingoism-cum-flag-tennis. It's probably Discord, but I don't know because I'm not on it. I am part of that problem - I'm not self-venerating, merely describing the situation. Every single person reading this (probably nobody, I would have stopped reading it by now myself) has the power to make it better. Step 1 is to truly come to terms with the fact that Lusty is a game that can neither harm nor benefit you in real life (I'm talking about the game part of Lusty, not harassment etc).
Lusternia likes to say that it has a lower cost to entry than other IREs, but speaking as one who has played in all but one, this is no longer true. Not to mention that the combat balance here is...well, there is no combat balance. Even Imperian, as ridiculous as the damage meta is over there, is balanced out by equally ridiculous affliction classes.
And now that I've namedropped a game, here comes the squad of "but you can't compare games!!!" Sit down, Fabio, yes I can. Fundamentally, they're all the same. There is a reason why players flock to one and flee from another. Honestly, even with all its resources Achaean lore continues to pale in comparison to Lusternia's. But I find it more enjoyable there because of open dialogue (even critical forums threads are left open), balanced combat (more or less, there is no perfect balance but at least every class has a viable 1v1 kill route), and overall more palatable promotions (still not good in the long run, but far better than the 2000cr must-haves here).
I enjoy the game, and I especially appreciate Hallifax's admin. I feel like we've done right by them, and so they do right by us. They're a huge reason why I love the game. It's why I'm an envoy trying to run damage control over the massive imbalance that artifacts have been bringing to the table - though I haven't even gotten around to writing any reports on them because I just don't know where to start.
Almost all the wonder items (HUGE subset of myriad, gamebreaking abilities), alongside a few other artifacts such as cement socks/runes of mass, are destroying the PK scene. In the right, skilled hands (because it is possible to have a ton of artifacts and still be horrible at PK), and combined with a strong skillset, it's just impossible. A huge portion of the game began, for all intents and purposes, opting out of PvP ///months/// ago and their pure dissatisfaction has either been overlooked or ignored or explained away and shoved to the side. PK has slowly but surely been choked off, and its dying throes began a long time ago - longer than you probably assume I'm thinking. Funnily enough, that coincides with the near-monthly release of ridiculous artifacts. Is it any wonder why people are leaving now?
Yes, I do feel a right to complain about Glomdoring's skills, but really (and I've mentioned this before) their entire kit just needs a few tweaks. There's only like 5-6 abilities (that's just 5-6 reports) that need attention, as well as shoring up the effectiveness of other orgs' kill strategies. The fault lies almost entirely with artifacts.
You won't make any revenue when no one is around to buy your artifacts. Think before you ever release another wonder item.
But seriously, if I knew Lusternia couldn't benefit me (through relaxation, escape, community and stimulating my imagination), I'd be out of here. You're talking now, Versalean, to some of the most loyal players. Making sweeping, useless declarations such as those only contribute to the sense of disenfranchisement.
I'm mentioning Glom skills as an example of intergroup bias, not because you don't "have a right" to complain about Glom skills. But, you know what, if that's how you want to read it, you go on ahead and keep complaining if it's somehow improving your life.
All that said, I've clearly misrepresented what I was trying to say - genuine apologies. I'll try again, safe in the knowledge that anyone who wants to understand what I'm saying will understand it. Lusty should have the same impact on RL as any other form of entertainment, yes. When you win you should get a little "yay" just like when you beat Sephiroth. But when you lose it shouldn't be as psychologically damaging as it sometimes is - I include myself in this as somebody who has felt pretty effing awful over stuff that's happened entirely within the four walls of a MUD and which really, when all said and done doesn't matter. I've lost RL datasets before, and it didn't feel as bad as that time Player X won the Great Hunt because of a bug. wtf is that about? The Godmin can improve the environment in many, many ways, but what they can't do is stop the playerbase from being dicks to one another, and until that is fixed, what else really matters?