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Comments
Just no.
Viva la Bluef.
I remember back in the day, when Pandemonium was created, thinking that this particular god had some serious potential RP possibilities within all of the cities. The problem comes with no one wanting to lose ever, and the best sort of plots would take real world time to complete, wherein, usually someone or Someone would clue a faction in that they were being played and people tend to fail at keeping boundaries between IC/OOC knowledge.
Anyway, it's late, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is you could build up even a non-combatant city into a decent sized force without an overarching game plot of alliances to do so.
Would much rather have Ashtan continue to win all the time and see strong individual identities continue to grow in the rest of the cities.
That'll bring them up and bring the rest down a peg.
You say Team Red/Blue were boring, I disagree. Shallam would be raided by Mhaldor/Ashtan and be rescued by Eleusis guerillas. Ashtan guerillas would dive into Hashan (even while enemied) to shove off a Shallam/Cyrene entrenchment. Shunning city relationships stifles politics, and war outcomes can be guessed before they're waged.
Anything on a long enough timeline bores, but not as quickly as our current staling factions. Singular factions are limited, there's no mix, no internal mixing or rivaling of politics/beliefs. The eternal struggle between Mhaldor and Targossas has grown secondary to Ashtan's dominance over everything. No one can beat Ashtan alone, it would take an alliance. Hashan gets beat on with the obligatory minimum 10 man Targ crew, while knowing they don't know how to fight back.
Eleusis is absolutely useless on a political level, as even @Rangor says they tried to aggress against Targossas and somehow, inexplicably failed. Which is actually impossible. Against Cyrene, the best they do is take passive aggressive jabs with their "There were trees in those mountains, bro" approach.
Also, look at attitudes of "X was fun without A-Team around" and the acceptance that Hashan is an entity that should remain beaten.
Your views are outdated, @Silas. Your Achaea isn't all it can be.
Wtf. Team red vs. Team blue was not "fun." It was "I wanna be a Mhaldorian while pwning with all my Ashtani friends. Screw RP. Wat's that?"
Well-RPed, temporary alliances would be fine, from a theoretical standpoint, but players have shown time and time again that they aren't really capable of this. OOC friendships and OOC enemies form, and RP factional differences dissolve into simplistic Team Red vs Team Blue.
So, no. The "players can't be trusted" perspective is false.
RP factional differences do not dissolve. They remain intact. As you must have missed, I suggested a 'greater good' common threat. Survival at risk, cooperation is required.
Edit: "Greater good" is nice once every two hundred years IG, if that. In the mean time, it's better for six relatively hostile powers to be fighting each of the others for their own reasons, than to lump Nature/Good/Cyrene together again Chaos/Evil/Darkness
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
I'd be quite happy to see more alliances formed over new threats like the Conclave (please don't use the Conclave again for a monthly promo event), but teaming up to beat Ashtan doesn't make any sense because there's nothing to beat them at that really matters. Ashtan's dominance doesn't translate to any greater threat to anything - cities just know to assume the position when Ashtan's army grows restless, and to settle in to being their entertainment for a while.
Combat wise. on good times we fight both Ashtan and Mhaldor to a tie. But if you now combine the huge playerbase and participants in Mhaldor to the elite group in Ashtan you just get another wagon rolling over the opposition again.
The funny and/or awkward thing is the vitriol that one often experiences when a character wants to improve inter-city relations. This is less true regarding Mhaldor, as they're currently in maximum trollerdrive, but for a long time my character's been trying to find common ground with people of other cities - ironically, between Mhaldor being Mhaldor and members of Ashtani leadership attacking Cyrene for "being under the yoke of Targossas'/creation's control", my character's found common enemies with people of Eleusis and Targossas.
I've found that there's a deep reluctance to take this to the logical next step (Team Red vs. Team Blue) on both sides of the fence. Cyrene, by and large, isn't interested in being anyone's pawn in a war machine. Targossas, as a city and not necessarily as a people, hold Cyrene in contempt because it "doesn't take enough of an active enough role in the defense of creation". Eleusis isn't a huge fan of Cyrene because of the destruction of nature that necessitated its founding, although Bron's quietly hoping that things may change given time and cooperation on that front.
I'm not complaining, because it's the nature of the game; however, if one truly wants to encourage inter-city relations, then the first step is to encourage them through activities, discourse, trade, or just open communication.
Just sayin'.
Artemis says, "You are so high maintenance, Tharvis, gosh."
Tecton says, "It's still your fault, Tharvis."
-
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important
Based on that, the potential for improved relations just isn't going to happen between Cyrene and Mhaldor. My implication isn't that Mhaldor doesn't have an IC reason for acting as they do (OOC, you guys are trollin'), so much as improved relations between those two cities would require the cessation of beliefs and priorities that neither city are willing to give up.
..Erm, go Team Blue?
Overly-convoluted Example: Villages provide some sort of unique resource that cannot be purchased from their commodity shop, which is lucrative enough for other factions to acquire. Such as shardsEDI:"That is a joke."
Theoretical application:
1. Said villages initiate a cycle of 'exportation' of said commodity in a given date. They also have two types of score-based numerical values: separate dispositions towards a city and shared commodity stocks.
2. Between cycles, citizens may perform tasks that improve the disposition of said village towards their city. Some activities are akin to 'village quests', which can range from hunting bandits to helping improve crop yield in their farms and award disposition and commodity stock.
Others may be city-given quests that decrease another city's disposition towards the village, such as spreading nasty rumours via forged letters or sabotaging another city's grain donations in the village's warehouse. These types of quests provide greater disposition changes, but have a caveat that commodity stocks do not change, or even decrease. Possible additions may involve instanced events to dissuade PvP and quest cooldowns to prevent a single citizen from doing every quest to rack up disposition points too quickly.
3. When 'export day' happens, village produces x amount of commodities, to be distributed to a city that has produced the greatest amount of 'disposition points' towards it. Afterwards, disposition points and commodity stock reset for another cycle.
What I would like to see is more world RP events like the Reckoning, but that are *designed* to operate with different alliances. Whenever I think back to the most awesome RP events Achaea had - Bathmat, Vertani, Death's Heart etc - they were great because there weren't necessarily fixed teams participating. They weren't a simple good vs evil obvious slug-fest, or at least they shook up the existing structures in new and interesting ways. It is actually a really good RP exercise to design events that are specifically designed to, say, set Ashtan up against everyone else, or that have Eleusis and Targossas as antagonists (like the Darkenwood thing), or that have Hashan and Cyrene hook up.
Achaean RP is incredibly deep and rich, and each city is well enough developed to have its own "essential" aims and goals that might actually conflict with the power structures and alliances prevailing in Achaea's geopolitics at the time. The Conclave could have gone that way for example - I wasn't wild about how the Reckoning played out from a narrative perspective, but I loved that it gave an opportunity for people to play in teams that were unusual. Eleusis has Nature, Mhaldor has Evil/power, Cyrene has its own security and maybe ogres?, Ashtan has a whole bunch of Chaosy, class warfarey, freedomy, stuff, Targossas has the Light and Creation, Hashan has Darkness and the Triad and all of that juicy goodness. It's fun to bend those core identities in ways that make things look new (What if you *had* to burn a forest to oppose Evil? What if an army of ogres bent on erasing Cyrene were also drawing on the powers of Night in a way that weakened them? What if Ashtan had an internecine war or tried to impose "freedom" on other NPC entities with an autocratic structure?)
Unfortunately, all that stuff has to come about with admin-led, RP heavy events but it's how I'd like to see that kind of large-scale, world PK go rather than have a recurring event that is largely RP irrelevant, and repetitive. Achaea needs to totally own being Achaea, and not to try and be text-WoW. It sucks at being text-WoW but it rules at being Achaea. In other words: more big RP events please - that shake up the existing dynamics and aren't just Brewfest every October. Unless I'm missing something, things seem to have petered out a bit on that front post-bathmat. If anyone with the power to do anything about it is reading it, remember: always go big. Epic is never wrong.