Howdy, Stranger!
Categories
- 6.2K All Categories
- 3.1K Everything Achaea
- 1.5K North of Thera
- 26 Archives of the Terraformer
- 257 The Matsuhama Arena
- 885 The Golden Dais of Creation
- 299 The Scarlattan Theatre
- 149 The Blank Canvas
- 2K Getting Help
- 412 General Questions
- 258 Quick Class Questions
- 1.3K Tech Support
- 313 Client Help
- 486 Curing Systems and Scripts
- 841 Off-Topic
- 255 The Wander Inn
- 586 The Universal Membrane
- 298 Class Discussions
- 298 Individual Class Sections
- 20 Alchemist
- 9 Apostate
- 30 Blademaster
- 9 Depthswalker
- 14 Druid
- 4 Infernal
- 20 Jester
- 19 Magi
- 34 Monk
- 11 Occultist
- 8 Paladin
- 7 Priest
- 29 Runewarden
- 18 Sentinel
- 26 Serpent
- 20 Shaman
- 9 Sylvan
Comments
Honourable, knight eternal,
Darkly evil, cruel infernal.
Necromanctic to the core,Dance with death forever more.
It's good to see some people approaching this in a reasonable way, even when they wanted more from the change, but the attitude that the Garden must fix -everything- in the -exact- way you say is ridiculous.
Shallam got new Gods in Deucora (just like Eleusis got the return of Gaia), but Targossas would still be going to shit if the players hadn't embraced the change. The people bitching about how they can't possibly change their RP and that exterm absolutely must be deleted need to realise that they're only adding to the problem.
The Garden right now are listening more to the playerbase than they have in -years-, but the onus is still on the players to sometimes shut the fuck up and just get stuck in.
Just out of curiosity, how much of a factor to Eleusis's problems is their desire to avoid internal conflict? I know, that can probably get stupid if anyone takes it OOCly, but, gods, give it a shot. Conflict makes life interesting, and drives just about every story imaginable.
Don't over-value your character's current personality. Changes happen, and change can be interesting. If you hate the current way nature is defended so much, have your character start thinking thoughts. Make them go around and ask other people if they're thinking the same thing. Start a rebellion. Be subtle, if you must. Get creative. It'll be awesome.
(Pandemonium's death saddened me because I wanted to play him someday
)
To balance it out, exterminations will damage a room permanently, but the real repercussion comes in the enemies that do it will eventually have the wrath of the forests knock them out of a good few hundred rooms in the mainland. It's not exactly a hit to Evil or anything, but I see that as a decent enough inconvenience at least to the individual.
Looking forward to any new changes that do come in though. Will be interesting to see how it pans out (even if just in beta).
Losing their light in the glorious sun,
Thus would we pass from this earth and its toiling,
Only remembered for what we have done."
I'd be perfectly fine with extermination only lasting half an hour if the caveat was that Eleusis had to act like the other major centres of conflict and actively go anti-city. Every time someone above CR1 shies away from either initiating or furthering a potentially fun RP conflict with somebody other than Mhaldor-because-red-fog, though, a random wilderness room should catch fire. Everybody else is at least pretending to be fighting with everybody else, you all are dropping.the.ball.
-
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important
The Laws of Nature
The realms are at their purest when unsoiled by the poisoned touch of industry. Hence, the sole duty of the savage is to restore the Natural Order.
To defile the land with structures of steel and stone is to make an enemy of the noble savage.
The re-gifting of the land to the Wildwood Queen is paramount. The trivial scriptures of false idols are beneath the natural man.
etc.
You're welcome, extermination now means barely anything and you have the coolest faction by far. Now go, no more forums until it's fixed.
To be honest, that attitude would strike me as being difficult. A little nudge from the divine in-game would help, but honestly: when has any game-mechanics change announced via, say, Announce, resulted in characters standing there with their fingers in their ears saying "I can't hear you and haven't seen it for myself so I don't know yet"? I'm thinking of theft, landmarks, the war system, ... : did your character really continue to walk around indefinitely acting as if nothing had changed? Who's downloaded a new Vadi or Omnipave including changes or even existing mechanics that they haven't personally seen yet with a particular character?
Wysteria hit the nail on the head with her OCD comment- this is on partly on us.
Sarapis is trying to give us a helping hand here, and told us that there's more coming, but at some point we need to participate.
You could be bang in the middle of some carefully cultivated roleplay and someone with no interest in RP could decide to ring your doorbell and run away, mentioning no Tiamats. (Sorry, bro.)
The problem, basically, is this happening:
"Through your link with Nature, you feel a foul breach upon the sanctity of the Blahblah Forest."
This wording is important. Exterminations are the most important thing in Forestals' world because for years the game has been telling them THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN YOUR WORLD. If you don't want players to feel an obligation to drop everything, basically don't flash them a big yellow IC warning every time it happens.
I just used to QQ and come back later. :P
Losing their light in the glorious sun,
Thus would we pass from this earth and its toiling,
Only remembered for what we have done."
I assume you hear it for every forest in the world. Just as a thought, what if you only heard it for a single forest - the forest you had a grove in, for instance? Would that force Eleusis/Oakstone to sit down and decide which forests they can and can't reasonably protect? Or would it just be better to remove the warning messages entirely?
Personally, I find it weird that forestals are expected to protect places aside from Sapience, given that they're a Sapience organization. Personally, I think that forests outside of Sapience ought to randomly fix themselves via local forestals, or whatnot. Like, maybe every game day, depending on the island and what resources it'd have for doing that, damaged forests could have a chance of being restored if no one's watching, or something like that.
And it could literally have an IC reason of "other people maintain nature too, you know!" Heck, you could apply that to Sapience's forests too. There're plenty of denizen forestal... things. I think. I'm almost certain there are.
My opinion doesn't matter too much, but what do you forestal people think?
-
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important
-
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important
Yes. I would totally join this faction. Eleusis needs a more meaningful purpose than just being "anti-necromancy".
The thing is, it isn't just a matter of RP. This is such a disgustingly complex topic, involving not just the murky bugaboos of player morale, RP expectations, restraint, and written role design, but more solid beasts like skill usage, XP loss, essence gain/cost, and curative supply for a given side. There is absolutely zero way to balance the system (short of scrapping it altogether), simply because it ties into so many different and otherwise unrelated things.
GO AWAY
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
As far as I understood it, the idea was go concentrate Nature as a faction, rather than have it as a faction spread throughout Sapience and, therefore, generally ideologically diffuse and unable to act as a coherent whole. Alchemy was supposed to act as a city-based alternative to the forestal skill-set, gradually over time tipping cities towards the alchemical and away from nature in an attempt to maintain a distiction between Nature and Civilisation.
I don't think that's boring, I think it's awesome. I don't think people have really run with it, because inertia is the strongest force in Achaea and there hasn't been (IMO) the drive on the player, or Divine side, to really push past it.
I guess that's also true of the current situation, so whatever.
I think the last change was bad because
1. It was done via Announce post. Not something a dryad did, or the forest spirits made happen, or Gaia decreed. Announce posts are where you announce Vegas trips or Christmas credit sales or new server hardware; you can't discuss that stuff over citytells, it's OOC. If you want this to change the paradigm of forestal behaviour, you need them comfortable in discussing it freely. That doesn't require a huge event or anything - though those are always nice - just a world message and Gaia shouting something.
2. It didn't change any gameplay. The only forestals who benefit from this are forestals who don't log in. Any who play are still going to rejuvenate and replant, because of course they are.
3. It weakened the concept of extermination for the sake of no gameplay benefit. Previously, ignoring all gameplay mechanics, extermination was something conceptually pure: it was orcs vs ents at Isengard. The bad guys using black magic to totally eradicate the forest and salting the earth behind them. People destroying the forests vs people protecting the forests. And the forests needed their protectors. In a game where people are always desperately looking for a real way to represent their team and make their mark, bend the world to their will, this was gold.
Now, that's all a little weaker. Not a lot, but a little. And not because of something Gaia did to strengthen the forests or weaken necromancy, but because of an arbitrary, quasi-OOC Announce post. Extermination is something less vile. The forests don't need their protectors as much. That's bad. You wouldn't say, "Chaos isn't that much of a threat to reality," or, "Devotion isn't really holy, it's just some weird rituals you mortals made up," so I don't see why this.