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How are the other games going?
With people retiring characters and some contemplating a move, I'm curious if anyone here who plays any of the other IRE games could provide an update on how they're doing. The newsletters give a sort of very broad overview of events and mechanical additions, but I'm curious about the player experience.
So any information about Lusternia, Imperian, and Aetolia, ideally in comparison to Achaea, since we're all presumably most familiar with it.
Here are some of my questions:
So any information about Lusternia, Imperian, and Aetolia, ideally in comparison to Achaea, since we're all presumably most familiar with it.
Here are some of my questions:
- What is the population like? Does it feel like it's increasing or declining? Is that a problem (either one)? Does it skew older or does it feel like it's mostly a lot of relative newbies with high turnover?
- What seems to be the general focus? Combat? Individual or group? Raids? Roleplaying? Is it balanced or does the population seem to prefer one thing over another?
- What is the mechanical balance like? Does combat feel as dynamic, varied, deep, and interesting as Achaea? How about group combat?
- Since it seems to have become a big question over the last year: What does the general state of automation seem to be?
- What are the RP themes like? Does it seem to be moving in a more light-hearted direction or is it trying to be darker and edgier? What's unique and interesting in the game's RP?
- Any recent-ish additions that are particularly noteworthy? Things that really changed the game for you in a substantial way?
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As for Lusternia... I find it unnecessarily and overly complex. Has some really cool features, but it's SO much to take in. At the time I tried it out, they did not have a reliable mapper. Not sure if they have any reliable curing systems. Pretty sure Vadi had made one for Lusternia, but he may not be updating it anymore due to the same reason he doesn't update SVO anymore. Also, the population there was ridiculously small, much smaller than Aetolia's. Expect to spend a lot of time alone and figuring out things on your own.
- What seems to be the general focus? Combat? Individual or group?
Raids? Roleplaying? Is it balanced or does the population seem to
prefer one thing over another?
In terms of PK, there are two features in Aetolia that is unique to the game. Cities gather 'Ylem' as means of powering the Ministry of Research, unlocking various abilities for the citizens. When tapping lesser or major foci for ylem, game-wide messages announce what's going on. The zones where they're found become open PK, and you can contest the enemy side for the research materials. For single player combat, there is something called the 'Sect of Blades'. People gain ranks and even have the potential to gain a powerful artifact for a limited time from duelling and engaging in PK.There is no raiding to speak of at the moment, but a new warfare system is slated for 2016. I personally enjoy the roleplay in Aetolia more than the one in Achaea. There is less of the quasi-OOC 'I had aeon', or 'My soul must rest' which would not really make any sense for any person to say ever if you think about it. It also has so many quality of life upgrades that I just miss when playing other games, one example being the audit command that tells you exactly what your crit chance is, what your XP modifier is, what your dodge chance is, what your resistances are, etc.
- What is the mechanical balance
like? Does combat feel as dynamic, varied, deep, and interesting as
Achaea? How about group combat?
It is similar, but different. I am not much of a PK'er myself, so I can not give a fair and nuanced comparison.- Since it seems to have become a big question over the last year: What does the general state of automation seem to be?
Automation in Aetolia have advanced a fair bit. That said, in top tier PK, you have to adapt to the opponent's route to beat them. No one has written a script that wins the game yet (or at least not to my knowledge).- What is the population like? Does it feel like it's increasing or declining? Is
that a problem (either one)? Does it skew older or does it feel like
it's mostly a lot of relative newbies with high turnover?
Population is smaller than in Achaea, but not small enough that it bothers me. If I was a completely new player and ended up in a guild with few members, I might have gotten discouraged, but the people I play with are usually online all the time and it's always easy to get a party invite (well, it's called 'webs' in Aetolia) for some OOC chatter while going hunting or fishing or whatever.- What
are the RP themes like? Does it seem to be moving in a more
light-hearted direction or is it trying to be darker and edgier? What's
unique and interesting in the game's RP?
Definitely dark. One of my personal favourites was the 'shadow plague' arc, in which me and my Order members were infested with a magical disease that caused our shadows to try and overtake us. They would suddenly animate, banishing us (basically kai banish), and do other bad things. It got progressively worse, until the plot was resolved.- Any recent-ish additions that are particularly noteworthy? Things that really changed the game for you in a substantial way?
I just came out of hibernation so I'm actually catching up on the most recent-ish additions.Bonus:
Aetolia has honours for all the Gods, and even some mobs:
Lusternia is definitely the most 'out there' of the IRE games, but last I checked it still had like 50 guilds for a population a quarter of the size of Achaea's, which is ridiculous. There's also way too many skills and the rep is no one ever 1v1s in Lust, even less than Achaea.
Aetolia is GREAT for the RP focused, and the hunting isn't too bad either. The high levels are WAY higher than Achaea's, and there's lots of incentive to keep leveling because you can earn points to spend on things like your Haven or on skills.
42 is way better than 9 though, I gotta say!
Estarra was constantly introducing cool new features and then forgetting about them, like those nexus guardian gundam suits that were forgotten about a week later with no post-release support/balancing. New classes or new alternate class skills were being added every few months, but they tended to have terrible PK balance. Other tacked-on features would have major PVP ramifications. At best there was costly backpedalling (stripped ascendancy, comprehensive PK rebalancing), at worst a stubborn refusal to acknowledge major problems (the game's small population being spread over 30 guilds in 6 cities - low population? just vote more!).
The setting is extremely well-considered and cool, constantly being developed and expanded. All the major organisations have a long list of unique themes that contrast amazingly with other orgs, and are so well-considered that their native character archetypes almost write themselves. But then they have events and promos like "these magic wigs have come to life! wear them to get buffs!".
There are about 6 million honours quests which is great.
Influencing was great. Mount breeding, feeding your mount to affect its appearance, training it to learn new abilities, was fantastic. But it meant you had to trans about 15 skills.
Org conflict was a big focus, but it meant that you could never hope for a solo fight vs anyone.
Ultimately I found the bad poisoned the well too much for me to enjoy the good. The development was too unstable, I couldn't feel comfortable knowing that it was only a matter of time before some ill-conceived new feature shook the foundations.
If your dream game is an amalgam of Stephen Universe, Avatar Legend of Korra, Gaia Online, and RuPaul's Drag Race (not being snide here), and you're achievement-focused and don't care much about PVP balance, you may enjoy it. It's a great game with some bad elements, not a fundamentally bad game. I'd be apprehensive about transferring assets over there if you haven't played it before.
I think that's a major issue with the retirement system. 30 days is not long enough to exhaust the initial burst of excitement, get through all the shiny new low-level content and into the "endgame" experience of a being a semi-established character, and know whether you want to make significant financial investment. After a month, you may have made that decision - but now you're forced to abandon that character so you can inherit assets on a new one.
Anyway, I'm trying out all Aetolia and Achaea (as well as a IRE clone) now and it's nice to hear non-newbie views about the games.
Definitely bugged.
http://wiki.lusternia.com/Aetherspace
Or, it used to. They seem to have completely redone everything and removed the stat system entirely a few months ago, because balance. Classic Lusternia. I don't know how it works any more.
Apparently, converting gold to credits outside of the credit market is against IRE policy, so these chests got removed from the game. Some people had accrued tens of millions of gold and a lot of it was dumped into the credit market instead, which made credit prices skyrocket, and in turn became super expensive for regular people. The administration realized that gold generation in the game (in particular from bashing) was too high, and they chose to reduce it by roughly 90% of what it was previously in the endgame zones. Far, far too much in pretty much every basher's opinion (with a few exceptions). In all IRE games I tried, it was at least possible to earn a few credits by going out and killing monsters. I remember when I first started in Achaea and went to Annwyn - it took a while, but I was eventually able to transcend my first miniskill with credits purchased with gold earned from killing Sidhe and animals and whatnot. It was a great feeling. Questing is just not appealing to everyone.
As of this moment, Aetolia's credit market has stabilized somewhat: Total credits for sale: 244 shown (244 total) (Average sale price: 6278)
There are still plenty of credits sold at higher than 10,000 per, but I'm thinking prices will continue slowly creep down towards previous levels. This is just my assumption, and I may very well be wrong. There is currently no real gold sink of in the game to speak of. Nothing. At all. The state of the economy is not ideal, but I hope the administration will be making changes to improve the situation.
I understand that if a single player can max out gold gain to obtain thousands of artifacts in just a few months, then something needs to change. What happened was that the changes hurt all the players, not just the select few who unbalanced the system. I didn't mention any of this in my previous post because it's still all very new changes, and I'm not sure how things are going to land when the dust settles.
TL;DR
If you just want to try out Aetolia, create a character, get involved, start RP'ing with folks, level up a bit, but don't transfer your retirement credits until the thirty days are almost out. Wait a bit, get a feel for the game, and if the economy issue still is a concern, then don't commit to the game. I really hate advicing against trying out Aetolia long-term (thirty days really is not enough to figure out if you're going to stick with a character or not), because it really is a game that I enjoy a lot, but if new people can't afford credits off the market, then there's a problem that needs to get fixed.
This is why I never end up sticking to non-Achaea IRE games
I'm going to echo what's been said, the admin (Estarra, especially) is pretty crazy. There is good crazy, though, and bad crazy. Most of time it's the good version, a few times the bad kind.
The nicest thing about Lusternia for me is the number of choices you get as a character. For example, each class still has the basic three skills, but typically one of those you can choose yourself from a pool. You can have a Guardian (ent-class) in Gaudiguch whose skills are Cosmic (specializing in Transmology), Rituals (specializing in Paradigmatics), and Hexes, but then you can also have a Guardian in Hallifax whose skills are Cosmic (Harmonics), Rituals (Aeonics), and Astrology.
Plus, everyone can take a trade skill right at the start. From the top of my head, there's Bookbinding, Brewmeister (yes, brewing beers), Cooking, Artisan (furniture), to name a few.
It's also true that Lusternia is notorious for pumping one The Next New Thing every other month. Over the past year and more, though, there's some sort of Overhaul going on where the admins scaled down all the bunch of little mechanics that grew during the feature creep. There's even talk of a sort of Renaissance-style Guild Overhaul to address the empty population of some orgs.
EDIT: the in-game economy of Lusternia
A few years back gold drops were increased in Lusternia, plus mobs gave more gold the longer they're not hunted/influenced (around the same time Achaean mobs did this, too, I think!). Theoretically, anyone can get at those big gold drops, but of course if you have a more established character, this is easier. It's some big experiment on trickle-down economics that spun wildly out of control, and now the average price of credits in Lusternia is 40k - 50k.
Cool as hell on many levels.
Site: https://github.com/trevize-achaea/scripts/releases
Thread: http://forums.achaea.com/discussion/4064/trevizes-scripts
Latest update: 9/26/2015 better character name handling in GoldTracker, separation of script and settings, addition of gold report and gold distribute aliases.
Based on my experience, Lusternia PK balance is superior to Achaea's in that 20k credit investment in artifacts is going to give you more utility, mobility, and and a slight edge in actual offensive/defense, but does not create an impossible schism between the haves and have nots. This is actually the major aspect of Achaea vs Lusternia that holds me back as a PKer from diving into Achaea. You will feel your artifacts in Lusternia, but you won't win with them and there isn't a glass ceiling for non artifacted combatants. Based on what I've gathered about Achaea, that glass ceiling is very much an accepted part of PK.
The Overhaul (a couple years in the making) is nearing completion. The stat removal has actually been fantastic, and not just "because balance." Lusternia suffered from the same issues Achaea did, everyone played the same two or three races. Rather than copying stat packs, Lusternia came up with the idea of racial perks and normalizing stats across the board, and picking races based on niche value (one race is tanky, one race bashes faster, one race is slightly better in influencing, etc). It's actually been exceedingly popular in Lusternia so far. Not everyone is a cat man anymore and there's a perk that appeals to however you play the game.
The "features" of Lusternia are abundant, to the point of being extreme and possibly ridiculous, but rarely are the necessities. Such as wig curios: if you don't influence, you don't need them. You can opt out of them most times if you feel like it. There are a few exceptions, like wonder crystal items, but again, while it feels overwhelming none of it is needed to be competitive.
The price of credits in Lusternia appear crazy but post level 100 (which is exceedingly easy to obtain in Lusternia) you can amass millions without much effort. They are crazy only in context to other IREs, but we have entire swathes of the population that are richer than all of the organizations and could clean out the credit market if they wanted to. Though they don't because you run out of artifacts that have a significant impact on your gameplay. As a PKer you can hit 5k in escrow and be totally fine
The biggest flaw in Lusternia is that conflict is not super prevalent. It's been on the steady decline for a while. Incidentally why I've been eyeballing Achaea. Some of the recurring conflict mechanics, like revolts and wildnodes are exciting when enough people are around to contest them. Raids and what not are mechanically discouraged with harsh penalties. Envoys are currently trying to address that. I will say the envoys are also empowered to change a lot, not just skill balance. They report on everything, from raid mechanics to artifact effects.
I've also heard from people that play both here and there that Lusternian conflict is somewhat slower in paced than Achaea and easier to keep up with. You tend to not explode in group combat unexpectedly and die without knowing why or what happened.
It's the hefty coding requirement that gets most people now.