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Comments
Second time I was told there was a specific note that Amunet put on my file that said only she could unenemy me and they are going to uphold that (even though she was long dormant and no longer an archon).
Third time was after Grandue stepped up and I paid a 30k fine and was unenemied in 10 minutes.
Glad that shit was finally resolved.
Results of disembowel testing | Knight limb counter | GMCP AB files
Niether do I.
Been saying this for a while. Lol'd heartily.
a little late to the discussion - but what happened to Ashtan was pretty straight forward - for a while there it was just not fun to play someone in Ashtan or, more precisely, it was more fun to play in other cities - it was really pretty straightforward. However, for a while pre-Renaissance Ashtan was still large enough population-wise to give the appearance of a vital city. But many of the players were very well established - by which I mean old and stale. But they were showing up - mostly they'd show up and do a few things then afk or talk on clans or do their own thing. Even though Ashtan had a large population on paper - you'd never know it from ct - people just wouldn't use it. Of course pre-Renaissance Ashtan did still have a pretty solid core of combatants - but really combatants are generally only interested in combat. Which is to say if you weren't a good fighter, you'd have a pretty hard time fitting in with the other fighters. In this type of environment its very difficult to be a new player that can make a difference. The Renaissance changed a lot of this - with the elimintation of the old Houses, many of the old players who were invested in their House found that they no longer had a reason to show, so they slowly stopped showing up.
Many of the mid-level players were willing to give it a try but frankly were a little lost in the new role that Ashtan had been given. (Something that I still feel is an issue). While modern fantasy is replete with examples of good and evil characters and archetypes to model your rp around. Chaos is different. Yes lovecraftian genre stuff is available but that's over a century, old. Besides which lovecraftian villains rely mostly on a shadowy organizations and mystery to give their sinister air.
So a stale environment, the Rennaissance, and a new (and rather nebulous) direction are the factors I would cite as the reason for Ashtan's decline.
I also feel that we hit bottom a few months ago and the problems are being addressed (if slowly)
Nearly every city seems to be pushing more and more conversation out of CT. A week ago I saw more than a dozen people in one city and over the course of four or five hours there wasn't a single message on CT. And when conversations do happen, they're treated like spam - people are asked by glorified hall monitors to "take it to tells" or to some other channel or something, even when it's many people discussing something explicitly related to the city with more and more people chiming in. 90% of the messages on CT seem to be people congratulating newbies for finishing the tutorial or announcing the formation of groups for combat.
I'm not really sure when or why it changed - it was always that way in Mhaldor when I was playing Tael, which makes sense thematically, but it definitely wasn't that way when Tael was in other cities before Mhaldor.
This trend of treating CT like everyone treats shouts (i.e., not for discussion, only for announcements, only to be used rarely) seems to have made the game feel much more socially isolated, especially now that houses don't really provide the same community that they used to and cities are supposed to have largely become the main social organizations.
First, like you said, the monitors who sit so high and lofty on their horses. People are afraid to discuss something or comment on an event for fear of someone telling them to take it to tells or slap them with a channel silence. I feel like they sit perched on their branches like vultures waiting to swoop down and tear into someone who is BARELY slurred from drinking or who asks a question that would be better suited for Market/House/Newbie/Order/mentor/Clan.
Secondly, the changes in house/city have left a lot of people "faking it". Before people were very educated on their house and city lore and now that so much has changed a lot of people aren't really confident in their understanding and so they're afraid to ask questions for fear of making it known they don't understand it and afraid of answering questions for fear of answering them wrong. If you asked Grandue what tasks needed to be completed for the ranks of his house he would have to cheat and start skimming hhelp files quickly. Hell, had he not become CL and spent hours studying what all took place during our Reno and interviewing people about the different houses he wouldn't be able to tell you shit about Ashtan's lore or the relationship between the Court and Ashtan.
And lastly I think that the new "branding" for most cities in one that is more serious than the previous ones were. As factions we're MORE dedicated to our cause than before and I think this has bred a feeling of "THAT type of conversation doesn't reflect the gravity of our existence/situation/purpose. Spend less time discussing the best hunting class or the best place to buy clothing and spend more time doing Evil/Chaos/Good/Forest/whateverHashan+Cyrenedo". And maybe on a lesser note people want to be seen as being more dedicated to their faction's cause and this results in a more stoic type of conversation from them. You wouldn't expect the general in an army or the glorious high secretary of the house in charge of whatever path to discuss their favorite hobby or their preference of rum over tequila on the city/house channel with the "peons". I've seen this kind of mentality and admittedly even participated in it in Ashtan. People consider your interactions over ct/ht when deciding who to promote/appoint to a position. Are they the type of person you always see joking around and shooting the shit over CT? Well then of course no one will take the seriously and it will make the house look bad if you appoint them to leadership council of your house.
And I don't know if this is technically a reason behind the decline in using CT/HT but people seem to get so easily offended now. Say something that could POSSIBLY be construed as being directed at them or a dig against their personality/opinion/character/performance/history and they get so butt hurt about it. I get probably 1-2 messages a week from some citizen sending me a log of something someone said that hurt their feelings and they are SO BLOODY IRATE about it and when I look at the log I just want to tell them to grow the ef up a little bit. This is a city with hundred of different personalities from all walks of life, not a daycare.
Targ is semi-chatty, yes. Cyrene has conversations on CT some of the time, but it's mostly when someone has a question and gets fifty different answers. Dunno about Hashan, and Mhaldor is Mhaldor. The only CT usage is for Sartan or when someone's on the phone with Verizon.
Back to your regularly scheduled topic!
The two times I can think of where I saw an actual discussion start, in each case something involving the city that a number of people were weighing in on, someone came onto the channel and told everyone to meet up somewhere or form a party or use tells (presumably because there was mild disagreement, which I suppose speaks at least a little bit to Grandue's point about thin skin, or at least a mistaken assumption that people have thin skin and thus need to be "protected" from seeing people disagree). In one case I even remember the CT message almost verbatim (I'm not sure it was the Dragon's Tail, but I remember most of the phrasing pretty distinctly): "I think this has gone on long enough. Anyone who wants to continue this discussion is welcome to meet up at the Dragon's Tail. A lot of people probably don't appreciate this continuing to clutter up the city channel."
And it's a good thing that they "uncluttered" CT in that case because I think it was only about half an hour later when next everyone spoke on the channel to say "Congratulations" to a newbie who had just finished the Minia tasks.
I'm not sure Grandue's diagnosis that it's all people throwing their power around just to feel self-important or that there's much of a problem with people "faking it" or any of that is accurate for Hashan. But the radio silence is definitely a thing there. I really don't think it's just that people are absorbed in what they're doing.
I'm not really sure what the reason is, but if I had to venture a guess based on the tone and content of most of the messages I've seen asking people to stop using CT, it's that people are viewing it as some sort of limited resource - that they're trying to pre-emptively prevent it being "clogged" or something. At a guess, I think it's just a new manifestation of the natural trend toward well-meaning premature regulation that ultimately invades every social aspect of Achaea.
That trend is almost always at odds with player engagement and I think this is probably another instance where that's happening.
As evidence of how quiet Hashan is, here's a summary of Hashan's CT history after removing people saying hello and goodbye:
yes some where or other people got extremely anal about ct useage - I always thought this was extremely weird as I felt that the defining experience of being in an organization is that shared channel. Definitely one of my initiatives as archon is to restore usage of CT and to restore Ashtan's sense of community. Drama queens and problem makers will be hit with the banhammer - I expect people to know how to responsibly use an ic on-line community channel
It definitely feels like a ghost town most of the time and if anything remotely spicy happens on CT then it's basically feels like forced radio silence. I can understand trying to keep some basic decorum but half the time it feels like people need it to feel like a 100% safe space for whatever reason.
I'm not sure why people feel like keeping things off the channel will deescalate the situation when in my experience it becomes very much more explosive under the scenes at that point through tells or secret meetings.
So with that, a note to city leaders abroad: avoid squelching conversations over CT. If you ever feel the need to say "take it to tells," and it's not just petty inter-personal stuff, you are doing it wrong.
If the city wants to have a legitimate discussion without dropping into one of those two categories, I don't see any reason why it should be muted.
ETA: Another reason that a conversation is muted is because the person being interrogated simply doesn't have all of the information, which is a problem that we're trying to solve in Hashan, and they are afraid that they will spread incorrect information. Not everyone can say "I don't know, but when I do, I'll let you know" and a lot of people in Hashan won't take that as an answer and will just continue to rail on despite knowing that there is no more information to be given at the time.
edit: had an extraneous 'the' in there.