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Comments
(Though the burn-out is real)
Perhaps something else was adjusted but you can see how we thought the defense points rumor was true.
This is all from both my own decently extensive observations, as well as the observations from close ooc friends in that faction and random independent other members. There's not really room to dispute the facts.
Lack of transparency in score and progress were both really frustrating to deal with in the event. Something as simple as, "You have 40 more vampires to recruit." would have been great. I asked at the start whether completing the tasks first would convey any lasting benefits and the Demigod only said that it would enable you to raise your defenses earlier, nothing about getting points in the war.
Dangling carrots of cool factional things for winning really made every time-wasting bug, bug that prevented us from defending the first two times, problem with transparency, and the disparity in task difficulty (camp this spot for 80 hours vs go kill 30 of these things) many times more frustrating and irritating than they would have been otherwise. We wasted 3-4 hours thinking we were done with our hunting task when there were 12-15 mobs locked behind a door that nobody knew how to open that we eventually had to get admin to unlock to progress.
I was also kind of disappointed that the war was more dependent on who had more consistent numbers than anything about skilled usage of the war system (aside from allying and feeding eachother defense points and all of that silliness). I think every faction wasted a ton of gold on the towers which turned out to not really do much at all.
Overall, I think myself and many others would have enjoyed the event a lot more had it (never thought I'd say this) been more like the Reckoning in terms of not really having a prize at the end (even though the Reckoning did promise a prize and never gave anything omg yes I'm still mad about that). The "this is your only chance to get this really cool thing" really intensified all the little problems over the course of the event that otherwise would've just been more like "this is bugged, well that sucks" as opposed to "this is bugged, we can't win that really cool thing now".
I had fun in certain parts of it but in total the event left me feeling more frustrated than anything else. Regardless, I do recognize and appreciate the massive risks the admin took in this kind of event, even if some of them didn't pan out very well. The time and effort that was put into this event must have been staggering, and events like these always see a surge in population (except in Targossas apparently) for a reason, they're amazing and rare. Thanks for putting this together for us admin!
This wasn't a last minute plan, it was the plan all along. Belladonna was once a citizen of Ashtan and through her scheming and plotting she dealt a terrible blow to the Occultists and the city and betrayed the city's trust in pursuit of her own immortality. She slaughtered our citizens and the bodies piled up high before she was finally driven away to where she now currently resides. She had the audacity to ask Ashtan to help her in this war thinking we had forgotten her past transgressions. She is an enemy of the Seat of Chaos and I intended to return her sabotage and betrayal. I met with Alrena earlier in the event to discuss Bella's faction and what I intended to do to the vampiress. We knew about the defense points and we spread rumors that they weren't working and I even instructed our General to not even tell our own faction members about this subterfuge because SURPRISE even our own people can't keep secrets. If a demi-god actually told Hashan that you didn't get points for defending then that was either an amazing coincidence or we fooled even them (but I doubt this even happened). I won't go into all the specifics of what loose alliances we formed in order to pull it off, but this wasn't a spur of the moment last ditch no-RP effort, it was planned and calculated and had centuries of RP rolled into the decision. The negotiations with Alrena were also intense and difficult and took a lot of navigating before everything was laid out and agreed upon, it isn't easy getting a faction to agree to betray their undead host so that a city they aren't a part of can get some sweet payback on the slut of the Underworld. It was just as much a strategy to win that phase of the war as it was a strategy to get revenge on Belladonna and prevent Eleusis and Targossas from getting a boon.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
All well. Toe to toe bouts without the back alley dealings were more my style, I suppose.
Also considering Alrena was talking about deciding whether to give Ashtan or Hashan points in the last couple hours because she hadn't decided points to your whole post being bullshit.
Cascades of quicksilver light streak across the firmament as the celestial voice of Ourania intones, "Oh Jarrod..."
This is OOC, I don't need to forum RP that we're some kind of evil geniuses. I worked incredible hard on minute by minute alliances and backstabbing to get a perfect beacon score of 13/13 points and as many defence points as I could. Yet, I'm not going to act like we're some fucking bunch of know-it-alls who saw every inch of every other general's tactic and plan before they moved. We had a small group and had to work really hard to secure. Weekends are the lowest population days for Ashtan, and many of our combatants had other things to attend to- which is why I agreed to be general in the first place. I was the only non-comm General so I had to lean on people to stay in the game, and we did well.
So... Yes, I posted about the defense points being nulled to the city and that we needed to defend ALL our points anyways. I also posted instructions about how to defend in my few sleeping hours. Why? Because it was in response to an issue answered by Meletus that defense points weren't a thing, and Hashan had points deducted from their medallion. (Which I'm really kind of sour about how that same admin had also told Deladan he was in the right to use an excessive number of beacons, allowing him to go on ooc clans and boast about how he was doing nothing wrong and his points were going to stick even after Nicola posted it was an error. [Run on sentence is run on... I'm exhausted still.) Anyways... point being, at the time of my post we had no proof that defence points weren't stripped from the game and only had that issued response to go from.
Did we lie to other factions AFTER we earned another defense point? Yes, I did. Our participating factions members knew, and there was no reason to announce it to the population at large. Moreso, most factions had used up all their beacons at the point we started pulling in defense points. Did we have an obligation at that point to tell anyone? No.
I hope that clears it up a bit for my people at the very least. We played with what knowledge we had and worked to attack and defend despite it all.
So if the failures were the ones being counted, you guys should have had more points (Also, I think one of your successful defenses was against Belladonna, who definitely didn't use extra stones).