Third Black Wave: Electric Boogaloo

14547495051

Comments

  • JiraishinJiraishin skulking
    @Keorin, I strongly suspect that this isn't the end of the event. From what the admin have said on this thread, the plotline was ongoing. It's the end of one chapter and the retreat of the tide.

    But also... the outcome that was a 'victory' for the Tsol'teth and a 'loss' for Cyrene, the Tide receding, is the same thing that would have been a victory for Cyrene and a loss for the Tsol'teth if things had turned out differently. You have not actually lost anything, except this particular chance to get vengeance.
    ________________________
    The soul of Ashmond says, "Always with the sniping."

    (Clan): Ictinus says, "Stop it Jiraishin, you're making me like you."
  • If I had seen a signpost of the sort that Neraeos shared with Cyrene it would have totally changed my perception and interaction with the event.  Very disappointed that wasn't done in a more public fashion, especially one less ephemeral than a city channel.  Relying on the grapevine to spread that sort of vital guidance is asking for trouble and dissatisfaction.
    image
  • Shirszae said:
    Synthus said:
    Shirszae said:
    I don't know how things could have been made any more clearer than Neraeos made them by that log.  :/ Really can't believe that people insisted on banning everything in spite of it. That's the biggest wtf and proof that most of the senators in Cyrene shouldn't be there... 
    "The Staff of Nicator is the only means by which to defeat the Black Wave and turn the tide of the war you wage with them. If you seek vengeance, justice, and retribution for your fallen, then go forth, compete, and lay your claim to the staff. Otherwise, be as silent as the graves you have dug."
    That's basically what he said. He litterally made a point of mentioning the staff is the most effective weapon against the Tsolteth. You are nitpicking because he didn't say you like you would have, but the essence of the message was the same:
    " what you all are seeking won't be achieved by foregoing the chance to get back the staff" 
    I have to disagree. I'm seeing this log for the first time, and even with the benefit of hindsight, there are still a number of points that could have been clarified. From the log, it -is- clarified that:
    • The Seleucarian Games will not impact the Tsol'teth Games in any form or fashion (duh)
    • Sampling will only be required for the Sojourn.
    • Winning the games would "be winning the staff and never returning it to them." (Ooookaaay?)
    • "The staff is the most effective weapon to use against the Tsol'teth."
    While that makes an argument for competing, it does not make an absolute argument, which would have been needed for Cyrene's participation after everything it went through. Explaining that the staff is the only option to winning the war and that it's the magical mcguffin in this plot line would have made that argument a hell of a lot easier.

    I realize it was said that the staff was "The most effective weapon to use against the Tsol'teth," but that does not clearly explain that it is the only weapon against the Tsol'teth in this case, which is what it feels like so far since the closing of the games. I do feel like greater emphasis with more direct clarity would have been beneficial here, especially since the majority of us were dealing with a great deal of burn-out at the time. Otherwise, why wouldn't we think there was another option on the table that might present itself?

    Also, I'm still kind of confused by "I am pointing out that defeating the Tsol'teth, as far as these games go, would be winning the staff and never returning it to them." I was under the impression that the staff would be held by whoever won the games until the next games, so why would it ever go back to the Tsol'teth anyway? The wording on this and what's trying to be conveyed doesn't make much sense to me.

    I'm not trying to be nitpicky or complain about stuff just to annoy. There were a lot of pain points in this event, and I feel like a lot of them could have been avoided with clearer communication.
  • If you don't understand why after weeks of people pouring their time and effort into fighting tide, trying to engage with denizens, write plot threads, and otherwise achieve something during this event, watching everything you have worked for get resolved with a few god yells is more than a bit disappointing, then I don't know what to say.

    As best I can tell, the entirety of Cyrene could have logged off for six weeks, and nothing about this outcome would have been meaningfully different. I know for damned well sure that I could have. People worked and fought and lost friends and got frustrated and pushed through out of the belief that it would achieve -something-, that it would make -any kind of difference-, only to find out that nope, could have skipped all of that for the same results.

    I find it pretty unsurprising that people who walked away with the staff, or a new class, after getting to skip out on all the tide fighting and getting fun admin interactions feel a bit differently about these results, though.
  • JiraishinJiraishin skulking
    Yeah, because if we'd logged out for six weeks nothing about the current outcome would have changed, and we'd still have Staff and fun admin interactions.
    Sometimes when you work for things it turns out you've been working in the wrong direction to achieve the outcome you wanted. Doesn't make the concept of effort meaningless.


    ________________________
    The soul of Ashmond says, "Always with the sniping."

    (Clan): Ictinus says, "Stop it Jiraishin, you're making me like you."
  • edited June 2019
    Taryius said:


    even if it is for the Staff because the intuitive thing to do would be to barge into the TT's home, kick all their stuff down and try to make off with the Staff.
    Yeah I think this is spot on a good intuition, and the admin said they were prepared to go that route, yet no one did. And I think, having been in the same perspective, a lot of that was out of fear. We saw the Tsol'teth in their full power decimate their enemies, and not wanting to lose more is a real fear. But that is good event and villain writing, not bad.


    I actually don't think the coalition was afraid to go in and more like the thread wasn't completely picked up because it's the kind of thing that needed admin support and there were 100 other things going on? Part of the complaints being bandied about is that a lot of attempts to orchestrate things either didn't get picked up by the needed admin support or just fizzled out mid-way and a sort of general admittedly self-defeating notion by the player leadership that it wasn't really an avenue the admin side were willing to explore, but I think the more active leaders would know more about that than me and the nitty-gritty of why things fell apart as far as this avenue was concerned is probably something other people would be in a better position to examine. 
  • edited June 2019
    I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty specifics, except to say that in terms of wanting a compelling, absolute argument from Gods ICly: this virtually never happens except in the clear cut theocracies like Mhaldor and Targossas, or in the context of their orders.

    A massive part of the God role is offering guidance in a way that explicitly does not clearly command people (especially whole diverse factions whose identity isn't based on that God alone). While we're very conscious that there is much to be gleaned from this event going forward, any misinterpretation or failure to communicate is ultimately in the hands of those receiving the advice.
    "If you build it, they will come."
  • I don't think anyone is saying that we needed a godrole to step in and tell us what to do. Obviously, that's not the sort of thing that happens.

    But some sort of clearer indication on the admin side that the games were the final part of this chapter of the event, that the result of the games would be the -only- thing that had an effect on the plotline, that weeks of player investment was going to culminate here? That might have been nice to have some indication of, when so many signs felt like they were pointing in a different direction. 99% of what was happening at the end was getting announced through OOC roles on the announce boards anyways, would it really have killed things to give a hint there for the less intelligent among us?

    Like I said, I'm perfectly willing to accept that I was just too stupid to understand what was going on or to engage with this event properly. I failed, in character and out, and I suppose that all I can do is regret believing that there could be any other conclusion.
  • Ictinus said:
    While we're very conscious that there is much to be gleaned from this event going forward, any misinterpretation or failure to communicate is ultimately in the hands of those receiving the advice.
    Yes but that leaves those of us who did not hear the communication at the mercy of whichever players happened to be logged in at the right time.  Any failure on their part to spread the word still leaves us left out.  It doesn't really matter whose fault it ultimately is - if that information doesn't reach me, I'm gonna have a bad time.  Knowing other players had access to the information doesn't really make me feel any better.
    image
  • And?  That's a failure on the player's part and the leadership's part.  Hold them accountable.
    Deucalion says, "Torinn is quite nice."
  • I'm just sad we didn't march on the Underrealm. Bain'maal was raring for a big fight when we spoke, I stumbled across something, called Mhaldor to arms, and tried to incite the same fire in other cities, but ultimately failed in rallying the Overhordes. It's harder to tell everyone to march and convince them I'm not being villainous. Inevitably, the breadth of avenues being explored meant others fell to the wayside. Can we march still?

    Instructions were clear: fetch the Staff from heathen hands. We had three strong contenders, and could've backed one of them if the Mhaldorian zeitgeist wasn't "each to his own Strength". I'm glad they all competed at their best.

    Never a dull moment!


    Reaching down with a massive hand, Sartan lifts your head and draws a taloned finger across your throat, the wound closing as He does so.

  • Torinn said:
    And?  That's a failure on the player's part and the leadership's part.  Hold them accountable.
    That seems to require me to act on information obtained OOC
    image
  • edited June 2019
    Now that I'm home and happily kept everyone alive today.. I can do a bit more than just read.

    Cyrene got taken, population destroyed, and had been slogging through this event like we had been pulling OT every week non stop. Because as much as Cyrene gets absolutely shit upon, Cyrene takes certain aspects of roleplay way more seriously than others. Our roleplay doesn't require combat or religious polarization to be damn important to us. Cyrene as a whole does way better against NPC foes than PC foes.. and oh boy did the garden do a spectacular job of hard polarizing a faction. Like.. we've seen the roleplay of other citystates put aside for the greater good.. but the garden did a fucking -stunning- job of turning Cyrene hard against the Tsol'teth. Which also meant I personally was more keen on blowing up their spawning vats and watching the Tsol bleed for their atrocities than I was in entering a damn foozle contest at their behest. 

    As for the posts and nudges from the admin, I'm going to be brutally honest there. It's entirely up to how it was interpreted. At the time, I personally got the feel like the event was overplayed a bit and it wasn't expected that Cyrene would go hard starship troopers and "The only good bug is a dead bug" into everything. So, to ME at least, the nudges honestly felt more like "Oh god we kinda screwed up, how can we try and get people okay with the games.. because we kinda didn't expect it to end up so polarized." Which.. IN THEIR DEFENSE the garden probably didn't have Tesha insurance so that whole situation they found themselves in.. was kinda a shitty/crazy/"drowning in retardation screaming" one.
  • edited June 2019
    Farrah said:


    Mak and Ictinus's comments aside, I do think you're latching onto the admin defined "victory" too much now. You chose to take a different path, and it's not really inherently worse. You stuck to your ideals. The Tide is gone anyway. You don't even know exactly what you would've accomplished with the Staff. I think it's clear there was some indication that a greater victory against the Tsol'teth themselves would be achieved with the Staff (Icti kind of just proved that). But it doesn't really change the positive aspects of what you did. You get to say forevermore that you didn't give in to the Tsol'teth, which seemed to me to be what Cyrene wanted given what they were saying the whole time.

    It just so happened that you could not do as much "damage" to them without sacrificing some of your desires. You can make your own victory. I think anyone who thought they could stubbornly follow their emotions rather than logic and still achieve the optimal result was ignoring the evidence though. It's a fine IC path to take, but there's also a reason two cities allied with the Tsol'teth in the first place.

    You have to accept that some goals might be too tall of orders. The Tsol'teth don't truedie. They have a god. They have two cities allied with them. You should probably consider them more like a player city than a group of denizens meant to just be defeated. That is, you don't expect to just eradicate Mhaldor permanently. Have to consider them somewhat the same way.

    They are now withdrawn, though. Cyrene has its sovereignty back. The Tide is gone. And Cyrene paved its own path. I don't think any of that really has to be taken as a "loss."

    Just as a last note here, I didn't choose shit. I pushed for Cyrene to be allowed to compete and do more to affect the staff outcome, fought against the rest of the senate on it, and then failed to muster the votes in the last-ditch referendum I managed to get set up. I badly wanted to be able to personally compete, and the only choice I made there was failing to sway the government into allowing it, and not wanting to quit the damned city over it when it wasn't.

    Independently of that, I'd also decided to try and run an alternative set of games, which I got a lot of wonderful volunteers from the city to help with, but which Cyrene's government played no part in. Unfortunately, they tired me out enough that I failed to engage in the politiking necessary to -have- a choice on whether to participate. So I guess you could say it ended up being mutually exclusive, but if I'd known that, I sure as shit wouldn't have gone through with it.

    No one wants clear instructions on what to do. People just want to have the knowledge they need to -make- a meaningful choice at the end of an event that they're invested in.

    But if you can't understand why, after weeks of fighting tide, pushing plot threads, and everything else, that having none of that have any impact, let alone any kind of narrative payoff, might be just a bit frustrating, then I don't know what to say. A lot of us were keeping going and holding out on the assumption that what we were doing might, you know, matter. That there would be some kind of different result if we kept at it than if we logged off or sat out the entire damned event. Having achieved -any- sort of win condition would be a huge difference to the overall narrative, and I'm really not sure how you can say otherwise. Or was winning the staff as meaningless to you and your faction as you're saying it should be for us?

    I was too stupid to understand the situation that, from what I'm getting from this thread, apparently any other player in the game would have understood properly. I directly undermined my IC and OOC goals at every turn. I put time and effort and everything else into trying to have some effect on things, only to be told that I was too dumb to actually do anything that I wanted, and I could have logged out weeks ago and everything would have ended the same way. And apparently, I should have understood all this from the start. Or, in the words of admin and other players:
    Ictinus said:
    any misinterpretation or failure to communicate is ultimately in the hands of those receiving the advice.
    Torinn said:
    And?  That's a failure on the player's part and the leadership's part.  Hold them accountable.

    Failure seems to be an appropriate word.
  • Never fixate on the result too much OOCly. It's a game and factions don't get obliterated utterly very often. Most things players do don't in general have the kind of impact you seem to desire. It's the journey that's fun. If you didn't enjoy what you were doing, you should've tried to find a way to make it more enjoyable imo. If you did enjoy it, why does it matter what the result was?
  • Makarios said:

    * From an ooc perspective, the Cyrene playerbase have historically been very resilient, and we knew this was going to be a tough one. This was a factor in discussion.


    Maybe the big mistake was this, judging by the complaints on the forums.
  • Jurixe said:
    I feel that a lot of people are (intentionally or otherwise) dismissing the frustration of the Coalition players over what happened with this event. 


    I feel if you're stating this, then you havent really bothered to read the posts and are just jumping to defend once again.

    What the players have brought up are logical retorts to the rather aggresive claims made by Coalition players that they had no signs and that they had no control in the matter.

    Jurixe said:

    I have little to no investment in this development

    I have to call your bluff on this. You were one of the biggest and loudest advocates of the games and coalition. Your forum history alone shows that as well did your actions in the game. You most definitely had an emotional investment in all this which would definitely be considered in any statement you made afterwards.
  • ArchaeonArchaeon Ur mums house lol
            
  • Let's get this back on the topic please.
    "If you build it, they will come."
Sign In or Register to comment.