PK Updates: Announce #5364

Moroa

Regarding @Ashlei's point on focusing on the roleplay aspect of things: what I find hard to understand is that the response my issue received is that cause counting is, in some general, vague sense, permissible. ("Generally speaking, if you have two reasons to kill someone, you can kill them twice. [...]")

(Aside: I know the term cause counting is a misnomer, but we all know what it entails in-game, so I'm using it.)

Cause counting is just about as little based in roleplaying and roleplay-based conflict as I can imagine. To me, it feels there is nothing, nothing, that explains—in an in-character way—why a person would tally up some sort of "grievance debt" and check items off that list one death of a person at a time. The only reason I imagine people do this is simply because they want to participate in as much combat in as wide as scope as the PK policies allow, and that's not an ideology that I believe can be shoehorned into an in-character, role-play based justification. </rant>

In other words, I don't believe cause counting based justification for killing someone is something that makes sense as an in-character ideology.

(Another aside: I think you could maybe even go further than what I've said, though, and say it doesn't even make sense to cause count within the lore of Achaea, due to... however the halls of death work. The vagueness of how we as players understand them to function isn't very clear to me though, so I'll leave that to someone else.)

Athelas

@Tirvai

" ... I started logging in less and less. Most of what I liked here revolved around hunting [...] but it has been made very clear recently that more PvP is the direction that the world should be going. For those of us that enjoy PVE but not PVP...do we have anything to look forward to?"

Same here. Logged out over a week ago ... does not look like I'll be logging back in. For those who have the time to spend on coding systems for PvP, this kind of change is likely a lot of fun. For those who don't ... Time to find another game.

Archaeon

you guys are such crybabies lmfao

Gallida

Nothing has changed aside from "no more brainlessly hitting the most valuable thing in a zone" and "the admin is encouraging people to 'defend' (read: grief) one of the more populated midbie/autobashing zones".

The fact that nothing is done about the autobashing nor is there any encouragement for PvP that isn't "lol let's only play when we can't lose" are better reasons to quit, personally.

Shecks

I personally don't even believe these people. Nothing has materially changed for them. Maybe they're indeed not logging in but I wager they either weren't going to anyways or were on the edge for other reasons and just looking for any excuse (to themselves) to stop logging in.

Then again IRE is trying to make a more realistic immersive world where sentient living beings are more than just a pile of gold waiting to be collected and maybe some people just can't handle that. In that case, oh well. We'll keep more new players by making the game better than we'll lose to fear of change.

Aegoth

“I can’t autobash while watching netflix anymore…. Time to play another game.” 👋

Athelas

@Archaeon "you guys are such crybabies lmfao"

Yup, the shaming tactics are strong with you. Never understood what kind of enjoyment you get out of doing that. To each his own though.

Either way:

"So long, and thanks for all the fish."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucGzGVuuO-Q

Saonji

Probably because you're crying about literal non-factors.

Like 80% of the people who bashed Moghedu/Sirocco/Dun (for example) didn't even kill the single mob that hires. Nothing has changed whatsoever for any of them. The people who do bash them, woopty shit they lose out on like 700 gold. The horror.

Sobriquet

As someone who is very close to hitting lvl 131 and hunts a lot, I say to those people who are actively leaving the game due to recent changes... this is entirely on you. By that, I mean you are able to hunt about 99% of the mobs out here and NOT get hired on. The Mobs that do hire give a warning so unless you're autobashing you can very, VERY easily carry on exactly as you were and simply miss ONE mob in an area. Clear out Sirocco but skip the Duke, for example.

Given the warning messages you can now actively avoid all contracts if you're paying attention. I've gained around 30% at lvl 130 since these changes and haven't had a single denizen contract on me.

If you're looking at playing another game purely for this change I'll argue you weren't really playing this one in the first place.

Shecks

I agree with everything that's being said here (other than @Athelas obv), but there's another angle to take here:

If you're not willing to play an RPG with consequences for RP-based actions, then maybe you are playing the wrong game, or at least you're taking the wrong attitude. I think what IRE is doing (or rather, trying to do) is pretty damn awesome. They also made it abundantly clear that it's just a first step and many changes will be needed including perhaps this change to make sure it's a optimal balance between what's fun and engaging.

Personally, I have a hard time sympathizing with people who just want to hit F1 8 billion times with zero interaction with other people. Gimme $100 and i'll set you up with a telnet server that will let you hit your F1 macro and give you bigger and bigger numbers ad infinitum as long as you like without destroying the Achaea credit market and killing what are (in-character) millions of sentient people in a living RP environment with zero consequences.

Profit

If you're not willing to play an RPG with consequences for RP-based actions, then maybe you are playing the wrong game, or at least you're taking the wrong attitude.

lol

Tirvai

I started playing this game around 15ish years ago. I left for around 10 years and came back because I had good memories of this game. I was very impressed by how much the game itself had changed but so much of it felt familiar and I remembered more and more as I walked around. Now I'm almost 40 with a wife and three teenagers. I'm self-employed and I work a lot. The kids have all kinds of sports and stuff that take up a lot of time. I pop on this game for normally between 10 minutes to an hour at all kinds of random times. I don't have hours every day to sit around and wait for something exciting to happen. I focus on what I like and what I have time to do. I'll hunt, do some prospecting, get some renown, maybe even do a foray or sail a little bit. Hell...if I have a night without the kids...it's fun to get an edible and see how many dragon talismans I can get. Getting elder dragon has been my main goal in this game for a while now. I've only been working on it for over a real life year.

I (and several others) offered ideas for better ways to implement an immersive experience for hunting NPCs. I know this may be hard to believe but some of us play this game for different reasons. You can call it whining or say that I'm lying and I don't care. I'm not going to get upset by some internet tough guy saying mean things about me in regards to a text game. I am trying to provide constructive criticism for a game that I have enjoyed for a long time. I remember logging in with 400 or 500+ people. There was always something happening. Now I regularly play for half an hour and not see a single person talk on city or house channels. I haven't had much luck doing any RP these days but to be fair, I haven't made the time to make connections with people. I tried a few things when I came back but I didn't know anybody and those attempts fizzled out so I focused on the world and the NPCs. I hope this game stays around forever. It's impossible to please everybody. I don't cause problems and I don't issue. I've spent more money than I would care to admit on this game but I know it's just a drop in the bucket to compared to many. The player base is unlikely to grow tremendously from new players. I'm sure they trickle in. I would guess most new players are old returning players but this is all pure speculation on my part and I'm sure someone will be here soon to pick this post apart and tell me all the ways I am wrong.

Jiah

Hate to derail, but if only AR3 and above can be attacked, unless sanction is easy to obtain, no raiding will really happen if the defending city doesn't defend.

Idea:

1) Kill on Minister of War in city is automatic sanction, with descending impact for lesser ranks down to AR3, and

2) The retaliation tank sanction needs to be on more of a 25 hour (or so) expiration.

1) is there to allow attacking cities an easier time in obtaining sanction.

2) is to allow defending cities an easier time in retaliating, in case events prevent a proper response.

Another way is that maybe the tank can be dropped early and charges much slower, but the city knows that there will be a detonation eventually.

(These are probably awful ideas, but seem to address some flaws in the current approach from my perspective.)

Saonji

Being able to drop a tank without killing anyone was already tried. It sucked even more than what we currently have.

Shecks

You just can't force people to defend, ultimately. I would not shy away from slightly increased consequences for city destruction but too much would just be griefy as many raids are essentially unstoppable from defender perspective.

I think considering you don't lose any exp and that room destruction is pretty much meaningless, the frequent refusal to fight doesn't make sense to me, especially once you factor in that it's kinda OOC to just sit around idly in your city while enemies are 20 rooms away trying to destroy buildings and such.

One easy change would be to just give some meaningful reward for successful defence or even a moderate reward just for trying (maybe renown for killing raiders during a sanction?).

Another easy change would be to just let AR5+ just ALLOW a raid to commence without the 3 kills. This way the defenders don't have to do the "don't let them get 3 kills" dance and can skip straight to the zero exp loss defence part.

Ultimately though I think we're pretty close to the limit of what mechanics changes can fix. I think city leaders should just discourage this culture of just ignoring raids while just chilling on guard stacks or ships until the raiders get bored or wait 30 minutes to blow up their room and leave.

Gallida

You need a mechanical incentive (or an RP/divine one, but lol at any city but Mhaldor enforcing that) for people to defend that doesn't encourage raiders to fish for sanctions and then bring overwhelming force to tank city features.

If the result for not defending is in any way punitive, it's going to result in even more time zone raids. It has to be a reward outside the means of regular city business.

Sobriquet

You can put in all the mechanical incentive you like with regard to zero xp lose, rewards for tanks / disarming etc. The main factor here is people just don't like to lose, especially to certain groups. It's why I find raiding Cyrene the most fun of all the cities, because they try, they improve, they try again, the improve again. They take the defeats on the chin (although I hear internally they have some resistance) and move onto the next one.

Raiding and fighting with Eleusis is a massive clusterfuck of ego's borne out of numerous IC (and, I think, some OOC) grudges over time and I'm not sure much can be done about that now.

Eurice

Conversely, I don't know anyone can keep a straight face when saying Achaea is a "living RP environment" when barely any roleplay of substance actually happens (your relationship stuff is not narrative substance, before anyone gets gripey with me), and the systems that exist are all hamstrung from causing meaningful roleplay to develop in them because lo and behold, three days pass and the absolute maximum extent of damage anyone can realistically do is repaired in full like it never happened save for utterly trivial repair costs.

Factions (Eleusis) have lost wars and protracted conflicts then just claimed they never happened and that they actually won them instead. The last time mechanical war was peddled out, the subsequent fallout was responsible for shattering a faction OOCly that it's only just begun to recover from. Nobody is ever interested in the story, because the story sometimes involves losing, and Achaeans are so hysterically allergic to the notion that people will go so far as to not play the game when faced with the possibility of it happening.

The game is basically a sandbox wiped clean every 3 days with minimal loss for any of the actors involved and most of the playerbase by far and large is still uninterested in engaging in conflict. Shrines, raids, what-have-you.

What are the administration supposed to even do at that point? They keep dialling things back to get people involved and people keep inching away from it more and more. It is clear that what the majority playerbase wants and what the administration wants are not even remotely in sync, and that an exodus of one or the other is imminently forthcoming.

Gallida

archaeon friendly tl;dr - cut two orgs, make good guys and bad guys, bad guys win then lose to good guys, yay storytelling

Here's my unsolicited take:

1. The game population is too small to sustain a six-sided conflict dynamic. It needs to be pruned down to four, possibly five if we're hellbent on keeping Cyrene as "HOA Simulator". As to which ones get dropped and kept, that's a decision to be weighed based on active divine versus population versus established lore.

2. Two of the remaining organizations get to keep their zero-sum apocalypse win conditions. Not all, not one, two. They are now Achaea's antagonist roles barring game-spanning metaplots. They should not want to work together at all, and their existence is a threat to every other organization.

3. The other two organizations have to drop the "we only win when everyone else loses" nonsense. They're now Achaea's protagonist roles, which means they don't get to play genocidal slaver world blower-uppers, they have to pretend like they care about things outside their city. They can differ on ideology and implementation, should probably want nothing to do with one another, but should be able to come together in times of dire crisis. Being raided by one of the antagonists is not and will never be a dire threat.

4. The antagonist organizations should win on occasion, maybe score a symbolic victory, and then be undone through some Macguffin/deus ex machina/power of friendship. If they cackle and twirl their mustaches suitably while playing the bad guy, maybe they get cool lasting cosmetic effects on the world. They are going to lose, sometimes hard, and they have to be able to accept that.

5. The protagonist organizations should get their asses handed to them on occasion, maybe have to suffer under the antagonist symbolic victory, but if they play the part of getting convincingly whooped in rounds one and two, they get to pull a victory out in the final round. They are going to win, sometimes not quickly, and they have to do so with grace.

6. If you want muddled shades of morally grey, put that into your game-spanning metaplots. Force an antagonist and protagonist to begrudgingly work together. Give one of the protagonists a clearly overpowered Macguffin and make the other three orgs have to join forces to stop it. Introduce a big threat and make people figure out how to stop it while staying true to their ideologies. The sky's the limit.

7. I'm intentionally leaving Cyrene out here because it doesn't fit into the factional divide and probably never will. I've jokingly suggested the tsol'teth come back and put the whole thing in a non-aggression bubble as a wildlife preserve, just so that the people who want to play bureaucrats without touching the conflict systems can do so.

Is all of this horribly simplistic? Yes. Is it reminiscent of pulp fantasy or Saturday morning cartoons? Sure.

The problem is that Achaean storytelling can't even reach "dudes in white hats and black hats" nowadays, because everybody gets to be a genocidal maniac while also being the good guy who is 100% justified. It's the same character depth as Grand Theft Auto, minus the blackjack and hookers.

Drop the morally grey bullshit, establish firm alignment lines for people to play within, and force people to win and lose within those lines.

Saonji

They're not gonna cut any more orgs at this point. Not only would it not really solve any of the problems, it would also create a whole heap of new ones.

Kog

People are bad at the mustache twirl "I'll get you next time" that you see in movies/books because they want to win. I totally get that, too, like Hashan is capable of stomping Cyrene into the dirt if they really felt like it at all. So they'll come back until a tank is disarmed, and if anyone gets lippy about the disarm they can come right back. Or come back in an hour or two, to get that win. They spend a ton of time practicing, they have a lot of good PKers, and they put in the work to improve, all outside factors aside. They *deserve* to win because they can outperform us-- I think that a lot of the issues we have are because people insist on treating this like a book, not like a competition or sport. But it *plays* like a sport, not a book:

"And then the bad guys all attacked except they hit deliverance from our hero. Then they all came back to life and for the 19th time they charged."

Imagine how long LotR would have been if Sauron just inked a burst and articalled the ring. Achaea's more like the Browns suiting up to go play an actual football team. Losing a tank is just getting stopped in the red zone. If you don't follow sports, it's getting checkmated in chess or losing in tic tac toe- you just go next and do it again.

I don't have an answer that's concrete, but I can't help but wonder if maybe the answer isn't to reward narratively but instead to reward like a sport- you get paid if you play. As long as you try you get something. The Falcons got to the Super Bowl and dropped a 28-3 lead, then dried their tears with their millions of dollars in salary. Conversely, when you give up the 200 tanks or whatever I've lost, you get yelled at in shouts and roasted on forums and get not a lot IC for 2 years straight. "To the victor goes the spoils" sure, but there has to be some kind of carrot for actually trying, or people are never going to bother trying to overcome their natural disinclination to avoid loss. And you *need* them to lose. Because if they don't lose, and aren't willing to lose, you can't win.

Grandue

I’m just now getting back into raid defense and a lot of the mechanics are still unfamiliar to me, but here are a couple of initial observation coming back from dormancy.

• Showing up with 13 raiders when there are only 2-3 people online who know anything about defending probably isn’t going to get much of a response. Smudge all the totems, kill all the denizens, yell all you want…it’s going to be hard convincing people to dive into a totem propping, piety rite, entrenched group three times yours size.
• Would changing the kill requirements to include a certain number of different player deaths help? For example, from an RP perspective, 2-3 defenders may decide to suicide in defense of a city and dive that group hoping for a miracle, but not if it is just going to make things worse for the city. If a tank required 5 different defenders to die, 2-3 people could die over and over trying to root out the raiders without making things worse. Again, I’m largely ignorant on this, it’s a sincere question.

Iaxus

• Showing up with 13 raiders when there are only 2-3 people online who know anything about defending probably isn’t going to get much of a response. Smudge all the totems, kill all the denizens, yell all you want…it’s going to be hard convincing people to dive into a totem propping, piety rite, entrenched group three times yours size.

*cracks knuckles*

I've tried to raid Ashtan almost every single day for the past two weeks. Most of those times I showed up with 1 or 2 others (Ante/Caladbolg, normally). After being taunted in tells and yells and clearly shown that I'm not getting an engagement no matter what, yes, I'm going to get the sanction and then bring in my whole city for tank xp. It would be dumb of me not to. When Imyrr/Makenna came to Ante/me, we didn't summon anyone else. We just dived them while they were moving guards. And if you don't want to defend, don't be a soldier. That's an easy solution for you.

Gurklukke

Joining the Army is not so you can have a line in your honors that says you are in the Army, it is you deciding your character will defend its home and act on behalf of its military.

It's pretty simple to understand.

I have heard people say that it has been mandated to them to do so, that is also a choice, a mandate is about environment, you can choose to not be part of that environment.

Saonji

I'm not gonna defend when it's already barely an even fight, and I know for a fact that multiple others are gonna come running the second a fight does break out. Nothing is going to make me change my stance on this; it's a game first and foremost, if I don't wanna do something then I'm not going to.

You can claim "lol bad rp" all you like, if anything it just makes you look like more of a bellend. Please don't presume to know anything about my character. (this is a general comment, not literal 'you') Frankly it's just gonna make me less likely to engage you in future; I don't have to conform to your own view of what <x> thing means. I've had some fun conversations with Ante, the rest not so much.

Yelling shit, sending me tells, killing guards, just being generally annoying, etc... Is also going to just make me say 'k' and then probably go bashing, or just go and queue up a dungeon on FF14. It's definitely not gonna make me say, "Oh damn, I guess I'll engage!"

Iaxus

No one ever has to engage, but coming to forums to complain in an unrelated thread about 13 people raiding without providing the context is asking to be corrected. If you (also global "you") don't want to engage that's fine, I have no OOC issue with that, but I am also responsible for my raiding party's fun and if that means we can't get a fight, we're going to bash denizens/guards/perform a ritual/yell/etc. No one wants to enter into a city and sit there for 10+ minutes waiting on a fight then just walk home having done nothing.

Saonji

That's entirely your prerogative, and you're free to act as you please. Just don't expect it to foster any sort of goodwill for future attempts, like so many people often do.

That said, it says something if it takes you that long to realise you're not getting a fight. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Imyrr

This exchange is so disingenuous I'm having a hard time taking it seriously. When you raid for hours every day, especially for people without tons of time to waste on Achaea, you're not going to get a response. Which is why, after days of being harassed for hours -each day-, we finally moved guards. I literally do not have the time to spend dealing with you every single day. Find something else to do, JFC. I have fought against problematic odds often, but I'm not going to encourage people to be combat dummies for your masturbatory pleasure. You don't want a fight, you want an uncontested win.

As for yesterday, we engaged after I arrived as there were reasonably comparable odds, and once a sanction was granted, it immediately swelled from four to eleven, to then thirteen to six Ashtani, with none of us competent raid leaders. Another reason we don't engage every damn time, because that's your M.O. You can't claim you're playing in good faith if you never demonstrate it, yourself.

Eleusis was a surprise to everyone.

Kog

"Eleusis was a surprise to everyone."

Especially Cyrene because they were trying to raid us and had an active sanction at the time. It was almost Cyrene jumping Eleusis jumping Targ in Ashtan.

Archaeon

babel returns for like 2 days and already we're spreading chaos everywhere