The salt is immaculate. My favourite lie is "being harassed for hours -each day-". Yeah we've tried to raid nearly every day, and nearly every day we've left within a few minutes because you guys only want to defend if the Eleusian gank squad is there. Sorry that Ashtan is literally enemy number one for Targ, pick a different city.
2021/08/31 01:15:35 - Iaxus slew Maricel, an old woman.
2021/08/31 03:08:46 - The forces of Targossas have destroyed Amadia's Jewellery Shoppe of Ashtan.
2021/08/30 00:12:15 - Vinzent slew an Ashtani corsair stationed at Junction of Manike Way and Deer
2021/08/30 00:44:24 - The forces of Targossas have destroyed Deer Grove overlooking the Accra.
2021/08/25 00:05:00 - Iaxus slew Chef Procurio.
2021/08/25 00:51:42 - Ante slew Chef Procurio.
Forgive the hyperbole there, here are some exact numbers just from the logs of denizens slain, not including the times when you just parked with the horde, smudged totems, and talked shit. The lack of self-awareness as to why people don't want to engage with you when you act like a bag of dicks just reinforces my position to not interact with someone who acts like a bag of dicks. And I'm a gay man.
This kind of behavior is also why nobody wants to do anything with anybody else in this community, and Iaxus is not the sole person to perpetuate it either.
It's okay, it's perfectly in line with a grimdark edgy interpretation of Nature where the weak get bullied and killed because they're weak. Which isn't to be confused with a grimdark edgy interpretation of Progress, Evil, Light, Chaos, or Bureaucracy where the weak get bullied and killed because they're weak, this is totally different.
Crazy thing is Imyrr, we only added after we got tank. I’m not acting like it’s not annoying, I’m sure it would be if my city was afraid of iaxus and I. I’m literally terrible at this game(aka have less arties than pretty much everyone you would bring). We do it because it is literally our city’s role play to hate chaos and man do you make us want to raid more with your better-than-you attitude and inability to fight for your own city. I played targossian when we got chain raided for the first two real life weeks. I got no sympathy for us messing around in your city for maybe 12 hours total in 2 weeks. From a rp standpoint it shows you and any other potential raid leaders don’t care about your city. At least our novices who don’t even have aliases set up defend willingly and ask questions and get better.
those reasonable odds were Vanessa, caladbolg, me iaxus and romaen versus 8 of you. It’s also the 4th time eleusis has showed up to fuck with us, shout out andraste twice and archaeon twice. Hats off fellas you have killed more targossian raiders in ashtan than ashtan could ever make an effort to.
Not sure how you say you don’t have time to waste on achaea, you sit afk in ashtan most of the time I’m logged in. Sure do have a lot of time to talk shit tho. none of our raids have gone over an hour unless we are actively trying to sanction, which only comes if(important because you miss this) you defender
also happy first forums post to me, possibly my last. Forums be toxic, gg see you next raid.
also you picked up 30k of my gold and talked down to me when I politely asked for it back. Dick move
Nobody would care about raiding if there was a better way to display angst between factions. The God of Oblivion just woke up, you're going to be seeing a lot more of factions that oppose him going forward. People are going to do what makes sense for them to do in the moment, yesterday or 3 days ago don't matter. It's been that way and will continue to be that way as long as the rules support it. Targossas trying to ramp up efforts against Ashtan make sense and are within the rules. Eleusis 12 man raiding Mhaldor when 4 people are online is within the rules. Eleusis diving Targ tank in Ashtan to try to disrupt a raid is also within the rules. Your perspective colors your interactions without fail, and these things are never viewed the same across factional lines. Handle it in game, it's easier on everyone involved.
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
You tried to gank me 3v1 right after the change to AR3 being made open pk and had the gall to ask for the gold you dropped back. No, you don't get it back. 🙄
If I'm in Ashtan, I'm dealing with things that don't necessarily require me to move. I assure you, were I afk, one of you would radiance me to death.
Edit: Although you're right, expecting any of this conversation to have any impact is absurd. Back to lurking I go!
@Gallida Regarding your earlier comment on downsizing orgs, I really don't see that as helpful. Shallam being destroyed caused the majority of the people Greys played with to just quit playing. My best estimate is that only maybe 40% of the Shallamese playerbase stayed with the game.
Abruptly blowing up organizations is definitely the wrong answer. It could be argued that big repurposing of organizations hasn't really worked out either, between losing people who no longer want to play under a firm ideology and the continued fostering of "ends always justify the means, unless we lose" mentalities.
I think the best way would be to sit down with each organization on an individual basis, OOC town hall style, and have the people there work out the following:
1. What can your side bring to the game if you were in an antagonist role?
2. What can your side bring to the game if you were in a protagonist role?
3. What does the game stand to lose if your side no longer existed?
It's all a moot point, though, since the admin is understandably gunshy about big sweeping changes to things other than Pariah. Nuking Shallam irrepairably hurt the game population, Ashtan still hasn't recovered from their renaissance, and the three orgs doing the best population-wise are Hashan, Eleusis, and Cyrene, the first two having relaxed roleplay and conduct standards and the third being the elemental plane of inertia.
Named denizens in cities should hire as long as they have gold in their inventory. Then, if you want to kill them without repercussions, you have to hire a Serpent to steal their gold first. Stealing gold from a denizen should mark a character as a thief, so thieves who steal from city-loyal denizens are really just transferring consequences from the denizen's killer to themselves.
This is a valuable service that I can make money from.
Also, create other ways to undermine and attack cities besides raiding. Yes, I know that this is already possible but create more. If a city like Cyrene can't raid or retaliate, they become a punching bag and it sucks. It's no fun being or punching a punching bag. Create more realistic and effective methods for infiltration, spycraft, subterfuge, blackmail, economic sabotage, hamstringing, let's engineer plagues and poison the water supply, maybe someone released a monster in the sewers, maybe they stole your whole library, maybe they forged your signature and started a war (oops).
There just aren't enough creative avenues for addressing and escalating conflict that aren't raiding.
Yes, there are RP avenues for this but those aren't real. If an avenue and its effects aren't mechanical and concrete, they do not actually exist. No conflict will ever be resolved purely through RP if one side of the conflict has to willingly RP the loser.
The broader portion of the playerbase is not interested in conflict of any kind. More or less, they want to play the Sims in Achaea, and are perfectly content to do it. Conflict counteracts that notion and makes them either complain or cease playing. I am not being snide or derisive about this, it is just the simple truth.
When all is said and done, there is about 20-30 or so of us who want to play a PvP game with actual stakes (or any kind of antagonistic/competitive roleplay) and another 70-100 people interested purely in the PvE and social aspect. No amount of stuffing conflict-oriented mechanics into the mouths of people who don't want to chew on them is going to do anything. There is a fundamental mismatch between the expectations of the vocal constituent that lives on these forums and everybody else who plays the game, with most of here being firmly in the minority for desiring avenues and appropriate consequences for the things we do in-game.
Again, I'm not trying to paint any one side as superior to the other here. All I am saying is that the people who enjoy conflict are outnumbered almost three to one with a number I plucked entirely out of my head, and the general tendency of the game to stagnate when not violently forced into motion by the administration is direct proof of this, as is the total lack of any real mechanical consequence for loss. The Garden aren't idiots. They know full well what would happen if they threw wide the gates.
@Eurice I think @Profit understands it pretty well. He is providing ideas that could help bridge the divide you explained that exists between the PVP and PVE crowds. That's what several of us have tried to do in this thread. Most of us are okay with making things more immersive and have effects or consequences. Many of us are just not okay with the decision to grant contracts and pull us into PVP for hunting NPCs. It's silly (to me and others) for a lot of reasons and we are attempting to give other options that we find more appealing. Frankly...this felt like a quick, easy, and lazy option to add to the game as I'm sure the other ideas would require quite a bit more work.
It's interesting that you believe the PVE and social crowd is so much larger than the PVP crowd. I have no idea about the numbers either but I would have thought they'd be a little closer.
On a side note...I quit before Shallam went boom. Partly because it was getting so toxic there that every day was nothing but fighting and bickering. When I returned and saw that it was destroyed, I was a bit disappointed I wasn't there to see it happen. Part of the problem with this game is that it exists 24/7 and the mechanics make it difficult for all the factions to have their fun and consequences and all that is involved with that. Unfortunately as a result of this I do not find raids or PVP that engaging.
I honestly don't know why I enjoy hunting so much. I suspect if I got all those damn dragon talismans then my desire to hunt would probably diminish quite a bit. Gotta have something to draw us in and engage. When the admin makes attempts then we provide feedback. It's better if that feedback offers insight or ideas but what they do is up to them and how the player base reacts is up to them. No one is really right or wrong for the most part. Everyone plays for their own enjoyment and who am I to say that someone needs to play this game differently because this part is more fun than that part.
Group combat is just not interesting enough for giant PvP fights to be remotely compelling as the primary way in which organizations interact with each other. It's almost impossible to get any remotely interesting story generation out of a raid, because every single one goes the same way, there's far too much spam to even really understand what's happening, and it basically just comes down to whoever has the better mechanics. Fights snowball, and whoever is better equipped and more persistent will eventually win based on that, barring overwhelming numbers or some other external factor that does nothing to make them more compelling on a story basis. But none of those are interesting, none of those are memorable.
No one's writing stories about raids, no one even thinks about them again more than 30 minutes after they're over. They just become a log line, and either a brief period of self-satisfaction or annoyance at losing. Some factions add a little flavor to this in the moment, but none of it actually matters, and none of it persists in the collective game consciousness.
The game just fundamentally has nothing to support group PvP to be compelling, because defending against a raid offers nothing beyond not being "punished". And I use that word very loosely, because even the punishment is just a very minor, temporary inconvenience. People keep talking about PvP driving 'conflict and roleplay', and I honestly just don't understand it. Fighting someone in this game is fun, and interesting, but getting ambushed by some random mark because I killed Duke Semiro does nothing to make my game more 'roleplay rich'. It just means someone who is better at the game than me is going to kick my ass around - which I can't imagine is particularly compelling for them, either. And to be clear, I don't mind this change in a general sense, but claiming it 'drives RP' or is going to cause people to look at NPCs as less of a bag of gold-studded meat is just completely unsupported by the mechanic? You can't both claim that it does so and then also that "it's so easy to avoid, just don't kill this one NPC!" - It's absolutely even more ridiculous that Duke Semiro is cool with you killing his entire family, court, and about a hundred sworn knights and guardsmen but he'll only send anyone after you if you dare touch him.
It's been said a bunch of times, but there are just literally no consequences for death, and also just so many, many mechanisms for avoiding it if you really want to as long as you're willing to spend a load of money and/or time. Every single change to push more PvP seems to just tilt towards giving more leeway for people to be vaguely abusive to players who are inexperienced or haven't spent thousands on artefacts, in the name of "roleplay-driven conflict".
Regarding making raids and group combat more fulfilling, it was something Targossas did have an internal discussion about, namely rituals and other things to perform during a raid. Unfortunately, there is limited capacity to see such things by the other partyies.
No one's writing stories about raids, no one even thinks about them again more than 30 minutes after they're over. They just become a log line, and either a brief period of self-satisfaction or annoyance at losing. Some factions add a little flavor to this in the moment, but none of it actually matters, and none of it persists in the collective game consciousness.
Comments
The salt is immaculate. My favourite lie is "being harassed for hours -each day-". Yeah we've tried to raid nearly every day, and nearly every day we've left within a few minutes because you guys only want to defend if the Eleusian gank squad is there. Sorry that Ashtan is literally enemy number one for Targ, pick a different city.
You close your eyes momentarily and extend the range of your vision, seeking out the presence of Andraste.
Though too far away to accurately perceive details, you see that Andraste is in Mhaldor.
As you gaze into a mirror of fae perception, you see the shadows of 12 people alongside Andraste.
Mhaldor have 4 people awake, two of which are Novices.
That's some effort to prove a point
2021/08/31 01:15:35 - Iaxus slew Maricel, an old woman.
2021/08/31 03:08:46 - The forces of Targossas have destroyed Amadia's Jewellery Shoppe of Ashtan.
2021/08/30 00:12:15 - Vinzent slew an Ashtani corsair stationed at Junction of Manike Way and Deer
2021/08/30 00:44:24 - The forces of Targossas have destroyed Deer Grove overlooking the Accra.
2021/08/25 00:05:00 - Iaxus slew Chef Procurio.
2021/08/25 00:51:42 - Ante slew Chef Procurio.
Forgive the hyperbole there, here are some exact numbers just from the logs of denizens slain, not including the times when you just parked with the horde, smudged totems, and talked shit. The lack of self-awareness as to why people don't want to engage with you when you act like a bag of dicks just reinforces my position to not interact with someone who acts like a bag of dicks. And I'm a gay man.
Me soloing in to kill denizens does not equal harassing for hours. Those are separate incidents. But go off, keep saying things out of context. :)
ETA: I will concede the middle one! We tanked you, did a cleansing ritual, and killed a guard stack. It was a good day.
Iaxus is just wanting to take over Shecks' place, since he got forumbanned.
Disappearing from Achaea for now. See you, space cowboy.
smileyface#8048 if you wanna chat.
This kind of behavior is also why nobody wants to do anything with anybody else in this community, and Iaxus is not the sole person to perpetuate it either.
@Eurice Nobody wants to do anything with you because you'll probably try forcefeed them mare's milk.
Disappearing from Achaea for now. See you, space cowboy.
smileyface#8048 if you wanna chat.
It's okay, it's perfectly in line with a grimdark edgy interpretation of Nature where the weak get bullied and killed because they're weak. Which isn't to be confused with a grimdark edgy interpretation of Progress, Evil, Light, Chaos, or Bureaucracy where the weak get bullied and killed because they're weak, this is totally different.
Crazy thing is Imyrr, we only added after we got tank. I’m not acting like it’s not annoying, I’m sure it would be if my city was afraid of iaxus and I. I’m literally terrible at this game(aka have less arties than pretty much everyone you would bring). We do it because it is literally our city’s role play to hate chaos and man do you make us want to raid more with your better-than-you attitude and inability to fight for your own city. I played targossian when we got chain raided for the first two real life weeks. I got no sympathy for us messing around in your city for maybe 12 hours total in 2 weeks. From a rp standpoint it shows you and any other potential raid leaders don’t care about your city. At least our novices who don’t even have aliases set up defend willingly and ask questions and get better.
those reasonable odds were Vanessa, caladbolg, me iaxus and romaen versus 8 of you. It’s also the 4th time eleusis has showed up to fuck with us, shout out andraste twice and archaeon twice. Hats off fellas you have killed more targossian raiders in ashtan than ashtan could ever make an effort to.
Not sure how you say you don’t have time to waste on achaea, you sit afk in ashtan most of the time I’m logged in. Sure do have a lot of time to talk shit tho. none of our raids have gone over an hour unless we are actively trying to sanction, which only comes if(important because you miss this) you defender
also happy first forums post to me, possibly my last. Forums be toxic, gg see you next raid.
also you picked up 30k of my gold and talked down to me when I politely asked for it back. Dick move
Nobody would care about raiding if there was a better way to display angst between factions. The God of Oblivion just woke up, you're going to be seeing a lot more of factions that oppose him going forward. People are going to do what makes sense for them to do in the moment, yesterday or 3 days ago don't matter. It's been that way and will continue to be that way as long as the rules support it. Targossas trying to ramp up efforts against Ashtan make sense and are within the rules. Eleusis 12 man raiding Mhaldor when 4 people are online is within the rules. Eleusis diving Targ tank in Ashtan to try to disrupt a raid is also within the rules. Your perspective colors your interactions without fail, and these things are never viewed the same across factional lines. Handle it in game, it's easier on everyone involved.
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
Also lol saonji learn2defend it’s literally easy
You tried to gank me 3v1 right after the change to AR3 being made open pk and had the gall to ask for the gold you dropped back. No, you don't get it back. 🙄
If I'm in Ashtan, I'm dealing with things that don't necessarily require me to move. I assure you, were I afk, one of you would radiance me to death.
Edit: Although you're right, expecting any of this conversation to have any impact is absurd. Back to lurking I go!
Achaea: Caution and Ethics are Regressive Concepts
Achaea: Where everyone’s a critic
@Ante Can I have another look at Chinny?
Disappearing from Achaea for now. See you, space cowboy.
smileyface#8048 if you wanna chat.
The problem is people don't handle it in game. They log off.
Only if you send more ants.
edit: and move guards out of me and Iaxus’s sweet, sweet love Manor.
@Ante Nah, they're just there to make sure nobody else gets disturbed by that sight.
Disappearing from Achaea for now. See you, space cowboy.
smileyface#8048 if you wanna chat.
@Gallida Regarding your earlier comment on downsizing orgs, I really don't see that as helpful. Shallam being destroyed caused the majority of the people Greys played with to just quit playing. My best estimate is that only maybe 40% of the Shallamese playerbase stayed with the game.
I wonder if destroying orgs has ever worked at all.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
Abruptly blowing up organizations is definitely the wrong answer. It could be argued that big repurposing of organizations hasn't really worked out either, between losing people who no longer want to play under a firm ideology and the continued fostering of "ends always justify the means, unless we lose" mentalities.
I think the best way would be to sit down with each organization on an individual basis, OOC town hall style, and have the people there work out the following:
1. What can your side bring to the game if you were in an antagonist role?
2. What can your side bring to the game if you were in a protagonist role?
3. What does the game stand to lose if your side no longer existed?
It's all a moot point, though, since the admin is understandably gunshy about big sweeping changes to things other than Pariah. Nuking Shallam irrepairably hurt the game population, Ashtan still hasn't recovered from their renaissance, and the three orgs doing the best population-wise are Hashan, Eleusis, and Cyrene, the first two having relaxed roleplay and conduct standards and the third being the elemental plane of inertia.
Named denizens in cities should hire as long as they have gold in their inventory. Then, if you want to kill them without repercussions, you have to hire a Serpent to steal their gold first. Stealing gold from a denizen should mark a character as a thief, so thieves who steal from city-loyal denizens are really just transferring consequences from the denizen's killer to themselves.
This is a valuable service that I can make money from.
Also, create other ways to undermine and attack cities besides raiding. Yes, I know that this is already possible but create more. If a city like Cyrene can't raid or retaliate, they become a punching bag and it sucks. It's no fun being or punching a punching bag. Create more realistic and effective methods for infiltration, spycraft, subterfuge, blackmail, economic sabotage, hamstringing, let's engineer plagues and poison the water supply, maybe someone released a monster in the sewers, maybe they stole your whole library, maybe they forged your signature and started a war (oops).
There just aren't enough creative avenues for addressing and escalating conflict that aren't raiding.
Yes, there are RP avenues for this but those aren't real. If an avenue and its effects aren't mechanical and concrete, they do not actually exist. No conflict will ever be resolved purely through RP if one side of the conflict has to willingly RP the loser.
I don't think you get it.
The broader portion of the playerbase is not interested in conflict of any kind. More or less, they want to play the Sims in Achaea, and are perfectly content to do it. Conflict counteracts that notion and makes them either complain or cease playing. I am not being snide or derisive about this, it is just the simple truth.
When all is said and done, there is about 20-30 or so of us who want to play a PvP game with actual stakes (or any kind of antagonistic/competitive roleplay) and another 70-100 people interested purely in the PvE and social aspect. No amount of stuffing conflict-oriented mechanics into the mouths of people who don't want to chew on them is going to do anything. There is a fundamental mismatch between the expectations of the vocal constituent that lives on these forums and everybody else who plays the game, with most of here being firmly in the minority for desiring avenues and appropriate consequences for the things we do in-game.
Again, I'm not trying to paint any one side as superior to the other here. All I am saying is that the people who enjoy conflict are outnumbered almost three to one with a number I plucked entirely out of my head, and the general tendency of the game to stagnate when not violently forced into motion by the administration is direct proof of this, as is the total lack of any real mechanical consequence for loss. The Garden aren't idiots. They know full well what would happen if they threw wide the gates.
@Eurice I think @Profit understands it pretty well. He is providing ideas that could help bridge the divide you explained that exists between the PVP and PVE crowds. That's what several of us have tried to do in this thread. Most of us are okay with making things more immersive and have effects or consequences. Many of us are just not okay with the decision to grant contracts and pull us into PVP for hunting NPCs. It's silly (to me and others) for a lot of reasons and we are attempting to give other options that we find more appealing. Frankly...this felt like a quick, easy, and lazy option to add to the game as I'm sure the other ideas would require quite a bit more work.
It's interesting that you believe the PVE and social crowd is so much larger than the PVP crowd. I have no idea about the numbers either but I would have thought they'd be a little closer.
On a side note...I quit before Shallam went boom. Partly because it was getting so toxic there that every day was nothing but fighting and bickering. When I returned and saw that it was destroyed, I was a bit disappointed I wasn't there to see it happen. Part of the problem with this game is that it exists 24/7 and the mechanics make it difficult for all the factions to have their fun and consequences and all that is involved with that. Unfortunately as a result of this I do not find raids or PVP that engaging.
I honestly don't know why I enjoy hunting so much. I suspect if I got all those damn dragon talismans then my desire to hunt would probably diminish quite a bit. Gotta have something to draw us in and engage. When the admin makes attempts then we provide feedback. It's better if that feedback offers insight or ideas but what they do is up to them and how the player base reacts is up to them. No one is really right or wrong for the most part. Everyone plays for their own enjoyment and who am I to say that someone needs to play this game differently because this part is more fun than that part.
Group combat is just not interesting enough for giant PvP fights to be remotely compelling as the primary way in which organizations interact with each other. It's almost impossible to get any remotely interesting story generation out of a raid, because every single one goes the same way, there's far too much spam to even really understand what's happening, and it basically just comes down to whoever has the better mechanics. Fights snowball, and whoever is better equipped and more persistent will eventually win based on that, barring overwhelming numbers or some other external factor that does nothing to make them more compelling on a story basis. But none of those are interesting, none of those are memorable.
No one's writing stories about raids, no one even thinks about them again more than 30 minutes after they're over. They just become a log line, and either a brief period of self-satisfaction or annoyance at losing. Some factions add a little flavor to this in the moment, but none of it actually matters, and none of it persists in the collective game consciousness.
The game just fundamentally has nothing to support group PvP to be compelling, because defending against a raid offers nothing beyond not being "punished". And I use that word very loosely, because even the punishment is just a very minor, temporary inconvenience. People keep talking about PvP driving 'conflict and roleplay', and I honestly just don't understand it. Fighting someone in this game is fun, and interesting, but getting ambushed by some random mark because I killed Duke Semiro does nothing to make my game more 'roleplay rich'. It just means someone who is better at the game than me is going to kick my ass around - which I can't imagine is particularly compelling for them, either. And to be clear, I don't mind this change in a general sense, but claiming it 'drives RP' or is going to cause people to look at NPCs as less of a bag of gold-studded meat is just completely unsupported by the mechanic? You can't both claim that it does so and then also that "it's so easy to avoid, just don't kill this one NPC!" - It's absolutely even more ridiculous that Duke Semiro is cool with you killing his entire family, court, and about a hundred sworn knights and guardsmen but he'll only send anyone after you if you dare touch him.
It's been said a bunch of times, but there are just literally no consequences for death, and also just so many, many mechanisms for avoiding it if you really want to as long as you're willing to spend a load of money and/or time. Every single change to push more PvP seems to just tilt towards giving more leeway for people to be vaguely abusive to players who are inexperienced or haven't spent thousands on artefacts, in the name of "roleplay-driven conflict".
Regarding making raids and group combat more fulfilling, it was something Targossas did have an internal discussion about, namely rituals and other things to perform during a raid. Unfortunately, there is limited capacity to see such things by the other partyies.
No one's writing stories about raids, no one even thinks about them again more than 30 minutes after they're over. They just become a log line, and either a brief period of self-satisfaction or annoyance at losing. Some factions add a little flavor to this in the moment, but none of it actually matters, and none of it persists in the collective game consciousness.
Speak for yourself. Not true for me.
Anyone saying that group fights always go the same way are clearly not often participating in group fights.
I mean in terms of outcome, the tactics used can certainly change, and the fights themselves can vary, but only two things ever happen in the end:
1) Attackers blow up something and nobody cares.
2) Defenders prevent attackers from blowing up something and nobody cares.
There's no long-term consequences from raiding, so it's just a dull morass.
Yeah, it was really dull when Hashan took over Eleusis for half a day.