Best Of

You should stop reading each other's webs/discords/OOC msgs. People who are leaking these to create content aren't doing anyone help either. I've, like most people I know do the same, said things that make no sense to my close circle of friends. Usually it's a joke, but sometimes it's just venting the pent up feelings I've about the game/recent changes whatever. And that's a very human thing to do. For example, we joked about me being a griefer for like the entirety of 2021, after I got issued with that wordage. And if someone showed all those logs to the person who issued me for it, that'd probably upset them pretty bad and cause more problems than there initially was. But nobody did that, and I am on much better terms with that person? So yeah, I firmly believe, it is not some heroic espionage move to tell people things that'd cause strife between players.

Now back to the war, is it progressing badly? I don't know honestly. I've only casually participated after work in the past few days. It looked decent. I got jumped a few times while trying to do the daily chores, as expected. But I also joined a few attempts to get rid of some troops and/or city defenses. And that's all I've seen. I don't think anyone is actively griefing anyone out of the game, by their actions, as far as I am aware. This war so far is making the game a lot more vibrant and that's always better than the alternative. I'd rather see 300 kills in kilstats over 20 combined kills in a whole week, we've been there before.

One thing though, I'm not personally a fan of how objectiveless/free of mechanical consequence this whole thing is. You can die 90 times over, and still claim your character "won", because death means nothing in this game, by design. You aren't locked out of repeating what you just did 30 seconds ago, you don't lose your gear/investments, the only thing you lose (exp) only really matters to people who are either newbies or people who are trying to get to lvl 200. That is problematic to me. And this design does make the whole thing about stamina, unless we are mature enough to just handshake and admit defeat IC. There's absolutely no reason to just give up, other than you know being camped whole day and not being able to do any of your activities within the game. (Which is only a problem for people whose top if not only priority in the game isn't PvP to begin with. I know this, because mine is PvP, hi.) This design does incentivize, the objective that doesn't exist originally in the conflict to manifest a new one and that is making sure the other side's engagements levels to drop. And that's not healthy, but it's the reality of it and I can't really hate the player, when I can just hate the game.

That being said, that's just my long term vision of this whole thing. I don't think we're anywhere close to that being a thing, but in time we can be. And I'd personally be just fine with however it resolves.

I signed up for forums just to comment on this.

I'm not sure what is going on in Shadow, but overall, Spirit is having fun. Most of the the playerbase has been awesome throughout this and as far as I know, there really haven't been a lot of bad feelings. I've been esteeming shadow players every day for their creativity, cleverness, and participation.

-There HAVE been some miscues, killing people that shouldn't have been killed on both sides.
-There WAS a blockade set and it was a mistake that resulted in a caravans being blockaded.
-Raiding is what it is. It got started, and it has continued - I recall spending most of my Monday morning chasing 5-8 shadow players around Duiran that were killing guards.
NOTE: IT WAS AWESOME
-Wanting to actively grief someone isn't cool, from any person on any side. What one person considers griefing changes considerably to the next person. That isn't for us to decide, if you feel like you're being griefed - 100% issue and let the admin decide and handle it appropriately.

None of us are perfect, mistakes are made and accidents happen. If you aren't cool participating, leave the militia. It's as plain and simple as that. If you screw up, apologize, or don't, just remember that actions have consequences no matter what side of the game you are on.

On a more positive note: The majority of the game has been stellar with these wars going on. The roleplay, the shouts, the bonkers pk, the clever tactics, I am completely blown away.

It's easy to lose your temper and nobody wants to "lose". But try to remember that this is just a game, and it's supposed to be fun.

This is 100% my two cents, spend it or throw it away. But have fun while you do it!

Has Spirit escalated? Hell yea we have.

But let’s not make this out to be Spirit is the big bad bully who is escalating for no reason.

A good portion of the Spirit army were galvanised by Nipsy throwing himself at our guards for hours.

We were galvanised by the blockades outside our orgs.

We were galvanised by the, from our character’s perspective, betrayal of Bamathis.

We are galvanised by constantly being told both IC and OOC that we are losing this war.

We are far past the point where it matters who escalated because nobody has clean hands here.

And to be quite honest? A lot of how this may look from the other side comes down to the simple fact that yes, right now Spirit is outnumbering Shadow most times of the day.

But when we have no mechanical objective how are we supposed to win this war? We have shown that we can raid Bloodloch during primetime when you have a good number of defenders sitting at the gates. We have shown we can clear whatever blockades you put up. We have shown we can dust all your shrines. We have shown we can respond to your ganks with more of our own.

Most of us don’t want to escalate, but we have been shown and told that what we have been doing is not enough, so now even many of the anti-war crowd are galvanised.