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Re: Mildly Irritating: Aetolia's Pet Peeves

If you perceive the people you are playing the game with as friends, and the people you are playing the game against as your enemies. You are making a big mistake. And I'm saying this despite, me as the player might come off as a polarizing character to the some of you. I know the real enemy is not having anyone else to play the game with OR against. It's important to keep that in mind as you carry on with your business.

Saltz

Re: Mildly Irritating: Aetolia's Pet Peeves

If you perceive the people you are playing the game with as friends, and the people you are playing the game against as your enemies. You are making a big mistake. And I'm saying this despite, me as the player might come off as a polarizing character to the some of you. I know the real enemy is not having anyone else to play the game with OR against. It's important to keep that in mind as you carry on with your business.

I just want to point out that this is probably the most important advice of this thread. Be nice to each other, and we can all have fun together. You can't play the game without the other side participating too.

Keroc

Re: Mildly Irritating: Aetolia's Pet Peeves

no more killing didi she is done have a great life

Didi, honey, I love you. I don't want you to be unhappy. I hope I've made that clear.

When this all seemed to be starting, I was indignant on your behalf. I thought Sryaen noosing you in Scidve during Orrery, when you were alone and definitely not participating in anything, was unnecessary. I also thought going out of the way to hunt you down in certain other instances was unnecessary. It seemed mean-spirited to me.

I'm not totally clear on why you want to attend lessers. Eld don't give good experience for anyone at endgame, and you can't make use of any ylem abilities since you're not a member of a city. The specific reasons aren't super important, though. Your character attends an open PK event. From a rules standpoint, anyone can freely kill your character at an open PK event. Furthermore, your character's name has increasingly shown up on kill assists alongside Shadow characters. I don't know why or how - maybe it's accidental - but the reason doesn't really matter. Since your character is actively harming Spirit during a battle, it's reasonable for Spirit characters to feel your character shouldn't be afforded certain privileges like free travel in cities, etc. These are simply consequences of your character's actions, not attacks on you as a person. As others have pointed out, there is a very simple solution to all this: stop attending lessers.

I don't want you to feel attacked here. I'm trying to say all this with compassion and out of concern for you. As someone who's had a rocky time in Aetolia, I absolutely empathize with you for feeling upset, anxious, and more. I've had negative mental health stuff exacerbated by goings-on in Aetolia, and I've taken rash actions as a result - whether quitting or lashing out at others. That said, I have to look at my part in those things. Sometimes I was in the wrong and behaving very poorly as a result. At other times, I was simply putting myself in situations that were causing anxiety or triggering other struggles. (Sometimes it was a combination of both!) I eventually had to step back and ask myself: why do I keep putting my hand on the stove? Nobody is forcing me to do so, and I know it burns.

I care about you. I don't want you to suffer. If you need to take a sabbatical from Aetolia, I get and support that. However, because I care about you, I have to tell you the truth, and the truth is that you are very much in control of this situation. If you don't like the consequences of your character's actions, the simple solution is to change those actions. Please consider it.

Alela

Re: Mildly Irritating: Aetolia's Pet Peeves

I have to agree with Sryaen. Reading that log made me feel sick. I have considered a lot of you as friends and, while our interactions have died down since switching to Spirit, I didn't think I would see such vitriol spilling from your mouths. You were talking of 'people behind the screen' when protecting Didi, which I agree with, but it completely went out the window when you were voicing your displeasure. I am sorry that what has been happening has been affecting Didi so much. She is a wonderful person and I truly hope she finds joy in the game again. And I get this game will always have an us vs them mentality, even oocly, because that is the nature of the game. It cannot help but seep oocly when we put so much of ourselves into our characters. Even if all we put in is time and creativity. Hell, I used to be one of them. What I know now though is both sides have their unicorns players, the toxic ones who will go out of their way to make things miserable for everyone else, but, by the most, everyone is just trying to play their character the best they can, and to attack someone oocly for that is absolutely ridiculous and childish. Be upset for ic things icly, but do not attack someone oocly over it. It is unicorns like that that get players to quit and not come back, no matter how long they have been a part of the community.

Ayastia

Re: Mildly Irritating: Aetolia's Pet Peeves

Jesus H Christ, I literally cannot believe this is still a thing.

I'm sorry you're tilted about getting killed at a lesser, Didi, but for real the easy solution is to just stop showing up to contested lessers until your character is willing to not run with the Shadow crew. I have no beef with you OOCly, but if this is seriously affecting you this much maybe you ought to take a step back and stop having people like @Rhyot and @Ayukazi enable you into thinking your char gets a free pass to do whatever she wants.

I've been pasted a log of y'all on shadow web and I have to say, you guys are an absolute joke with some of the stuff you've been saying. A quarter of you have never interacted with my character but sure have an awful lot to say, another quarter of you I don't even know who the hell you are, so talk about being an absolute nobody in this entire narrative, and the other half of you boast a big game on forums that you're not bullies or not toxic yourselves, but with some of the stuff y'all have said in this log makes me hope I never interact with you ever again.

Sryaen

Re: Mildly Irritating: Aetolia's Pet Peeves

I'm frustrated with how empty the game feels and how little there is to do during my playing times. In twelve years of playing the game as a European, I'm used to events only ever really taking place when I'm sound asleep (usually 3am onwards) but I usually always had some PK to engage in or a relatively healthy cadre of Asia/European Aetolians to interact with.

For the last couple of months I've literally been logging in to do my milestones, the patrol for the Templar and then sweeping for lessers. When they've been tapped, they've been contested maybe 1-in-10 times (as many people in the Spirit web will know from my bemoaning my PK 'drought' that I had to chase people into the Hunting Grounds to eventually break after nearly 400 hours of nothing).

Once those activities are completed, it's time to idle. I have sound triggers for anything meaningful that happens in game to alert me if I need to come back for anything (which I do, often for yet another uncontested lesser foci).

I could sect but I don't really fancy fighting the same two people several times a day - every day - until we all just get sick to the back teeth of one another.

I find I really am struggling to find any real reason to play the game for any meaningful amount of time outside of just making credits for myself by completing milestones.

Benedicto

Re: Mildly Irritating: Aetolia's Pet Peeves

I could sect but I don't really fancy fighting the same two people several times a day - every day - until we all just get sick to the back teeth of one another..
Gonna echo this and add my own frustration to receiving a progression task that involves getting top 20 in sect, which means I'd have to fight the same 2-3 people over and over until I manage to scrape out a W or a draw enough for me to complete said task.

Miss me with that unicorns.

I agree. Sect ranking shouldn't ever be a requirement for org progression. Maybe an option, but not a requirement. My experience with Sect ranking (overall, not seasonal) suggests the system is super busted - it doesn't reward improvement over time nearly as much as just being good to begin with. I don't mean to be rude to whoever's responsible for developing it, but I strongly suspect its statistical model is flawed. As such, asking people to achieve a certain rating or standing (as opposed to the ranks that are just related to numbers of matches) is extraordinarily unfair.

Alela

Re: I'm done for now!

@Lin While scary, more consequential deaths (With permanency or loss of all loot/progress) is a highly refreshing concept to me. I have tried a couple of similar games, and it does make you attach less to your character for sure. But, it is a good thing that keeps you on your toes throughout the entire experience and once the inevitable happens, I find myself craving for more with a fresh start.

I think some games definitely have work to do with regards to getting the balance between danger and longevity just right. In the current game I'm playing, you're really not at risk of permadeath unless you're either being supremely stupid, or you've built yourself up to be so powerful that losing the protection is the cost of agency. It has all the perks of permadeath (death seems serious, you behave in a genuinely cautious way, people can TRY to bypass your fancy shield if you really really piss them off and convince them it's worth the risk, no one's a vindictive snowflake shouting taunts from behind the safety of a city wall), while still allowing you to live a normal life and get attached to your character.

And regarding the storytelling, I made my peace with the fact that IRE will never be the place to tell the story through characters' decisions, but tbh, from my personal experience, Aet is doing the best job out of all their games in that regard.

I guess this was the tilting point. I have been playing this game for about twenty years. I love Aetolia, I really do. You don't stick around with anything for that long (MUDs, children, black tar heroin, etc.) without a genuine connection and passion for it.

But Aetolia gets a little weird when you've been around this long. You don't just master the world and its history, you find yourself in a weird place where if you know the right way to approach it, you're kind of helping create it, even without being in the Pools. I've written books, made crafts, even dropped little hints in RP that ramified into actual, solid lore, sometimes on accident, sometimes on purpose and an admin just decided to roll with it. It's enchanting, but also a total tease! I want that kind of control all the time!

That's the exception, not the rule. I'm at the point now where I don't want my RP to be just an inconsequential story I'm telling between Big Plot Updates. We all know that what we do doesn't matter quite as much as a directive from a Celani, but it used to be a little easier not to see the strings. I can't tell if it's a genuine shift or just my own longevity, but the demarcation between player agency and admin direction seems incredibly stark these days, to the point where I'm beginning to recall what Achaeans said about some events feeling like cutscenes.

I can't really bear it, anymore. I wanna play in a space where if I really work for it, and put in some effort, the things I do have just as much gravitas and lasting effect on the world as a God's new pet NPC. I seem to have found a space like that, and I've got to admit, it's a little hard to imagine going back to Aetolia now.

(sneaky edit: plus it's a lot more palatable when I don't have to pump literal thousands of dollars into my character to put them on the same level as everyone else)

Lin

Re: Ylem Aura Toggle On/Off

I basically agree entirely with what @Saidenn said in his reply. The idea of having the in-game pathing system work around unstable sections would be amazing to have, especially for times where there's a lesser in the Shamtota Caverns and BL's people keep walking through our location rather than taking the long way around (this happened a few days ago).

However, these 'things going on with Didi' are purely the consequences of her own actions - a spirit-classed person actively fighting alongside Shadow. As I said in a previous thread about all of this, I don't have any beef with Didi OOCly. But my character has every reason to see issue with some supposedly 'neutral' person shouting Shadow-themed things (slaughter, rip n tear, etc), attacking us at lessers and majors, and most importantly - NOT offering the same 'help' towards Spirit when we're controlling a foci point. The argument could be made that "Well why would Didi help you if you guys have been attacking her?" To which I direct that right back. Why the hell would we not attack her - or anyone else - for these actions? I've gotten so much OOC and IC grief over following the game's rules over open PK zones and ylem aura, that I'm sort of done with the backlash. Shadow's answer to this ( @Drystin mainly ) was: if you want to have open pk on anyone with hostility/ylem aura, that's fine. But you're not gonna like that can of worms you open; implying that if we wanted to take the stance of hostility towards Didi, that Shadow was going to grief us into the dirt. Further evidenced by the group of 8-10 shadow people led by Mazzion to go after Valorie and Jakarn in the fracture for agreeing with a forum post of mine where I.. basically said all of this. Again.

What an absolute joke coming from one of the guys who primarily goes out of his way to gank people in vortex/fracture. And you know what? That's completely within his right to do so. Because he's not breaking any rules by doing so. Yeah it may seem crappy behavior, but the alternative is to simply not go in those areas. If Drystin is around, I simply wouldn't bash the fracture or vortex until he's offline. Or have buddies to back you up. So I'm really tired of this double standard of holding some people accountable for their actions, but other people get a free pass.

If someone has some sort of trigger emotion or medical issue that arises during PK, that's just as much on them to not put themselves in that situation.

Looking forward to rehashing this same non-issue in a few weeks once it flares up again.

Sryaen

Re: Ylem Aura Toggle On/Off

I do like the idea of PATH TRACK working like it does for enemy territory and pathing around unstable areas like it does for areas you are enemied at (villages, cities, etc). It would have to be a CONFIG someone chooses, though, to let those of us who DO go there to fight the ability to use PATH TRACK easily. So - CONFIG FOCI ON/OFF or something.

As for a toggle, I think it is wholly unnecessary. I understand the desire to participate, but WILLINGLY going into an unstable area or orrery brings with it a risk, and from an IC perspective, Spirit has reasons to be suspicious of a character who spends 99% of their time within the company of and city of a group that is aligned against their beliefs and aims.

Accidentally walking through an active lesser sucks. People have been killed due to being a known character of the other side even though they didn't mean to show up. I have targeted a lowbie who hit a block and it was just a quick swap. The pathing would fix that, so that is definitely approved.

Otherwise? We already have an opt-out option for not getting aura: Don't enter the unstable area willingly. Don't enter Scidve during active orrery willingly. Don't enter fracture/vortex willingly.

I adore Didi as much as the next person, but her CHARACTER has been making choices, and those choices have consequences. Our characters are free to disagree with them, but let's try to remember roleplay in this. Disagree with the choices of certain characters adopting a hostile stance, sure, but act those out IC.

TL;DR: I adore Didi, make a path track config to go around unstable zones, ICA = ICC.

Edit: To briefly add tot his, I recall distinctly when a Spirean went to Orrery to observe and was slain on sight. They complained rather loudly and, because the character was not as beloved, they basically got told "Next time don't go into a PK zone if you don't want to die".

Let's please avoid double standards.

Saidenn