Best Of

Sect duels and city raids are apples to oranges. Both parties mutually enter, already, into a Sect duel with either challenging or agreeing, signaling their readiness to engage in combat.

Aggressors in raiding (caravans, guards, troop movements) do not currently show any readiness to engage in combat other than agreeing to a War for RP reasons. In this case, it would be more akin to finding another Sect member, even if they are AFK, and simply killing them and stating that them joining to Sect means they agreed to fight whenever or however. Or, in converse, targeting AFK militia members simply for being in the militia despite not actively moving or even outside a city.

A fun system is where all parties involved can actively ENGAGE with the system. Late-night raids with no defenders or extremely small numbers does not allow both parties to actively engage. It allows one party to engage in the system and take advantage of the other party's inability to engage for their own benefit. It is visiting a rival's baseball field, hitting a ball off a tee, and claiming you won a match against them.

Fairness can be hard and nearly impossible to obtain. And, of course, people may lie if you ask them so you can always make the choice to look for known defenders, too. But the point is that, when it comes to city raids or things that directly impact another org through your actions, if you are only thinking of your own 'fun', then that is the entirely wrong approach in a community game.

So, I've been working a lot so I missed good chunks of the war, and this last week I got a sinus infection for Christmas. Yet, I can give my perspective as the last active city in the entire conflict.

First, I will start by saying it felt like most of the playerbase stayed very very mature, and I was pleased to see how well people were doing despite the endless shouting, dying, rebuilding, routing, etc. The butthurt was minimal and people just dusted off, got back up, and went for another round. That is always enjoyable to see.

I also enjoyed how the conflict grew organically. There seemed to be an IC reason for everyone to be involved in the war, and none of it seemed too paper thin to seem as a super flimsy justification. I appreciated it and I was sad I didn't get to join in more conflict and do more stuff during the time.

Now, that said, with the lack of mechanical objectives, thing definitely did stretch and boundaries go so blurred it made me wonder why we even have a city vs city war other than to throw an "Open PK" label on certain players. I respect, appreciate, and encourage RP, but this is also a game, meaning that while we don't want too many barriers to limit our rp, we also don't want every conflict to just turn into an endless brawl of "who has the most people with the most time to play right now". That isn't fun for either side, and can even see people sit-out when they look at the ball of the opposing team and go "why try?" It is a bad mentality, I 100% agree, but I can also understand the perspective of looking out and seeing 3:1 odds and trying to get hyped to die 15 times in a row.

The war system is antiquated so it needs more goals AND more gates. Yes, cities like Enorian can RP all day they are the White Knights to Duiran's lost boys and Bloodloch stands next to Spines just cause they are hungry for some blood, but that then defeats the entire purpose of a war system of city vs city. At that point it will always and endlessly turn into a war of numbers and who has the biggest deathball the majority of the time.

The other idea with gates, too, is the timing of things. While I know raids happened and troop movements happened during prime time, there troop movements and raids in the middle of the night EST too. It didn't feel like, and this can be said to either side who did this, there was a pulse check of "hey do you have active defenders?" to ensure people weren't just bashing troops/guards when there was no one around to stop them. That's the kind of shit we should not tolerate. At all. It is bad for morale. It leaves a sour taste in the mouths of everyone. And there is no counter-offensive other than hoping you, too, have people in other time zones and/or odd sleep schedules to be around to intervene.

Overall? I was satisfied how the war went in what little I and Spines participated. We had our IC reasons for not participating, and I also had some OOC feels from the players in the city as to why we needed some time to recover from recent events. War was planned, but BL/Duiran beat me to it. I think we need more conflicts like this soon. Better objectives, perhaps, something more concrete so we don't spend a month or two just endlessly killing each other, and a better way to ensure that every city vs city doesn't just end up being tether vs tether, because RP concludes that it almost always will, every single time.

TL;DR - great time. Much fun. Better objectives/mechanics. Rails to ensure we can have actual org vs org conflict, not tether vs tether conflict every single time (which is why I think Holy Wars are rarely used, but should be used more). Lets bash each other around again soon.

I'm not a huge fan of the war system. In large part because it doesn't really exist in a satisfying way.

I like PK. I'm not going to be anywhere near as 'honorable' a player in open world PK as I would be in Sect, because I am much more playing my character in open world than I am in Sect (or at least, I've invented a character constraint that he'd be more honorable in organized sect pk). He's not going to duel a lot of people, because a lot of people he would not consider worth that time and effort. He's also not going to let people gank other people in the middle of the city or 2 feet out, even if they have cause to attack that I agree with OOC. Why would he?

For the most part, the PK portions of the war were fine. I didn't get a lot of milestones done because I was fully aware of what being in the militia meant in terms of where I could walk around. Fortunately, even when people don't have cause on my character, I don't have a lot of reason to wander around at the moment so I didn't lose out on a lot of RP that I'd usually get. With that said, I definitely have some points where I think the war system in general currently fails.

1. We had no real way to press objectives beyond pushing a war of attrition and making sure it was our troops meaninglessly fortified on the monolith. I think this is part of what lead to shrine targeting initially (the later shrines being targeted as a result of the Farsai business).
2. To be frank: I don't enjoy raiding, I don't enjoy defending raids. It's just not the most engaging content. I will do it if that's what the war system encourages, because there's not really another way currently to engage with it that seems popularly accepted.
3. Killing quest npcs is also pretty obnoxious.
4. Spawn camping is also pretty annoying, and happened multiple times, repeatedly.
5. Running it down into city guards for like 20 deaths in a row really just highlighted how absolutely meaningless death is as a consequence in this game, even if you aren't an undead.

I don't mean this to come across harshly towards anyone in particular, and especially not the Pools - the war system is old, outdated, and it not being very good isn't really anyone's fault because I don't think anyone really saw this war coming when it did. And at the same time I can't and won't really blame anyone for working with what the war system currently is (there are obviously lines not to be crossed, but I didn't really see those get crossed? i'm not going to pretend I saw everything, though).

From a Spirit perspective, I think things were kind of dying down a little before the failed trap at Farsai. Bamathis and Severn's actions there absolutely reignited the IC passion a lot of characters might not have really been feeling at the moment, and I think that really showed with participation afterwards. I've said before that just winning through numbers isn't particularly fun, losing through numbers also isn't. But I still kind of liked it from an IC and OOC perspective of everyone grouping together for a cause that my character is a firm believer in.

What I liked:

a. The PK. Huge, organized group combat over various objectives (Mamashi, defending the cities, raiding Bloodloch) - it was all done in such a way that the concept of griefing didn't even occur to me. Punches were pulled when enough was felt to be enough, and I appreciated that.

b. The story. As an Enorian citizen, I honestly had no clue what hostilities were brewing between Bloodloch and Duiran until the call to arms was raised. After joining in and finding out about the story behind the Monolith and how it was impacting the land, while also serving as a barrier was pretty cool in my eyes.

c. The cities' leadership actually drawing to conclusions, like.. I don't think treaties and pacts were ever made like this in any of the previous wars I've been in. They all essentially boiled down to troop elimination and burnout, whereas this one concluded with several RP points intact as an ultimatum for the ceasefire.

d. The banter. Shouts are usually annoying and pointless, but a fair majority of the shouting going on during the war educated me on a number of things and introduced me to a bunch of characters I would never have truly -met- outside of just PKing them. Big props!

What I didn't like:

a. The shrines. I have always been fairly hesitant about Order stuff, having been the sole active and combat-ready member of an Order before whose shrines went under attack for weeks on end for no real reason other than to draw me out and PK me some more, usually in a 3v1 or 4v1 scenario. As soon as Shrines became involved, I made it a point to not stick my nose into any of that business and to try and speak up for the lesser-populated orgs who might have found themselves under attack.

b. The War mechanic. CITY RELATIONS and an RP standpoint are one thing to a war, but when the war is literally initiated over something like the Monoliths, I was kind of hoping there may have been an actual, mechanical interaction to be had other than just laying waste to each other in the Mamashi over a Monolith that remained at 81% corruption indefinitely. Troops can be brought in and destroyed, but then what?

For me, it was a fight that started because of a call to arms. Initially we believed the war to be breaking out between Duiran and Spinesreach after the Copperhead event, so Enorian's citizens were led to believe that if, and only if, Bloodloch joined the fray, then we would rise up to join them. When it BEGAN with Bloodloch, some of us were like "Well, Bloodloch is a part of it so let's go!". Many of us did make a mistake in jumping in without joining the Militia, but I'm pretty sure all of those cases were rectified after the fact. Then our RP justification for fighting was fueled even further by some Divine being, basically encapsulating us in this conflict. For me, it was specifically fighting to preserve the Mamashi. That was my personal justification, and with no real means to such an end, it felt a bit obsolete and devolved into just joining for even numbers. I know it's a big ask for administration to incorporate specific, war-related goals to wars that spontaneously break out, but if something like that were possible then I feel a great number of people involved would feel more comfortable participating.

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Overall, I think it was a splendid conclusion to the year, and I'm glad it didn't devolve into just straight griefing for days on end. However, I do feel for any Orders that got crippled during and after bc that stuff sucks, and I am also of the belief that more mechanical aspects to the war itself would benefit the participants greatly.

Some sort of active militia system might have been nice. I was in full-blown assassination mode when I was able to participate, but I didn't feel right ganking people who weren't actually participating. I generally resorted to searching their name in the #game feed on the Discord and seeing if they were in any big fights recently. This feels like an incomplete view of participation, and not a standard that was broadly held, but it's what I went with for my own ganks.

Conversely, cities should be able/eager to boot inactive people from their militia rosters, perhaps. Or maybe the whole problem will fix itself now that people understand war is a thing that can actually happen, and decide more intentionally whether to join militias. There was a lot of "I don't wanna be seen as lazy, but I don't want to be free game for ganks all the time" going around, which seems like a lot of bad expectations from those people specifically. At least, I did not see anyone else saying "you have to be in the militia to be a good Lochian/Enorianite/Duiranite/Spirean", but very vocal people saying "I have to be in the militia because X".