Best Of

I'm going to go in reverse order, because I don't agree that deleting tethers is the right solution but I do think that Whirran's initial post (and some posts in support of his) all have valid problems or points that could be answered differently.

Yes, I wrote an essay. Sue me.

The Mechanics

Alright, now lets break into the pk discussion. I expect this is where things may get somewhat hostile, so I'm going to try and be fair here and hope this can be a constructive conversation.
I think the half vs half aspect of the game really kills the pk scene. Now, I know not all fights are purely about numbers. It's about attitudes, it's about coordination, it's about a whole host of factors. But by splitting the game in half, it essentially limits diversity in such a way that it ends up being eminently clear which side has the weight of numbers at any given time.

Raids, such as during the last war when Bloodloch raided Enorian/Duiran, or when spirit raided Bloodloch, it became a tether wide conflict in all instances. Even just a month or so ago when Sheryni raided Enorian with just the two of us, half the group that showed up was Duiran people. Spinesreach shows up to defend Bloodloch, and Bloodloch shows up to defend Spinesreach in this same vein. You can't ever tailor your group and say you know, we only have a few, Enorian only has a few, lets go fight Enorian, or lets go fight Spinesreach, because you're getting the whole tether no matter what.

But when all the weight congregates, it's a lot more telling in a two sided conflict than it would be in say, a four-sided conflict. I enjoy winning as much as the next person, and as stated above I would definitely bring all my people, but that doesn't mean that's fun or engaging in the current climate.

I agree with the bolded. However, my experience is that splitting organizations up has no actual benefit besides making your orgs feel smaller to the players inside of them. In Imperian, we had (RIP Stavenn) two orgs per tether and three tethers, with the orgs inside those tethers occasionally getting into kerfuffles: Ithaqua and Antioch never had true peace/cooperation, for instance, and Kinsarmar/Celidon are/were in a cultural civil war for literal IRL years. What this really does is that it separates the PKers and the Others from one another. One group goes to one org and the other takes the remaining one. The people looking for conflict ask 'which city is big right now?' and pick that one, since larger orgs are less risk averse. I think the same thing would happen here, to the expense of the story and those orgs that would take the hit on membership.

I don't think we would get the scenarios you are illustrating with more even fights or whatever. Organizations would be intimidated by the idea of running up against larger ones. By splitting us into four cities, I actually think we would just keep the same unfun issues but change who the big dog is and I'm just not interested in that.

Instead of it being say, four warring factions each with a variable number, it's two lump sums. I've heard in the past shadow was the larger, and would stomp all over spirit. I can say currently spirit is the larger, often reaching anywhere from 15 to 20 people against shadow groups of 10 or less.

But you really can't start open world pk without it devolving into tether-based pk. Foci? Tether oriented.

I don't think the solution to this is to split orgs and tethers up, but split players up. This deathessence mechanic has made that exceptionally clear to me.

Keroc floated the idea of making Twins as frequent as Lessers currently are, then sliding Lessers back to how frequent Twins currently are on the Discord and I've never been in love with the ylem conflict system more than when I was imagining that possibility. We would need to revisit how joining a Twin works (namely by getting rid of the 2+2 gating), but I think that would do so much for this problem that I agree exists. What I think Aetolia should try to do is lean on combat scenarios that favor small teams, so that the actual size of the tether doesn't matter that much.

It's also worth noting here that there's really no way to seek out or define the size of pk battles. Before someone says battlefields, yes these do exist, but I think it's clear they're intended for very specific scenarios. They're not here to be a complete substitute for open world pk.

I think it's not quite correct to say this. Battlefields exist for us to use them as we see fit. I have issued a couple battlefields for 'right now' when it would make narrative sense. I tried more than once to get a 'spontaneous' battlefield running and I got nothing but people refusing to accept it due to some 'broad terms' or they didn't see it in the bashing spam and I didn't send a tell mentioning it. I feel as if we ascribe too much 'officiality' to a Battlefield just because it's an invested priv with the word 'roleplay' on the label. After my attempts and the Selunic melee, the system has seen absolutely no use aside from the Farsai Yvalamon Thing. Why can't it be used to supplement or re-direct world PK into more appropriate venues? I would like proof of this, and the best proof comes from genuinely trying instead of writing the system off before exploring its possibilities. Before dismissing something as a failure, I'd recommend trying to open a dialogue with folks to get what you are looking for or figure out how to start getting it. I talk to plenty of you, but nobody has ever mentioned that they wish they could do something battlefield related - and when I say 'plenty of you', I mean the entire community. The only reason battlefields aren't solving a lot of these woes is because we haven't been inventive enough to conceptualize how we can use them to achieve what we want. If an RP 'ambush' or military engagement between guilds is simply some emotes and a battlefield command away, we can make as many even fights as we'd like.

The Roleplay

Lets start with roleplay and the game story. One of the things I find the least compelling is that for every event, essentially, there is a "good" or an "evil" option, by necessity. With the game being split 50/50 the way it is, there's only a tiny amount of wiggle room for nuance here. Even if the organizations in question may slightly disagree, it forces that split regardless because of how the game is set up. Tethers, for all intents and purposes, basically subsume organizational identity, in my eyes. When it's 50% of the game against 50% of the game, there's not really an option or a desire to explore differences in org view and org direction, you need to sign along the dotted line to either fight for "good" or fight for "evil." ​If you don't support one or the other not only are you stepping outside the established norm that tethers have created, you're weakening whichever tether you're a part of, and breaking these long established ties and expectations.

I think a lot of the frustration stems from how we all look at tethers and roleplay around it. [...] In my opinion, I feel that it was because of the progression that is multiclass that there was a real need to divide the game into distinctly identifiable tethers.

Undeath is a pretty easy concept for Spirit to rally around. There have been very strong precedents for both Enorian and Duiran to rally around it and set aside their differences temporarily for the common goal. Though they might contend about the actions each city takes that pit them against each other at times (I'm reminded of the Gorshire thing), it ultimately doesn't matter because it's deemed less important in the face of larger concerns.

However, the same cannot be said for Shadow. What do we actually have to rally around that has a strong precedent to it? From past to present, there hasn't been a singular banding "goal" that unites both Bloodloch and Spinesreach to work together. All too well do I remember the days when Spinesreach did ally itself with Duiran to war against Bloodloch, after all. Since then, relationships hasn't been the best between both cities, especially as Spinesreach more fully established itself as a republic against the dictatorship that is Bloodloch's government style. Both our cities are only on the same tether because our means to our ends involve methods that dabble into the "shadowy" part of morality or do away with it altogether. I know it might be an overused phrase, but it has always felt that for us, "The ends justify the means."

[...]

Tethers artificially tie a city success to another.

Honestly, I don't really get what the tethers are fighting over. Spirit thinks Shadow is dangerous, which is fair enough, but the Shadow tether doesn't really have a reason to fight against Spirit aside from self-defense, and a lot of Shadow orgs don't really care about the Shadow all that much. The Sciomancers make it core to their roleplay, it's part of Syssin roleplay, but I'm not sure I'd consider it that important, Archivists barely use it, and as far as I can tell, Bloodloch places much more emphasis on Undeath than the Shadow.

From what I can tell, Spirit orgs have a much stronger attachment to their tether than the Shadow orgs do, which helps to smooth out the alliance between Duiran and Enorian. Their philosophies are fundamentally antithetical, but they both choose to prioritize the Shadow over their other conflicts.

It doesn't help that the greater Shadow vs Spirit tends to fade in the background, and is often undermined. There needs to be some constant reminder of what the Shadow is to help pull new players into the conflict. I think the only Shadow-related event I ever participated in was the Revenant release, and that was Spinesreach fighting against the Shadow.

These chunks, collectively, do not tell me that tethers need to go. It tells me that your tether needs course correction when it comes to lore that unites them.

I could take or leave tethers. However, after everything that tethers 'gave' to me as a player and a character, I'm not super fond of having to give those things up. I as a player would be frustrated to have to make my character give up a lot of very strong working relationships and I would really dislike the strain on their friendships and personal alliances. It would not be fun for me as someone that would be handling the aftermath of that change, which would have implications for the orders of deities and their own org lore. We're looking in the wrong places and we're looking from too far a distance. We can solve the problems that these posts are outlining without dividing organizations. Just to link something here, since I think it points in the same direction:

I've done something similar with Bloodloch and Spinesreach. This is another good example of two factions that IMO should NOT be friends. Bloodloch is the type of government Spinesreach essentially exists in opposition to. In any normal circumstance, I'd say Spinesreach is exactly the type of city Bloodloch would be eager to subjugate for their stance on freedom. That's what the empire wants, after all.

I have no disagreement here. However, I think it only illustrates that things have gone wrong in a completely different sense than you are saying.

Just based on initial reactions all around me, I feel as if this would bother Spirit far more than it would Shadow. From things I've heard from Shadow players that I talk to, Spinesreach and Bloodloch are playing two different games that only occasionally overlap. This is not the case for Spirit's two citizenship organizations and I feel that the aforementioned friendships and culture would inevitably drive those two organizations to strike a treaty no matter what lore you serve up... and then we would be back to Spirit - just this time with Shadow fractured into two chunks. That doesn't sound any more fun or interesting than the current state of things goes.

Spirit absolutely explores differences in org view on the regular: anybody in Enorian who deals with my character can attest to the fact that he is not like anyone in their city and often holds views that are repugnant to the org - especially on the topic of Enorian's 'forgiveness culture', mercy, or trying to convert/deter before resorting to violence. You can have unique characters and creeds united under one loose banner. Here's a snippet I plucked out that I want to talk about specifically:

I think this further weakens the narrative we're trying to tell, and makes the world overall less interesting. I'll try to pick on everyone equally here. I've gone out and asked Enorian and Duiran folks both why they help eachother, pointing out that Enorian is, for all claims of defending life and innocents and such, a blight upon the natural land. Shouldn't this be abhorrent to Duiran, being a fundamental violation of what they hold dear, regardless of what Enorian believes? Shouldn't Enorian, by contrast, be somewhat iffy about the more savage tendencies of the natural cycle and how it impacts innocents every day?

Absolutely - and they are. The closest we ever got in recent memory was during December's war, where my character was spitting insults at the entirety of Enorian's leadership for being cowards by his approximation. Before that, another instance involved my character killing a criminal he apprehended inside Enorian, instead of turning them over for imprisonment, trial, reform, etc. That caused internal issues in the city all the way until he quit and went back home. We're fine with the friction for a little while, as evidenced by the Omei and Damariel drama - I think it's an interesting thing to roleplay at, about, or around, so long as you give it a chance instead of subjecting it to repeated OOC commentary and 'unity rhetoric', which is absolutely a phenomenon inside of Spirit tether. We've built a very strong community that allows for the roleplay differences you are illustrating, but Spirit's lore connections overall give them a sense of 'big picture' that I do not see in Shadow's narrative. The characters of Duiran and Enorian are very different and that comes from their org creeds, which has managed to co-exist just fine despite that fact.

Additional Thoughts

Here's the part I do not have delicate words for, so forgive me:

Organizations would have greater narrative freedom if they were broken away from tethers. That's just facts. Whirran is right. Duiran wouldn't be shackled by Enorian's civilized roleplay or notions about fairness and conversion, which would lead to a much more fulfilling interpretation of Dendara and the storytelling surrounding it. Enorian could start rapidly expanding into these natural places they're absolutely surrounded by without these pesky Duirani telling them to respect the land and obey the will of Dendara. They could go on conversion missions to enlighten savages. Spinesreach could... do whatever it is they do now, as it turns out, because that's exactly what's going on. Bloodloch could continue being an evil empire without having to appeal to Northern sentiments every time they want to do something particularly scary or violent that riles up both Spirit orgs.

Spirit players are invested in keeping tethers because they feel they've worked hard to achieve the kind of momentum they now have and they feel that it is founded on teamwork and co-operation - because it is. They're always going to be invested in preserving the status quo because the tether is built on the backs of a strong community - you're asking to break apart a team that has grown to really enjoy one another's company and support. Players are reacting very poorly to not being able to help their buddies out specifically because of this feel of camaraderie.

Shadow players seem to be more invested in changing or deleting the institution in question because of how their organizations have shaken out in terms of diversity of player type. Because everybody piled into Bloodloch and there's nobody there to begin fostering Spinesreach, Bloodloch is saddled with the unfortunate task of growing much bigger if it wants to take on Spirit by itself. This is the only way for them to maintain healthy conflict, because 50% of their orgs do not wish to buy in for any number of reasons we could speculate upon. I will note that, right about now, Shadow does have clear proof that their numbers do not match Spirit's when we are looking at this event's engagement levels.

It is no surprise to me that this is split down tether lines, because of course it is. I don't want to dismiss real conversation as 'tether tribalism', because I do believe that it is unfair to expect Bloodloch to fight 1v2 and a 1:2 ratio. The solution, however, is not to piss off the other 50% of the game. The solution is reviewing all of our conflict mechanisms as a top priority and making sure that neither tether ever runs into the obvious imbalance going on here ever again.

Thank you for reading.