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New ideas for Order Wars
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i like what @Xenia was doing, little skirmishes of Pinesloch citizens vs Slyphe supporters which any party with interests can buy into. It has the potential to include the greater number if people and is completely optional.
Politics
Apparently by doing that, I've made things worse.
Kind of crazy how half of Spinesreach is now completely out of the fight.
That's all, though. Sorry you were so upset.
http://hastebin.com/jetuhepute.dos
Looks to me like guard nuking might have been warranted. In a RP sense, all of it seems warranted. Let's just play it out and get some decent PK in. Kthx.
Politics
From what I hear, there are guidelines in place to limit the sort of retaliation that can be meted out. The problem is, all that is factored in, pre-calculated before the taunts go out. People know that the gods can't do much in response, and that's why they do it.
To be frank, it ruins the idea that gods are humans as we are ants to them. OOC'ly, they are laughed at and mocked, or worse, the 'harsh' retaliation is used as fodder to turn more people against the god and the player.
I hear of cool punishments in other IREs where people get put in flaming chains that burn them when they walk, or caused to vomit when they open their mouth, or be afflicted whenever they hit things, with a chance of instant-death. Here, taunting the gods is so tame as to be without real consequences.
Long story short, this is not the first time this has happened, and slowly I'm losing that ability to believably RP an awe or respect for the gods.
Why should the administrative team spend valuable time making special punishments for people that will still ultimately laugh them off or not learn anything from it, and will continue to exploit the fact that they know they're going to come back from an OOC perspective when they could be spending their time doing something much more productive?
There are two extremes that people seem to cling to.
'Gods are all-powerful and can do whatever they want ICly'
'Gods are like mortals, and limited/restricted in what they can do'
I'm going to poke at the first, and why it is an absolutely awful, bad, horrific, terrible thing.
A God is an omnipotent, omnipowerful being (or one way stronger than any GROUP (important distinction) of mortals) is one that shuts down the entirety of conflict. If they can do whatever they want to you, you should realistically NEVER do ANYTHING that might make them angry, because they would just erase you from existing. Why deal with having an enemy leader when you can just *handwave* them away? Why does BL have guards at all, if Auresae hates Undeath? Furthermore, why does Enorian? Why do those places even exist, really - just smash 'em to bits.
Counter-point: Gods can't just destroy cities willy-nilly because then theirs would get smooshed, and it'd be God v God. Mutually-assured destruction of sorts. At least, this is literally the only logical explanation I can come up with.
Counter-counter-point: Which, fine; but there's not that right now. I've seen dark Gods smash dark players, and light Gods smash dark players, and light Gods smash light players, but there's an odd lack of dark Gods smashing light players - in fact, the last divine-RELATED attempt to do something negative to lifers resulted in a long thread that resulted in the entire event being scrapped.
Furthermore, it's very, very easy to sit on the auto-win side and go 'just take your beating', but it isn't - nor has it ever been - a compelling or fun narrative. We see echoes of this every time balance shifts and one side starts to beat the other into the ground; complaints on the forums of unfair numbers, unfair skills, unfair tactics, etc. This is not an odd phenomenon where suddenly people just wtf don't like losing, but a well-documented and well-established tradition in IRE games. Spinesreach loses guards more often than any other city to divine, but if Spinesreach raids then people get upset and complain on OOC clans/to the raid leader/on forums. Bloodloch got raided by an admin EVENT, but then people in Eno/Duiran complained when they raided back. I'm somewhat dumbfounded that people - some of the same people who were so upset when it was their city getting hit - seem to feel so strongly about it when things are on the other foot...but I digress.
Not much point to anything at all, because they can just unmake you/your city. Seriously, in what world is it FUN to try to beat something that literally can never be beaten? Even if they ARE hampered by rules to the point you can taunt them and they can just zap you back, it's a poorly designed way to handle them. Give Gods power limits, ways to be attacked that actually matter, make Gods more than zap machines that shout witty comments or spy on someone -> report back to a player OOCly.
Tl;dr of first post: If Gods are really that strong, then quit trying to fight against them. Goodbye, conflict.
Second extreme: Gods are just like people, only a little more buff.
This isn't great either. I don't mean to say 'make Gods people!!!!1eleven', because then they're just glorified players, and that's likewise dull. I'm just dusting over things here because I don't want people getting the wrong idea.
Tl;dr of second bit: Seriously I was good, read the three lines of text.
Proposal: Gods are strong enough to handle a group of players on a fair battlefield but probably shouldn't risk it, let them actually be attacked instead of that silly divine fire thing (really, if they're going to spam DSL at you, or cripple/vivisect, and you have to sit there and take it or sit there and take it? Beyond lame), give them a weakness that has to be protected or they actually take meaningful, lasting harm that their Order has to handle. Forget shrines, if Iosyne makes a group angry, they can fight into her temple and kick her heart around. It should not be EASY, it should not be something that happens regularly - but just by making that threat, there's something more tolerable about being instagibbed by someone; it'll feel less like someone's just waving their e-peen around when the shout wars go down and more like there's actually something on the line. Don't limit Gods to zaps after that, either. They should go nuts, custom kills or curses or whatever they feel like doing. It's their role and one that can have so much of an impact on the game and every God log I see, I just remember stuff like this where it's shout->shout->zap gg no re. Uncreative-feeling, awkward, stifled, and a shadow of what it could be. I don't blame anyone for this, I just maintain it is a flaw within the system. Invincible Gods is the second biggest killer of my interest in Aetolia and IRE games, and the more stuff like this happens - justified or not - the worse it is going to get.
Tl;dr of the last bit: Give players a way to impact the game world/Gods, let Gods hit back harder and in more creative ways. Everyone wins.
Now back to the real topic at hand! ORDER WARS.
Let's get rid of them. To be honest people should be able to retaliate to things done with them as groups but at the moment the only way to do it is to announce a holy war that excludes a lot of people and quite frankly will always be squewed. From what I hear, On the Darkie side most PKers gravitate to one Order while on the Lifer side they are distributed between the Orders.
Let's have instead Organisational wars! Cities, Guilds, Orders and Clans choosing to fight against whoever they want. I mean this current situation would make a whole of a lot more sense if Moirean could have proclaimed war for Spinesreach on Sylphe instead of the vaguely related auto-win card of Iosyne's Order.
Points are collected by killing soldiers of either side, points taking away for killing civilians, or having civilians kill soldiers. You can get special raids activated where you would be assigned a raiding objective (Kill these denizens, stand in this room and steal ylem/resources) which both teams would be alerted to (Like a capture the flag thing). The quest could only be activated 1-2 times day and if you overstay your 1 hour time limit your war efforts numbers ticks down. Winner of the war would be whoever has the most points, or hits a target level (I had been thinking the winner judged by unaligned gods like Olies and Raz but people may cry foul).
Or maybe no system at all. You just announce a war on someone on behalf of someone else in public news and go at it. Abiding to a code of wartime conduct written up, "no killing civilians, no raiding for more than an hour, no raiding ten times a day" and so on. I may have misguided trust, but in comparision to other games we have a moderately mature playerbase that could do right to others if given the chance.
Politics
I think a cool and unique 'punishment' that'd work as both a time-out and a solid plot-point to keep roles consistent and immersive would be a tiered or raid-like prison that a player gets tossed in. Dress it up with whatever lore: maybe it's the uncharted abyss of souls or a pocket in the dreaded shadow realm or maybe its just beyond the folds of time.
Then the player has to either quest/fight/whatever their way out or submit themselves to a hex. The tier would determine the difficulty for the mobs within or perhaps the quest level as well as what the opt-out punishment (hex) is. Whether it's a whole level drain or temporary skill lock or whatever. The more adjustable the better. Whatever the case may be, the world would then remain consistent and there would still be points towards the whole "fear and awe" of the god's role. That's my two cents anyway.
In terms of how the current system works, it is garbage and will never be fun when it holds no true meaning or consequence on the world. I would understand if for example Iosyne won a war and her influence affected the world around us all with abomination's and such wondering about at night.
Abhorash says, "Ve'kahi has proved that even bastards can earn their place."
Politics
Oh my god menefail joined... it is now time to leave the order and rejoin Slyphe again
Abhorash says, "Ve'kahi has proved that even bastards can earn their place."
This war was pretty balanced, in terms of fight match-ups, and we often had smaller numbers. Frankly, it makes me upset to hear people constantly cite how we're bullies or have a win card and spew nonsense about greater numbers - that is not only disrespectful to our fighting ability (we went into fights that were 7v4 (us being the 4) and won), but more than that - this sort of mindset is pervasive throughout Aetolia, and it is the kind of thing that can sour one's own enjoyment of the game: they only won the fight because they had more people, they only won because x class is super OP, so-and-so only won that election because they did x-y-z, so-and-so only won a great hunt because they are an arti-whore, etc.
It's easy to cite a reason for a loss, in whatever aspect of the game. It's harder to actually analyze why, acknowledge where your own flaws and weaknesses are, and then improve them. Often, forum threads focus more on the first, without much emphasis on the second (it's even seen as trolling or mean to point out the flaws), but when we see the same things brought up and even changes to the game made based on these, it becomes very frustrating, as changing stuff won't fix the fundamental issue of ostriching.
Holy wars, as they are, aren't a perfect system and there are things that could definitely be fixed, but a large number of the complaints we hear about them wouldn't be addressed by a change to the system. A new system would just introduce new tactics for one group to use better than the other, and we'd see a new iteration of rants about how the system sucks.
What my issue stems from, yet again, the starting of the war versus how it played out during the war.
There are no rules I can find laid out restricting my use of this, aside from the built-in CD mechanism - I check with my order because I want to. I don't war on CD because that would be excessive. I've never had an admin tell me I'm breaking rules for doing it. From my perspective, this is a tool I'm given to use and being upset about me using it is like being upset at someone tapping a lesser.
I really think that at the end of the day holy wars are a larger version of PK. Sure, I can conjure up some 'cause' to go PK you, or whoever else. You've done it often enough, I've certainly done it, but in the end when you're obviously more serious about it / better at it / whatever it becomes another repetition of the same. Maybe you guys are just the most elite group of PKers and gamers known to man. Awesome. All credit to you, yeah? But people get upset. People frown on it if you do it often enough, and it causes bad feelings and animosity. Which is cool, it's mostly on the other end of the game and if you're into the 'you vs us' I guess it is what it is.
I've heard 'If gods are just going to bully (zap) us, we have to do what we can to retaliate' so many times.. I'd say declaring war is a way bigger imposition on others time and enjoyment than any dozen zaps. Sure, this one was mostly cool - started in the morning, lasted throughout the day (grumble, some people work) and into the afternoon. Mostly it was combatants on during that time, so even when outnumbered it was fun and I didn't hear much bitching. When it dropped down to like.. me, Cronides, and Luxanna available to fight and we knew it was about the time of day when all of you start logging on, someone - I assume Kerryn - made the decision to surrender. Not too griefy, all in all not a bad day.
Of course, I'm not in the Order and don't have to spend the week sanctifying all those shrines that were lost.
Still an imposition, and a pretty big one. It could have easily gone another way and been noncoms around all day getting waylaid. I've heard you complain often enough about Conner relentlessly hunting you because of bounties, and I'm sure when you're just not in the mood to PK someone bothering you is irritating. War declared so frivolously is basically doing that to a large group of people, right? And once again, it was an issue of 'Wake up, oh hey another war. Wonder what happened. *scroll back to see shouts*'
Guess my point is you're justifying a pretty hefty drain on a relatively large chunk of players' time without considering them, whether or not they're interested, involved or even aware of it, by saying that the system is flawed, or if they don't want you doing it, they should take it away, or that people are just mad because they're not as good, or .... etc. Those aren't reasons to do something. They're reasons you shouldn't be blamed, if you do something the -right- way.
Hey, I've done a lot of really stupid things around here because I drank too much, or I was depressed, or I was angry. I'm paying the price for that, and it'll take me quite a bit of effort to build anything close to a positive reputation back. Maybe, just once, we want to hear you (not even necessarily Moirean, just.. you) wake up the next morning and say, "Man. That's my fault, I probably shouldn't have taken it that far." instead of listing off all the reasons it's cool for you to impose way more on a dozen players than the one God that zapped you a few times for being globally insulting did.
Edited: Wording adjusted to (try) not to imply insult. Not my intent here, by any means.
Thanks.
Everything is hilarious when you're part of the pack or when the negative has no effect on you, but when the same sort of thing is aimed in your direction it all becomes a different sort of animal. I guess that's pretty much human nature, though. We're all guilty of it, really. I certainly laugh at @trager when he goes around PKing people in waves, but it'd probably be irritating if I were the one sitting in a Delosian pub RPing when it happened.
ETA: Forgot a word!
Disregarding the fact that the number of times I've agreed with, defended, or stood up for you is far greater than the opposite, I suspect you're right in that I've developed some irrational crusade and am obviously only out to slander your good name.
Man, you're frustrating sometimes.
You assume it was just us, what, complaining in forums then being like, oh it's all good, in game. Hey, an easy mistake because we're not airing it all out for everyone to see.
In regards to your point suggesting I laugh when it's my side on the up and 'their' side on the down-- that's simply not true. I've got empathy, and I understand the amount of time and BS it is to put up shrines after so many are destroyed. It's partially why I was even RPing in a Delosian pub, where Trager killed me. So I could put in the face-time to show that I sincerely was willing to help share the burden of time required to replace shrines.
It doesn't matter though, I wanted the thread to be closed because I could sense that it was going to turn into bickering, and yeah, I fell prey to making a flippant response to Trager. Hey, I'm not perfect!
I don't think this is a Crusade. I do not think making every disagreement or critique a crusade or about more than it is is helpful or productive nor fair for other players involved or impacted by decisions, and this goes on all sides. This goes for this topic, the Immersion topic, and what seems like -every- topic since this seems to be the standard more than the exception.
It was certainly unfun when the forumcrusade was tearing apart Enorian and there were pages of unnecessary blanket animosity, but I also understood part of the root and have taken those points to mind and continue to consider them going forward.
This currently is the same argument that's been had before, it doesn't seem like folk really want to address it, all of it, so let's save our breath to cool our porridge, yeah?
To be somewhat productive: I think more should be involved with declaring order wars. I think there should be certain checkpoints to it becoming a war - thresholds and so on, maybe, as that would allow for different scales of conflict that can escalate or deescalate and can become more integrated with RP on both sides of the fence and the actual people involved, rather than it being order vs to god through order. I also feel like shrines should only be part of a war. Looking back at holy conflict, even in just things like the Clash of the Titans movies, there's a lot of interesting and colourful things that could be done and tailored to unique obstacles for each god.