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@Zsadist - Get over people enjoying RPing(emoting) and not PKing, holy shit. I'm sorry, but I'm tired of you whining about people who only emote and never do anything else every other post in every other thread. Give it a rest ok.
Yep. Please stop.
How can you say that you want conflict between factions when you're showing up in the middle of the night to raid when like...10+ are logged in to the entire game. What did you expect to happen? Two people being able to take down so many guards is absolutely ludicrous and unheard of, no matter how arti'd out or what level you are. If you can't do it in Warcraft why would you expect to do it on Aetolia? No one is going to see this as "starting conflict" we're going to see it as griefing.
That's the only problem I had with the guards - it's an expensive thing to set up and it doesn't really work right now so why bother. Give me a good reason to keep paying for it, which admin mostly did though I do like what @Seir proposed. Outside of that, I dunno - the whole extortion thing was a good setup, that seems like a good rp way to start a conflict but beginning it with suicide bashing guards for DAYS in a row just seemed like someone got bored, knew they were OP, and decided to take it out on us. Typical, it's what we expect.
Now it's just spiraling into just because we don't play the way the other side wanted/or expected to it's not a true conflict. Duiran has no intention of giving in, Pilar would not be cowed or bullied, and the guards got an upgrade they obviously needed but...suddenly because guards can't be killed as easily there's no conflict? There's plenty of conflict to be had but just like RP people apparently can't complain about PK people taking advantage of an obvious scaling flaw - don't complain when you're hit with some snarky RP and underhanded tactics instead of whatever fight it is you were looking for.
I told him, "Water me."
Affirm Pilar!
Don't get upset when you get so annoying that people put you on their ignore list.
Don't get upset when admin step in when you do the whole guard thing.
I told him, "Water me."
Affirm Pilar!
Second point, how is it anything other than RP for a character who can beat up another character to...do so when given a reason, @Pilar? Is there even a reason for a PK system, if you can say/do what you want and it is considered griefing for someone to try to stop you?
Second, I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I never said no one can not or should not PK anybody, not once, so...
I told him, "Water me."
Affirm Pilar!
I support death meaning something in Aetolia.
We're only two pages in on a discussion and there's enough vitriol to warrant closing it already. While this isn't directed at everyone, there are some of you that need to stop perceiving commentary and suggestions for mechanics as an attack against your "enjoyment" of the game. More importantly, stop perceiving the players on the other side of the spectrum as of some sort of actual adversary that "whines" or "complains" about everything. I think there's some serious partisan issues going on if you're going to argue that one person raiding guards (which is the entire point of this thread) is inherently balanced or at all justified because there aren't a lot of other legitimate conflict avenues in the game right now. I'm going to also question how partisan you are in that regard because there were players on both sides stating the exact same arguments when Daskalos was doing it to Spinesreach.
Some of you really need to take a step back on the personal attacks. It's just a game.
This is a roleplaying game. It's completely stupid to expect players to sit there and do nothing while the city that they're in is effectively being buttblasted. Whether they can actually win the fight or not is something else entirely, still, saying "Lol just sit there and do nothing" is just plain idiotic and unhelpful to the situation.
Edited: @Seir there's only been one personal attack in this thread (and it was aimed at Zsadist and imo well deserved) and anyone who doesn't play Aetolia or IRE wouldn't think the discussion is all that toxic.
I'm really really sick of playing Aetolia, The PC Age. Can we roll back the servers to the last version of the Midnight Age or can I get a refund?
Regarding city raiding being an issue, I understand feeling obligated to defend a city thanks to RP reasons; however, I also see perfectly valid roleplay behind letting guards do their jobs. I like the changes to guard complacency to make this option viable, but I think something more needs to be done.
As far as I know, city guard recruitment and upkeep costs haven't changed, while exp loss from death has been significantly reduced over the years. Right now, players can do suicide runs against guards and cost a city a good chunk of their commodity and gold reserves while only losing maybe half an hour's worth of bash time in exchange. The way things used to be, there was more of a balance between the two, so an attacker had to consider whether or not the exp loss was worth hitting the enemy city in the wallet.
In my mind, one of two things can be done to offer the simplest solution: Either make guards cost less, or make death exp loss more costly. I'd prefer the latter, because I'm tired of seeing little to no consequence for the losing side. Players need to feel the gravity of their decisions, because it provides for more genuine roleplay and a more enriching experience.
There's also the possibility that conflict just isn't fun for some people. For one, a lot of conflict ends up resulting in a contest of who can throw the most bodies at an objective and then getting zerged down immediately or dealing with which side has potentially more whales than the other. Me personally, I was frustrated whenever I tried to generate conflict between me and one other person and it would immediately become a dogpile. I quickly learned to just not bother or take my own group in quickly dispatching people so other players wouldn't try to be opportunists and just dogpile me down. Edit: This is repeatedly why I've tried to encourage mechanics that DISCOURAGE group ganking and dogpiling because I knew that non-ylem based PK was going to die out as a result of people perpetuating this silly group gank cycle and players weren't being held accountable for the actions of their character.
This all ties into people just not liking to lose at all and sometimes you're going to need conflict avenues (like war) where there is a clear winner and a clear loser and participation, while not forced, is going to involve the entire organization on some level. This is why, despite its faults, I absolutely adored the war system and it's why I've said that the village revolt system of Lusternia is one of the most successful examples of a conflict system. Why? It encourages participation not only from PK'ers, but also from people who are less inclined to PK, but gives them a means of contributing to where they feel comfortable taking a risk because it allows them to contribute to the overall effort. On the flip side with what we currently have, lessers are optional and, once the initial magic of them wore off, they quickly fizzled into a contest of who has more bodies at the time. What has happened is that the objective has no novelty or impact of being meaningful to the player or the character. Now, we have a situation where people are so starved for conflict that they're resorting to taking advantage of what scant mechanics still DO exist and I can see the frustration that has arisen as a result from both combatants and non-combatants. Edit: To add, avenues of conflict that affect an organization should require a group effort. They shouldn't be something that one person is taking advantage of, like we're seeing with guards. It's not the player's fault, but rather the design of what is being taken advantage of.
Here's the thing, though... as much as I enjoy it, that kind of stuff is generally a net negative for the game. It almost always results in a relatively small group of PKers routinely disrupting the game for everybody in a way that's very difficult to ignore. They're bored and they want a fight, so they go hit something the other side will feel obligated to defend. That's not the problem. The problem is that they keep at it for days at a time, completely dominating the playing window for a lot of people. It's incredibly irritating to log in with plans for the day only to find out that your playtime is actually going to be spent throwing out the same people who were raiding the day before, and the day before, and the day before, and the day before... and there's nothing you can do about it because there's no cost for failing on their part. And since their goal is the fight, by defending you're just giving them what they want and encouraging this behavior.
This results in an unpleasant environment for most people and it's why guards always get buffed. Just making failure cost more doesn't work, because a lot of players have so many resources that there is no reasonable punishment that can make them stop. The easiest solution is just buffing guards to the point where raiding isn't effectively possible so that's what happens, because the alternative is that you let a handful of people reduce the quality of life for the other side to an untenable point. However, it's a crappy solution because it effectively shuts down city-versus-city conflicts. There needs to be a way to add an in-your-face feeling to conflicts, otherwise you lose the "warring city-states" feeling and feel more like you're a ylem-ball team.
Any reasonable solution to this is going to have to be a compromise. There needs to be a way to open up a city for an attack that can accomplish something of substance, and that opening has to come frequently enough to keep it feeling like there's a war on. It also has to be infrequent enough that it doesn't totally dominate the playing time of the defenders, because the PKers have to suck it up and accept that not everybody enjoys combat and lots of people play this game for reasons other than combat, and when you force those people into combat all the time they just quit.
My suggestion is a player-activated raid window that lasts an hour and has a ~30 hour cooldown on it, maybe going up to a bit or down depending on how things feel when it is in place . I feel like this allow a city to launch a fairly steady stream of attacks at their enemy that keeps it clear that there's a war on, while providing enough structure to the raids that the raid target will know that raiding won't monopolize all their time and that once it blows over they'll be free to do whatever.
I also think it will increase PvP on the part of the defenders, because I feel like people are more willing to jump into defense when they know that it's just going to be an hour long defensive action and that if they jump in and take action their side can score a definitive defensive win that wastes enemy resources. Right now it's more "If I defend against Akara and Trikal they'll just kill the stupid guards when I go to bed in a few hours, so what's the point?" A raid window can change that mindset to "If we hold them off for an hour we win and they lose, and then I can go bash/fish/RP/whatever", and that's hugely effective in increasing participation.
It's better to go the other way. Remove death costs entirely. Keep PK experience. When you make PK more rewarding, you get more people who want to PK.
Imperian also removed xp loss and it worked pretty well. Imperian's only current issue with PvP is that the game is pretty stacked in terms of population for one circle right now. However, their shrine conflict has been pretty active overall.
Basically, it's a good system from what I've experienced. Raids are present, but never quite to the point where they're overwhelming. You can't get anywhere unless there's actually defenders around to kill (so that kills off late night raiding). It has an objective, but the objective isn't a huge detriment to those being raided.
However, while increasing xp loss definitely is not the solution unless you want to stifle conflict, I believe taking a temporary malus to overall vitals the more you die IS a way to discourage people from repeatedly suiciding into things and making them less effective overall in a PK scenario if they keep trying. This is an acceptable alternative, in my opinion.