The Controversial Solution To Surplus Lore

[Hanrahan 2983]

YesYesYesYesYesYesYes

 

...Says the man who used... *choke* Hidden blades in Ildon

[Demotheus 651]

Unless I'm seriously missunderstanding Rittsy, this will remove the chances of lore being well created, or will just transfer all the lore being created now into the ideas section...

 

Creatures will always need lore.

New potions will need lore.

New playable people (like golems and frost witches) will still need lore.

New magic will still need lore.

 

So what does this sugestion do?

 

Nothing... just move the lore that is created into the ideas section instead of the lore one.

 

Also for all those that keep thinking you need lore for everything... You don't... You don't need lore for anything that doesn't overpower you nor does major changes to the server. And players need to understand that to stop complaining about the lore.

So hold on...I can have my character use her hair as an extended limb so long as it doesn't give a particular advantage over other people (other than reaching that high shelf or b*tch slapping someone with hair.) ??? I don't need lore for that!? I've wanted that for /ever/! Look at that long hair! I wante dto be able to have Dani learn beardmancy so she could do that with her hair, but it's only for beards... XD

[Jistuma 1996]

So hold on...I can have my character use her hair as an extended limb so long as it doesn't give a particular advantage over other people (other than reaching that high shelf or b*tch slapping someone with hair.) ??? I don't need lore for that!? I've wanted that for /ever/! Look at that long hair! I wante dto be able to have Dani learn beardmancy so she could do that with her hair, but it's only for beards... XD

Yes you can do it, thought if you want an explanation it would be in domestic magic, but yes, you can do that.

 

[edit] Just try not to strangle someone with the hair, or grab a sword with the hair... Though both those sound pretty nice.

[Shorsand 2006]

I agree with the lore removal, however, all lore 'created' after that should be organic, and sparked via in-game events rather than on the forums. Additionally, so people don't have grotesquely overpowered weapons or other crazy-ass object that probably shouldn't exist, there should definitely be a form of proof or GM approval. In this, there would also have to be a fair consensus and acceptance among players to create fun and enjoyable lore that doesn't restrict others to a severe degree.

[Gwonam_Blaze 385]

Alright, I just know I'm gonna get plenty of arguments and may hit some nerves, and to all of you lovely staff; Please don't think I'm trying to attack you all here! I don't want to make enemies or hurt feelings, but I feel like I have to say all of this otherwise it'll never be said. I'm just gonna go right on ahead with it:

Don't take this the wrong way, but I think the staff (in general) isn't doing the best job of making the server happy as it stands and I don't think it can be 'trusted' right now to do so alone. To me, this just seems like another way for the staff to be in control and relinquish any say the community has over itself. Personally? I don't believe the staff should be in control or provide the entertainment for us; I believe it should be there to support us when we need it. I'm about to ask a truckload of questions in the following paragraphs, so prepare yourself; Why do we have to be spoonfed all the time? Why do we need all these random plugins that just hinder us more than they help us? And most of all, why are all of our suggestions being shrugged off? We keep making requests for 4.0 because we know what we would like to see, but instead all we're being given is: "No, no! You're gonna love 4.0! It'll be great! It'll be just like Aegis!". This is where my sarcastic side emerges to say: Wow! Deja'vu / 10. Where have I heard this before? Oh, that's it! For 2.0, and 3.0, of course! The past two maps which were promised not to be bombshells and 'we were gonna love' but the majority of us actually hated (admittedly, 2.0 wasn't bareable after a couple of months). Okay, sarcastic asshat Gwony aside, I'm sure the dev team may have learned their lessons after 2 flops, but can we honestly trust them not to make another mistake again? Can the already diminishing community actually afford that, or, should they perhaps bite their tongues and let the majority speak for themselves?

Now don't criticise me for pulling the 'BACK IN MAH DAY!' card, but I remember in Aegis we were left to make our own adventures and we enjoyed it perfectly well. We didn't need some GM or some ET member to make us play by their rules, we were left to have our own fun and take part in staff run events when we felt like it. Why has this changed, or better yet, why did this 'need' to be changed? I can remember when I played a Ghost character and everyone loved it. Not a single player cried 'POWERGAMER!' or asked if I have lore for it, we just sat our asses down and had fun. My only idea as to why this has changed is that Lord of the Craft is becoming more of a contest than a roleplaying server. Nobody's allowed to have fun or be creative unless the staff team and everyone else says so.

Another point I have to make is that it feels like LotC is becoming more like a dictatorship than anything. It's like the community has no power to do anything, which is insane. Isn't the point of becoming staff of a community to ensure that it is being maintained well and the players are happy? Why is it, in recent months, that when an outcry of requests is made it simply gets shrugged off? A perfect example would be Nexus Combat. I'm personally at an impasse with Nexus Combat; I like and dislike it, so don't call me biased or think I'm attacking it when I say this, but: Why has there been no poll about requesting whether it be removed or kept? I ask this because I have seen 'more than enough' threads and complaints already about it. One would think after so much ruckus, the dev team might consider listening to the communities demands or at least having an official look in to what the majority think?

One more thing I have to say is I think some of the staff are getting 'very' lazy, or should have their positions reconsidered. I absolutely know I am on no grounds to say this, and it's pretty damn shocking I have the nerve to say it, but it needs to be said (I won't be pointing any fingers here, just take this as a general notice). Halloween was a complete disaster. We had absolutely no large events, neither by GM or Event Team. On one of the biggest holidays of the year, absolutely no large events were held giving it no memorability whatsoever (and we wonder why players say the server's getting stale). This isn't exactly a 'huge' deal, but it does strike me as a problem when the one team that's supposed to hold fun and interesting events had nothing in store. Also, don't try saying there weren't any online; I checked and there were 'at least' 3 ET's on around the peak hours. Here's another shocking story; The other day, I heard from a GM that if the More Player Models plugin proceeds to be abused by players, it will be removed. I'm not mad at that particular GM because I'm sure this was a mutual decision between the team, but this was my exact thoughts process: "... Really GM team...? What the absolute f*ck...? ". Basically, what this told me; Rather than taking the time to ensure that a rule is put in place to prevent further incidents like this, you were instead going to pull the lazy teacher trick; A couple of kids in the class miss-behave, so the entire class has to stay behind. A couple of players abuse MPM here and there, so the ENTIRE server has to suffer by having it removed. Right, I know MPM isn't crucial for roleplaying; It's purely cosmetic and we get by without it, but that's not the point. The fact that the GM team were happy to make the entire server suffer instead of taking the time to think of a solution that could keep everyone happy just isn't good enough to me and is a serious problem.

That's all I wanted to say, really. I honestly hope I didn't hurt anyone's feelings, because that wasn't my intention. I just wanted to open some eyes and maybe make some change around here. These points may seem a little irrelevant here, but I figured this would be a good place to put them, where the staff could see it all. I'm confident things will change for the better soon, and as always, I bid everyone a good day.

TL;DR: I don't think the staff team can do a good enough job keeping the server happy by themselves and the community should have more say.

It feels like most of our freedom has been lost and we're instead left to be ruled by the staff. We need more signs that show we're actually being listened to.

Some of the staff need to be re-evaluated and seem to be getting 'lazier'.

[Alan 1815]

-snip-

 

I advise putting all those thoughts into their own thread, because although everything you said derived from the current discussion, it's a bit of a tangent.

With that being said, some of the things you said don't add up. For one, I am confused as to how this suggestion is a way for the staff to gain control over the playerbase. This suggestion calls for the removal of lore proposals while simultaneously changing lore regulations so that people can take their ideas and RP them IG immediately without having to go through a process of reviewal at all. If anything, is that not giving more freedom to the players? In fact, this is pretty much doing the opposite of what you're saying it's doing as it's taking control of new RP away from the Lore Team so that the players are less restricted.

 

Additionally, I completely disagree with your assumptions regarding 4.0. I'm actually surprised by this quote the most:

 

We keep making requests for 4.0 because we know what we would like to see, but instead all we're being given is: "No, no! You're gonna love 4.0! It'll be great! It'll be just like Aegis!".

 

This isn't meant to be rude, but to put it simply, this is quite simply untrue. If anything, we have never been more open about what we've been doing than with our development of 4.0. We have an entire subforum devoted to ideas and suggestions that we not only take into account but that we actually use. Orcs and Dwarves want to be close to spawn? That's where we moved them. People wanted more land? The map was made larger. Less regioning? We agreed to only region the areas directly surrounding the main road and capitals of the nations. Everyone wanted less prebuilding? We decided to go with small tent camps outside incredibly small and basic settlements to start the map. This isn't just "talk" either, in fact Native has been doing an awesome job of livestreaming 4.0 development every couple of weeks, changing the map according to what the players feel is best. Truthfully, 4.0 is really a project that we are developing based on the whims of the players, not ourselves.

 

You're next paragraph implies that the change in attitude of the playerbase is the fault of the staff. Could the staff have prevented it? Maybe, but that's just wishful thinking. Blaming something on the staff that is really just the result of our community being here longer and thus having more "experienced" veterans who therefore feel superior or elite is grasping at straws, not reality. Following that paragraph, once again the claim that we're a "dictatorship" couldn't be further from the truth. Technically Lord of the Craft IS a dictatorship given the fact that it's an internet server where players only have as much as power as the staff gives them, though no real life law actually prevents those powers from being taken away, which in its most basic form is essentially a staff with absolute power (which we couldn't change even if we wanted to, that's just how it is on the internet). With that being said, we as a collective certainly don't act like that, so I'm not sure why you would think we do. In fact, as of late, we have been giving MORE power to the community by paying more attention to their complaints and suggestions. Nexus, for instance, was queued for removal or at least heavy changing after so many players provided proper negative feedback on it, but rather severe last minute complications forced us to postpone it.

 

Lastly, you're essentially calling us lazy for spending all our time focusing on fixing important issues (Nexus, for example) and trying to fix the state of the server rather than taking the time to create a single event for a single day. Sure, it would have been neat to have an event on Halloween, but what's so bad about us doing one a couple weeks later when we actually have time? Would the players rather have us focus on events to keep them happy while we slowly let the server crash and burn, or let them create their own events while we spend our time trying to not only keep it alive but improve it to the best of our abilities? As for the MPM situation, you're taking an irrationally aggressive stance against the GM team for what was most likely something a single GM said "in the moment", rather than something one of us said officially after thinking it through. Who's to say that GM didn't think about it immediately afterwards and go "Hmm, maybe that wasn't the best idea"? GMs aren't robots, we're people just like everyone else, and thus we make mistakes from time to time. 

 

All in all, and I mean no disrespect to you, but it seemed to me like you were using this thread as an excuse to go off on a tangent completely unrelated to the purpose of the thread to discuss your issues with the staff, which is odd given the fact that this actually likely derived from a misinterpretation of the actual message of this thread, as well as the fact that most of the stuff you said was exaggerated or, in a few cases, false.

 

I'm not mad at your for expressing your opinions on the staff, in fact I encourage you to continue expressing your discontent (in a polite way of course, don't want flaming :P), but please in the future do not derail a discussion in order to do so; that's why we have a feedback forum.

 

TL;DR I went off on a tangent to tell you to not go off on tangents. :)

[Thatpyrodude 2008]

I support for there to be no lore proposals and letting the Plays RP lore as they wish as long as it follows lore rules.

[Tethras 278]

 

My opinion summed up... I'll make another post about this in more detail later.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[JtPv 140]

If I understand this correctly, players would be able to make any neutral or fragment lore without having to write a lore post, and the only time a lore post is needed is if it bends the rules? I'm for it. Let me put an example:
If a player and another group were in a bar right next to a cemetary, one of the players could rp a terrifying-looking ghost even though the ghost is harmless. This would most likely install fear into everyone else because they don't know what the ghost could do. For all they know, it could eat their souls in a matter of seconds even though it couldn't? It just installs and pokes at our fear of the unknown, our sense of adventure, and the wisps of imagination floating in our minds?

Rittsy I love you. I love this idea. I love everything in this post.

 

 

Unless I'm severly mistaken, and I absolutely hate this and I don't even realize it. Then no. We're through.

 

[Alan 1815]

If I understand this correctly, players would be able to make any neutral or fragment lore without having to write a lore post, and the only time a lore post is needed is if it bends the rules? I'm for it. Let me put an example:

If a player and another group were in a bar right next to a cemetary, one of the players could rp a terrifying-looking ghost even though the ghost is harmless. This would most likely install fear into everyone else because they don't know what the ghost could do. For all they know, it could eat their souls in a matter of seconds even though it couldn't? It just installs and pokes at our fear of the unknown, our sense of adventure, and the wisps of imagination floating in our minds?

Rittsy I love you. I love this idea. I love everything in this post.

 

 

Unless I'm severly mistaken, and I absolutely hate this and I don't even realize it. Then no. We're through.

 

 

Yep that's actually pretty much right, though you would probably have to stick to current ghost protocol just a little bit, assuming we'd even have any if this went through. 

 

Also, I can now officially say God loves me. I'll add that to my "Bucket List" (lolcwatididthar)

[Gwonam_Blaze 385]

TL;DR I went off on a tangent to tell you to not go off on tangents. :)

Now, in all seriousness, after reading all that you responded with I'm afraid I still mostly stand by what I said, though you have given me a new light in several ways. Regarding your first point, I'm actually gonna admit that I'm a bit of a poopy head and got the wrong idea there. Despite actually reading it over several times to make sure I didn't read it wrong, I was still under the belief that you were trying to basically remove all of the suggestions thread then only accept lore if a player presents it to a GM first, but I now see that I completely got the wrong idea. Now that's pretty much answered for, let's skip over to your second point. I do understand that and I'm slightly confident that 4.0 might not be an abomination after all, but the problem I feel is that it doesn't really 'feel' like we're being listened to. This may just be me, but I kind of feel like only the ideas that the Admin team actually likes are listened to and the rest are shrugged off without much care. Take the big Nexus Combat debate for instance. No-one can deny that it's caused a massive uproar of mixed opinions (most of which I have to say appear to be negative to me). This was one of the several features that was kind of 'dumped on us' without much of a warning and kind of feels like we've just been given the world's only most difficult pet to take care of who nobody will take away from us. What I mean to say by this is; I don't remember any real 'testing' stage for it. It was tested among the dev team, but there's a major difference between the people who've been working on something the past 3 weeks and are obviously going to like their work testing something and a large community of players testing something they've never really seen before. This is something I like to call 'Insightful Marketing' because A) I like to pretend I'm smart, and B) It's a lot like real marketing and pitching. You can't come up with a product and assume everyone else will like it just because you do, because you're obviously going to think your product is a good thing whilst everyone else might think it's the worst thing to ever happen. The Tech team (Whom I'm assuming are responsible for introducing Nexus Combat to LotC, if not, my apologies to you) seemed to approach this badly because rather than giving it a 'test' period to see whether the community actually likes it or not, they more or less forced it on us and said 'We're not getting rid of this, like it or not'. I appreciate its the tech teams job to improve LotC and give us new things to improve our experience, but that effort is wasted if the majority of the community is unhappy with what they've been given, is it not? What I'd like to propose is with EVERY large plugin, like Nexus introduced, is a poll created by the staff which will ask whether people like it, dislike it, think it needs improving and so any inquiries can be discussed.

Now that large paragraph's out of the way, on to your third point! I don't have much to say about this other than; I honestly haven't noticed a change as of recently. I still kind of feel like the community doesn't feel like it can voice its opinion without being belittled or bitten by the staff. As for the conflict between the community itself, I don't think it has so much to do with Veterans as much as it does veterans realising how the server has changed for the worse (not that I'm one of those, I just want what's best for the server and what will make it better). On a somewhat relevent note, I also wanted to suggest some sort of rule (And I argued that it's like we're being dictated? Shame on me!) be added in which if 75% or more of the players involved in a scenario created by another player who isn't part of any staff team (I.E, they wanted to play as some sort of powerful monster) vote that they are 'enjoying themselves' and would like to continue, anyone disagreeing must either continue playing without argument or walk away. I realise this is once again not the thread to do this, so I've kept it short, but just something I feel should at least be considered.

On to your fourth point, now that's a load of boloney! If you read over my paragraph several times, you will notice I never said that the entire staff team is lazy. I did say that the GM team seem to be happier to make the server suffer than to come up with better solutions, because what I was told by the aforementioned GM pretty much explained exactly that, but I didn't say all the staff are lazy. I can understand you're quite busy with maintaining the server as it stands, but does that honestly include the Event Team? What were they doing that whole time? Could we perhaps have a 'Holiday Event Suggestion' thread, where players can suggest their ideas for a fun/silly event for each holiday and the best one is prepared? This might bring us all a little closer and would definately make the community feel more 'comfortable', after all, laughter is the best medicine. Regarding the latter half, I would assume such a major decision would be influenced by the entire GM team, and if it's not, why would a GM say that? Wouldn't that kind of imply said GM feels they have the power and authority to essentially make decisions for the entire team and when they present these decisions/ideas to the community are giving a bad reflection on the entire team, much like what happened in this incident? Consider this more of an actual question of curiosity than a criticism.

Moving on, yes and no. I did kind of try to use this thread as a flameshield because I felt making an out and out thread of what I think is wrong right now would result in little more than the staff getting upset and posting their 2 cents and the rest of the community either attacking me or the staff, and I'm sure that's the last thing you want too, but I did also try to express my thoughts on this thread too. All I've probably done now it's gone off tangent again, but I suppose it's only polite I respond with my feedback. And also, yes, I do tend to exaggerate which isn't fair, but I do have to say it's a good way to get answers, even if it does seem to make a fool out of myself. I don't think that really justifies me going of tangent, and in future I'll post my thoughts in the right place, but as for now, I'd like my feedback to be taken seriously, no matter how silly it may seem.

TL;DR: I still feel like a lot needs changing, but I am a dumby for lacking the brains to understand what this thread was proposing. I do think further action should be taken to ensure large steps, such as Nexus, have the community's greenlight before they're simply added.

I'm bad at formatting large paragraphs, but more importantly it just doesn't feel like our concerns have much of an impact, regardless of how much you say they do. I've noticed players tend to keep their views on sensitive subjects regarding staff, especially GM's, mostly for fear of being berated.

I'm subtly trying to say maybe the GM teams motives and attitudes should be made clearer because a few are setting a bad example for/painting a bad picture of the rest of the team.

I kind of wanted to say some things I myself and several other people have been wanting to say (albeit, probably poorly) for a while whilst not creating a massive ruckus/flame war between players and staff alike.

[gabriel101x1 463]

^ No need for bold large bright text....

[Gwonam_Blaze 385]

^

 

Sorry if you don't like the way I format and make my text a little more interesting than a wall of gray Arial Classic.

[Demotheus 651]

^

 

Sorry if you don't like the way I format and make my text a little more interesting than a wall of gray Arial Classic.

I think everyone would appreciate people to NOT make their text like double sized it makes it a pain in the ass to scroll down so much over a long post. <3

[Nefarious Aus Shitpost 891]

I am in total support of killing player lore proposals as well as the Lore Team.