[4.0] War And Land

[SirSnowMan 318]

I would enjoy these changes and support the movement towards a more "Dynamic Rp" setting for lotc.

[Lago 2572]

On the siege weapon discussion: My stance is by plugin only. No disrespect intended to the GM team, but it's been proven over and over that GMs can't do this right or do this fairly.
 

Maintain a number cap on raid parties.

This has proven itself impractical. People repeatedly defy this rule. Either we start mass-banning or we abandon it.

 

Remove the time limit on raid rules.

No timelimit but limited numbers is just going to let to confusion and breaches of the above rule. "No, we're raid party 2!"
When designing rules, you have to acknowledge that our players will lie, cheat, bullshit and exploit every loophole there is. You have to design it on the assumption that the playerbase is going to do everything they can to break and abuse it, and assume that even the explicit rules they are going to directly break. Because they will, and they do.

 

The flaw in these systems is that they assume our players will play by the rules, but it's been proven over and over that they will not.

 

Remove no-PvP flags.

And put up build-deny regions and use gates. This creates two options:

The first is that a settlement fails to effectively maintain a gate system.

     This has the effect of just leaving them open to constant overraiding.

 

The second is that the settlement effectively maintains a gate system.

     And everywhere that isn't a "mechanics-group", as you call them, becomes like Haelun'or. You are one of us, or you are staying outside. If all the non-participants in raider culture shut themselves away like that, is that going to fix the divide?

 

The simple fact of the matter is that we can only regulate LotC with rules on a player level. Cyberer, pugsier, we can ban them. But when a whole nation acts up? What do we do then? Ban them all? Things as large scale as raiding can't be effectively regulated with rules. We need to regulate this sort of thing mechanically: we don't tell players not to break rules they constantly break, we physically prevent them from doing so.

 

This was the idea behind the noPvP settlement regions: the settlements are safe and the wildlands are not. Raiding isn't controlled by rules but by mechanics: you can't raid a place where PvP is turned off. Reverting back to rule-controlled rather than plugin controlled raids was in my opinion a significant blunder on the staff part. You can't regulate raids with bans.

 

It's clear to me that a universal ground is not going to be found. It's time to stop catering to the extremists, to stop catering to whoever shouts loudest. The staff need to pick a direction for the server, whatever that may be, drive hard and full speed down it and run down any complaining vested interest that tries to divert that course. The people who just log in to raid and war and the people who want us to go forum RP will never reconcile. It's time to stop pulling the server in two directions. They've got to change for the server, it's not going to change for them. It can't. We all have to embrace LotC for what it is, all of what it is, or move on. Otherwise the server community will continue to rust and crumble.

[Blundermore 2741]

 

Honestly, what's the point for the raiders? The Orcs are okay with raiding, the Dwarves are okay with raiding, and the humans are okay with raiding. That means for any one of them there's 2 potential targets, three for Orcs and Dwarves(with both Kaldonia and Vekaro). There's plenty of places to raid where there won't be OOC conflict.

 

Because they're not easy targets. That's really what it comes down to in the end. People want to raid, but they want to raid targets they know they can win against, because it's not as fun to loose as it is to know that you'll win. That and I assume raiding and wars requires that you gain more than you loose or else you will slowly fall behind in the three stooges race for who can get the upper hand over the other two for when the next big war happens.

 

This draft is a step in the wrong direction in my opinion. The same suggestions rewrote again and again in an attempt to make raiding easier for raiders.

 

I my opinion we should just get rid of the whole system entirely really, as Lago has said above in order for the system to even work you have to treat every single player as though they are some sort of scumbag ******* who just wants to ruin everyone's day for a system to even moderately work, /and yet the system still doesn't work/. This isn't a fault of the system however, it's a fault of the actual players who time and time again have proven that they are incapable of following any system set properly. So why bother? Just get rid of it, the war is done, the raids are over. 

 

What's the point?  Our server isn't even equipped for large scale raiding/wars as it is because it was never even made to sustain such in the first place. 

 

The server needs to decide what direction it wants to take. Because this is becoming the breaking point now. 

 

Perhaps big wars should be fought out on another server that is actually designed for PVP with those big battle arenas etc. Not hosted by us though. It would improve the experience of those who like wars as well as cater to those who don't like war as well. 

[Lago 2572]

Server's got to choose. Does it want to be hardcore emote RP, more casual Minecraft RP or conflict-focused factions RP? Something else? It can't be everything.

[Aelu / Rel (Combustionary) 1540]

They also had a shitty wall that was easy to bypass,

The giant stone brick wall? From my experience after spending a painful week building it, that thing was pretty effective. The bad one before it sucked though.

 

That aside, I agree with you. Maybe allow a 24 hour grace period when a region is made, just so it can't be camped to death before a wall is built.

 

[Cyndikate 2303]

Remove the build flags and bring back PVP flags.

 

Build flags are an OOC barrier that blocks out legitimate players, and good roleplayers in addition to raiders. If one region owner screws up the perms(Malinor had about 10 or so subregions) then legitimate players will end up getting frustrated. Build perms are the most frustrating thing to deal with on LOTC, because 1. If the region owner doesn't like you OOCly, he will not give you perms, or take away your perms if you have them and 2. If someone makes changes to regions, you and other members would be screwed over. I remember my perms getting removed twice because the region owner's OOC vendetta. Perms detract from creative roleplay which much be represented in an MC manner.

 

Walls are still effective against raiders. Closing gates 24/7 works as well, but the problem is, again, it's hurting legitimate players just as much as the raiders because you're effectively isolating roleplay, especially when no guards are online to man the gates. Let's learn how the dwarves handled their gate system well. The dwarves sometimes closes their gates, and usually only close them when there are raiders. When no guards are online to man it, then they keep the gates open to allow RP to come into the city. Keeping gates closed all day, every day, when there are no guards online or not just takes away roleplay for players inside and outside the city walls.

 

 

PVP flags only hurt the raiders who are only out for PVP and items, not creative villains who want to provide fun RP for others. If you're not some item-hungry PVPer who wants to get their clicks on, then PVP flags shouldn't hurt you. It was a middle ground for those who want to raid, and PVP, and those players who prefer to have their own space and have a pure roleplay experience they signed up for. PVP flags helps to preserve roleplay, by keeping the balance between RP and PVP, and provides a middleground between the two types of players who want to enjoy LOTC their own way.

 

If players are raiding towns and running into PVP-free zones, then ban report them. It's a **** move to do so.

[Stag 3233]

Come to think of it, it might even be worth adding permakill to the server. If you want to make raids engaging, add a risk to doing such things. Make death be more than just a brief walk back to town and five minutes mining. Make losses affect you just as much as victory does.

 

End result sounds like less raids, more focus on peaceful RP, and a very simple way to stop others from killing you. Killing them. It's not like anyone can just power-game out of it anymore; PVP default.

 

#raises tiny umbrella to ward off the hail of disagreements.

 

 

EDIT: Actually, if I think about it, why do 90% of ban reports start? Because X killed Y. Adding more weight to killing will make  X  try to kill Y less often, for fear of dying himself. Therefore, less ban reports?

 

Or, you know, we could just stop being jerks to each other.

 

 

People would just use one-day alts to constantly try and annihilate other factions high-priority targets. This would just be more incentive to not wanting raids to happen. We should be welcome to raiding, but do it in a healthy manner.

[Lago 2572]

I think the best route is to have raids not be "a thing." No licence to walk into a settlement, say a few words and slaughter people, no arbitrary time or headcount limit on how many people you can bring to a legitimate battle. No combat region the cities and towns, and let warring factions freely kill each other (with RP) on the roads and in the forts.

 

Who knows, if people start playing nice with each other, techs could make some war plugins.

[Dyrr 137]

I like this alot. 

[Aedan The Bard 350]

I, personally, am cool with war and conflict RP. The problem begins when it becomes the only thing most people do on a daily basis. In Aegis, we had war every now-and-then, between nations that agreed to take part in war. If the dwarves and orcs wanted conflict, their leaders made sure to create the role-play that would lead to that battle.
As of right now, however, people fight for no good reason, and force war and conflict on people who are obviously trying to escape from it. That is the key to keeping things neutral: let those who want conflict fight each other, and let those who want to take a break take their break until they feel like participating in conflict RP and/or war once more. It's as simple as it gets.

To put it simple: If some players are not taking part in conflict, don't force it on them, go raid someone else; find another town where people are not busy or immersed in their peaceful role-play (like Oren, or the Orcish nation capital), and do role-play that leads to the raid.

[Aedan The Bard 350]

Why can't towns that don't want to be raided stop it through RP? If bandits keep coming, then work out a deal in RP where you pay them a certain amount of money for them to leave you alone. Or hire guards or make deals with military orders to protect you, etc.

 

I remember in Aegis and early Asulon, people would tell others to, "Deal with it in RP.". Now people are all too happy to make OOC barriers that limit RP and ruin the dynamism of the server.

You are aware this has been done multiple times in real life, right? Take Vikings, for example. Some Anglo-Saxon king payed them so they would leave their settlement alone. They returned a year later, threatening with raiding them, and they were given goods so they would leave. They left. They returned a year later, and the same thing happened. They kept doing it and doing it until whoever wrote that part of history got tired and focused on something else.

[TheBareSheet 194]

Moved to the Great Library. It shall be sorted into appropriate category shortly.