[Community Review] Raids

[Unwillingly 18096]

No thank you. Keep raids how they are. I just think the only change there needs to be at all is the reason for a raid so that people can ONLY raid with a reason and real goal instead of "lul" *stabs you

This rewrite is doing nothing but encouraging PvP and makes things over complicated and troubling. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy PvP, but I hate everything about this, and other people do too. The only thing wrong with raids right now (from how I see it) is the purpose of the raiders. From my experience, very rarely are raids done because of an IC problem. The few times they have happened, it's generated SO MUCH RP for myself and other people. Raids without a RP purpose?  Cancer. Toxicity. Memeing. The GM that was present for the last raid like this did nothing, and the other one that EVEN ADMITTED THE RAIDERS WERE BREAKING RULES did absolutely nothing about it, even nearly a month later, though that's not the point.

Tldr: raiders need to have a RP goal or reason when raiding, this rewrite encourages PvP and over complicates things. 
Also, I didn't read what other people had to say, so this has probably already been said.
Do not implement this rewrite.

[Narthok 10416]

4 minutes ago, WuHanXianShi14 said:

@Narthok Could you stop defaulting to assuming most people who disagree with your proposal just dont understand the rules you wrote

 

Also, off hours are different for everyone. Determining arbitrarily what is and isnt off hours isnt gonna stop people across a range of many timezones from getting their **** taken when they're not online. People also have different work and school schedules.

Indeed, hence my suggestion to account for the widest variety of inactivity. Most settlements will cap out around 8 and are empty most of the time as it is. 

18 minutes ago, Destroyer_Bravo said:

you know I can build a wall that cant be laddered up period with stairs

 

hell I could just make the wall extend out by 1 block from where it is at the surface

 

also can the settlement choose to drop its raid cooldown voluntarily>

You'd drop your cooldown if you launched any raids. Adding a bunch of player suggestions to the draft doc. 

[AGP 3169]

2 minutes ago, Narthok said:

As for chests, I understand that people have a deep attachment to their roleplay items for some reason.

I find this sentence insulting.

 

I'll use myself as an example - currently, the only form of RP I care about participating in (and the only reason I logged onto the server after several months off it) is operating my meadery. With the exception of OOCly gathering materials to construct the build, (which is its own separate reason why getting my items stolen sucks major ass but I digress), all of my RP is centered around being a beekeeper and running my meadery. It takes a not insubstantial amount of time and effort (including but not limited to waiting around for a long time for modreqs for custom bottles, coming up with ideas for products to craft, actually rply crafting and selling my mead, spending my 2-a-week renames on custom items and descriptions for them, and spending time gathering materials) to make the mead. Given that reality, the fact that someone can just take my roleplay items when I'm offline and couldn't do anything about it sucks major ass. If all my mead just gets stolen while I'm offline, there's no roleplay I can glean from that. At most I can roleplay "oh **** I'm poor and have to re-do everything I did" only for it to get stolen ~48 hours later when the victory cooldown wears off.

You fundamentally DO NOT understand roleplayers like myself if you can't understand why losing all my RP items that I spent time and creative energy creating sucks, especially if I was offline and not even given the opportunity to defend them. If you can't understand (and aren't even willing to try, apparently) people like me then, frankly, you shouldn't be writing raid rules that affect people like me.
 

8 minutes ago, Quirkyls said:

seek someone that can defend you, you can hire mercanaries, vandalize under someone for protection, bury your prized possessions under a pillow or something

 

there are plenty of creative ways that you can do to protect yourself from villainy,

being babied by skygods shouldn't be one of them

I can think of several ways to abuse the rules to avoid getting my **** stolen - easiest way is to just have a mudhut somewhere that I keep all my items stored in. Never will there be enough people in this random mudhut to be raided so the items are safe there. That doesn't mean that these ways of keeping my items safe are fun or RPly justified.

"Vassalize under someone for protection" is a really odd thing to say given the fact that I'm already an individual business owner living under a nation. What am I supposed to do if my nation fails to protect the city I live in from raiders? You can say "find another nation" but if I know that weeks worth of my work can be undone due to no fault of my own I'm not going to bother putting in weeks worth of work somewhere else and will instead just quit LotC and play other games.

All it takes is ONE failed defense of a raid and all my items can be stolen. That's not reasonable.

[Jasonhz 58]

Raiders raid to get loot and pillage, IC or OOC. Viking raided for gold. Yes, they took the gear their enemies wore, but they also looted the houses for other weapons or valuables.

If you hardcore RPers really want things to be 'realistic' and make things promote RP, then let the rewrite happen.

  Battering rams exist for a reason, they shouldn't be kept just to war claims. Yes, they shouldn't be present in every raid, but you know, let raiders use them with some sort of restraints. And, you know, hiding behind a wall with nothing happening for 15 minutes doesn't really promote more RP than you being actually killed, and a survivor telling you about it, and then other stuff happens.(Or, how about, if you intend to bring a battering ram or other siege weapons, then give the defenders a warning before hand, and say that the time was used to break through the gates/walls/etc.)

  Opening chests should just be an every day thing, but it isn't, because people like to keep their pixels safe. But, you know, locks can be easily broken? It's not like iron vaults were common for everyone to have back then, so I'm assuming they had normal locks, and with an ax, you break locks and chests easily! Also, inspired from uh, AGiantPie's previous comment, how about we can only loot chests of players online, or who have logged off just after the raid was declared? Since, you know, encourages people to actually defend their **** instead of logging off, which might happen.

  I don't know why heads have to be given with consent, maybe to avoid people having several of the same player's head, but you know, other than that, why? 

 

[Narthok 10416]

7 minutes ago, AGiantPie said:

I find this sentence insulting.

 

I'll use myself as an example - currently, the only form of RP I care about participating in (and the only reason I logged onto the server after several months off it) is operating my meadery. With the exception of OOCly gathering materials to construct the build, (which is its own separate reason why getting my items stolen sucks major ass but I digress), all of my RP is centered around being a beekeeper and running my meadery. It takes a not insubstantial amount of time and effort (including but not limited to waiting around for a long time for modreqs for custom bottles, coming up with ideas for products to craft, actually rply crafting and selling my mead, spending my 2-a-week renames on custom items and descriptions for them, and spending time gathering materials) to make the mead. Given that reality, the fact that someone can just take my roleplay items when I'm offline and couldn't do anything about it sucks major ass. If all my mead just gets stolen while I'm offline, there's no roleplay I can glean from that. At most I can roleplay "oh **** I'm poor and have to re-do everything I did" only for it to get stolen ~48 hours later when the victory cooldown wears off.

You fundamentally DO NOT understand roleplayers like myself if you can't understand why losing all my RP items that I spent time and creative energy creating sucks, especially if I was offline and not even given the opportunity to defend them. If you can't understand (and aren't even willing to try, apparently) people like me then, frankly, you shouldn't be writing raid rules that affect people like me.
 

I can think of several ways to abuse the rules to avoid getting my **** stolen - easiest way is to just have a mudhut somewhere that I keep all my items stored in. Never will there be enough people in this random mudhut to be raided so the items are safe there. That doesn't mean that these ways of keeping my items safe are fun or RPly justified.

"Vassalize under someone for protection" is a really odd thing to say given the fact that I'm already an individual business owner living under a nation. What am I supposed to do if my nation fails to protect the city I live in from raiders? You can say "find another nation" but if I know that weeks worth of my work can be undone due to no fault of my own I'm not going to bother putting in weeks worth of work somewhere else and will instead just quit LotC and play other games.

All it takes is ONE failed defense of a raid and all my items can be stolen. That's not reasonable.

Hm, fair point. So you suggest that no chests should be lootable period? Or than a select few chests should be lootable? Or perhaps that there should be rolls or a /smash interaction?

[AGP 3169]

2 minutes ago, Jason395 said:

Raiders raid to get loot and pillage, IC or OOC. Viking raided for gold. Yes, they took the gear their enemies wore, but they also looted the houses for other weapons or valuables.

If you hardcore RPers really want things to be 'realistic' and make things promote RP, then let the rewrite happen.

You do realize that viking raids IRL were a rare event and were a 'big deal' crisis for people, right? Vikings weren't visiting a town every 48 hours and most towns would go lifetimes without ever getting pillaged.

Here on LotC the entire continent is smaller than the city of London - everyone gets raided all the damn time because the world is fundamentally not at all similar demographically or geographically to the real one. If we want to pretend that our empires are empires and our kingdoms are kingdoms then we have to institute rules that prevent a random bandit and his three buddies from pillaging the wealthiest city on the planet every couple of days.

2 minutes ago, Narthok said:

Hm, fair point. So you suggest that no chests should be lootable period? Or than a select few chests should be lootable? Or perhaps that there should be rolls or a /smash interaction?

In truth: any chest-looting system you implement can be foiled by bullshit freebuild safety-vaults. I think chest pillaging should just be disallowed since it will heavily incentivize dumb stupid OOC crap to protect items.

Leave chest-pillaging to warclaims.

Maybe allow raiders to do damage to the actual settlement instead of stealing items so its not so oppressive. Might even cause some repairwork RP.

[Jasonhz 58]

Just now, AGiantPie said:

You do realize that viking raids IRL were a rare event and were a 'big deal' crisis for people, right? Vikings weren't visiting a town every 48 hours and most towns would go lifetimes without ever getting pillaged.

Here on LotC the entire continent is smaller than the city of London - everyone gets raided all the damn time because the world is fundamentally not at all similar demographically or geographically to the real one. If we want to pretend that our empires are empires and our kingdoms are kingdoms then we have to institute rules that prevent a random bandit and his three buddies from pillaging the wealthiest city on the planet every couple of days.

 

Since the world is so small, and we have to pretend we're Kingdoms, we'll have to recude the scales of everything else, including the proportions of the raid time from LoTC to IRL. Speaking of, a five month IRL cooldown from raids sounds reasonable to me.

 

 

 

 

[AGP 3169]

Just now, Jason395 said:

 

Since the world is so small, and we have to pretend we're Kingdoms, we'll have to recude the scales of everything else, including the proportions of the raid time from LoTC to IRL. Speaking of, a five month IRL cooldown from raids sounds reasonable to me.

 

 

 

 

In truth the scale is just kind of broken. Why do Kingdoms only have 1 city in the entire Kingdom? Etc. Should just ignore what happened IRL since there's no resolving the huge scale disparity.

[Narthok 10416]

5 minutes ago, AGiantPie said:

You do realize that viking raids IRL were a rare event and were a 'big deal' crisis for people, right? Vikings weren't visiting a town every 48 hours and most towns would go lifetimes without ever getting pillaged.

Here on LotC the entire continent is smaller than the city of London - everyone gets raided all the damn time because the world is fundamentally not at all similar demographically or geographically to the real one. If we want to pretend that our empires are empires and our kingdoms are kingdoms then we have to institute rules that prevent a random bandit and his three buddies from pillaging the wealthiest city on the planet every couple of days.

In truth: any chest-looting system you implement can be foiled by bullshit freebuild safety-vaults. I think chest pillaging should just be disallowed since it will heavily incentivize dumb stupid OOC crap to protect items.

Leave chest-pillaging to warclaims.

Maybe allow raiders to do damage to the actual settlement instead of stealing items so its not so oppressive. Might even cause some repairwork RP.

So you'd be fine with some et builders or WDs coming in after a raid and doing burn damage provided it had been properly rped?

[Jasonhz 58]

Just now, Narthok said:

So you'd be fine with some et builders or WDs coming in after a raid and doing burn damage provided it had been properly rped?

I mean, yes? why not? Holes in the walls, weak points, +1 for raiders. Then, RPers can actually RP building their cities, get a World Dev or GM or something, instead of having them built by one person with Schematica, since you know, people want to RP?

 

[AGP 3169]

Just now, Narthok said:

So you'd be fine with some et builders or WDs coming in after a raid and doing burn damage provided it had been properly rped?

In truth, I personally would prefer if none of my stuff could ever be forcibly damaged by outsiders and given that I have no interest in participating in raids (offensive or defensive) any ground given to raiders is something that gives me no benefit but could potentially give me grief.

Given that reality, I would not be 'fine' with it.

In the interest of creating a set of rules that work for the entire server however... I'm not sure. I'd have to know what other people want and what the actual raiding experience is like for the majority. From where I'm sitting (and where I've been sitting for many years) raids are almost NEVER rply motivated... beyond the basic "Grr I don't like the Dominion - they executed one of my characters once. I'm going to raid them every time they're off cooldown for as long as I'm active on the server." Or even worse, people who just raid b/c they want to PVP and don't really care who they're PVPing. You could argue that people who are just there to PVP won't bother doing rp damage afterwards, and you'd probably be right, but I still have so little faith in the RP that raids provide that I'm currently of the position of preventing raids as much as possible and in particular preventing people who don't want to have to fight raids from suffering unavoidable consequences.

2 minutes ago, Jason395 said:

I mean, yes? why not? Holes in the walls, weak points, +1 for raiders. Then, RPers can actually RP building their cities, get a World Dev or GM or something, instead of having them built by one person with Schematica, since you know, people want to RP?

 

This is a good point - a big problem with RPly causing damage to places is that you can't RPly repair stuff. Instead, some poor sod has to go gather resources oocly at the resource island then oocly fix the building with schematica.

[_Elrith_ 4525]

Tbh the only problems I see are Chest Breaking and the battering rams, everything else is p okay tho.

[Narthok 10416]

1 minute ago, AGiantPie said:

In truth, I personally would prefer if none of my stuff could ever be forcibly damaged by outsiders and given that I have no interest in participating in raids (offensive or defensive) any ground given to raiders is something that gives me no benefit but could potentially give me grief.

Given that reality, I would not be 'fine' with it.

In the interest of creating a set of rules that work for the entire server however... I'm not sure. I'd have to know what other people want and what the actual raiding experience is like for the majority. From where I'm sitting (and where I've been sitting for many years) raids are almost NEVER rply motivated... beyond the basic "Grr I don't like the Dominion - they executed one of my characters once. I'm going to raid them every time they're off cooldown for as long as I'm active on the server." Or even worse, people who just raid b/c they want to PVP and don't really care who they're PVPing. You could argue that people who are just there to PVP won't bother doing rp damage afterwards, and you'd probably be right, but I still have so little faith in the RP that raids provide that I'm currently of the position of preventing raids as much as possible and in particular preventing people who don't want to have to fight raids from suffering unavoidable consequences.

Raid culture is certainly an issue that I'd like to improve. I personally feel that it is largely perpetuated by raid caps forcing aggressive parties to cheese / rule lawyer and attack at off hours for any kind of success. During the heaviest raid regulation you had 4 flays in full god gear going around killing 30+ people. Because that way the only way you could ever feasibly win a raid. In my eyes that was the most toxic period of raiding on lotc. That legacy in my eyes has transferred to the current generation of raiders. There were certainly bants and salt in the past but rather than bullying the elves aggressive factions were able to actually fight each other rather than being hobbled as they are now. 

[Quavinir_Twiceborn 1050]

I am someone that openly despises pvp in general.

This extends to warclaims but this isnt what we're

here for so I'll leave that comment there for when 

people ask 'what about warclaims'. I am exceptionally

worried about the idea of raiders having free reign to 

loot and pillage people's items as they see fit. This can

be exceptionally problematic in my opinion, for one to

have their items stored safely, log back on, and be

entirely cleared out due to a raid that happened while

they were off. Worse yet, the raid rule requiring 3

people in the invaded territory is crazy, and is very

liable to abuse. Who is to say the enemy just has 4

friends go ahead and sit in the opposing city so they

can raid and pillage them?  How would this be averted?

 

Having people have free reign to pillage and loot, for

argueably dubious reasons is exceptionally worrying to

me. 

 

The claim of realism of having one's item lost in a

real life viking raid is undercut by the lack of loss on

the opposition's side for their immediate loss.  If a

viking lost in a raid-... They died. Gone, forever, gone 

for good. Given that death bears little to no meaning on

Lord of The Craft, raiders risk little to nothing, whilst the

defenders are risking literally everything they own. Which

as someone whom despises PVP, and wishes they would never

have to partake in such, I dont like having everything my

character owns be at risk, with the deciding factor being how 

good me, or my immediate companions are at PVP.  

 

Call me what you like, say that I need to 'git gud' at PVP if I

want to not lose my items. But to my understanding, this is a 

roleplay server, and frankly, the idea that being good at PVP

is required to not have everything you own absolutely taken

from your home in a walled city is revolting. 

 

In real life, it would take one sword strike to remove a single

raider for the rest of your life. But in Lord of The Craft, where

all are deathless, no matter what you do, there will be a band of

immortal raiders who will attack few days to have another shot at

taking everything you own. Its not a matter of 'if' the raiders will 

ever win, but 'when', as raids become a war of attrition, and if you

lose one, everything you own is up for grabs by a group whom wishes

you and your group harm.

 

Likewise, what is to keep these raiders from going full grief mode? Kill

the townies than start /trash ing anything that one doesnt want to keep. Its

utter insanity to me for this to be in any ways allowed.

 

 

[H7R5 55]

Another thing that I think is odd is that people think that raiders want to raid their factions for no reason or just to bully them. If there is no benefit to raiding you, no armor, no wealth and no political motive, then you will not be raided... Just don't conduct yourself like an ******* and lay low and no one will bug you, people are looking for a fight and loot, not people who just sit there and ***** the whole way through, that's not fun for either party. Raiders are just going to raid each other and you're going to roleplay. find an RP SOLUTION to RP PROBLEMS, you don't need to rely on OOC barriers for every problem, and if someone is OOC'ly harassing you, get them banned, it's really not that hard.