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CONFLICT AND WHY IT'S ESSENTIAL


Mickaelhz
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59 minutes ago, Hanrahan said:

you’re so right the one thing i’ve really really missed is pvp goons interrupting my RP for no greater reason than to upset people


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conflict and pvp actually provide some stakes; roleplay is only meaningful when it can potentially be changed or taken away without prior notice. if theres no stakes, or the conflict provided by staff through some event antagonist is intended to be won by the “good guy” playerbase then theres no purpose (or at least no sense of urgency) in getting on because people know the good guys cant lose

Edited by ryno2
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Agree. Wrote a thread about it myself a while back

 

Just feels like there’s no innovation or commitment from the Staff who have taken this responsibility and haven’t really done anything with it for well over half a year when there’s so many different approaches we could take with this, even experimentally.

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Want to know what’s always been true with LoTC? Conflict causes content.  It’s really as simple as that. Conflict, be it PvE or PvP,  is the driving mechanism for most map progressions. I’m with @argonian, look at the wiki, almost all the cool stuff that’s happened on the server is because of conflict.

 

I understand that people want to RP in cities and don’t want it interrupted every 2 hours with pvp goons. That’s why you can have city raid CDs for settlements. Banditing a road though shouldn’t have a timer, especially for the entire tile. Get bandited? Go get the guards of the city to go on a hunt for the bandits, boom rp opportunity. Your settlement doesn’t have guards? Wow, what a great RP opportunity to start a guard force.

 

People don’t have to like it, but conflict does cause content. Limit conflict and you’re limiting content.

 

Thanks for coming to my ramble of a Ted Talk.

 

oh and i ruined my 69 posts to post this so you know i think its important

Edited by Muddy_Buddy
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I’m not saying Va’s where good, but, maybe a cut down VA of some sort would be a good idea, mainly for the black list, limiting the people who are bad, who are problem and repeat offenders could help, it would discourage people from doing low quality bandit Rp at least. Va’s where in place in 3.0, I was an actual noob in 3.0 and I could still get one, and had some of the most fun around. Doing bandit stuff in fringe was so so so fun, the server didn’t die then. This restriction on “bad guy” rp is the problem, the actual problem is people not wanting to loss, and not being ok with losing.

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Seems really good, I’m new so I dont have much sayso but I haven’t been approached by bandits once, i think its more realisitc to be robbed in a world like this aswell. You should be preparing for danger whenever you go out. Itll give the guards something to do aswell, and give good excuses to train them so theres actual pvpers and CRPers in the military.

 

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1 hour ago, Hanrahan said:

you’re so right the one thing i’ve really really missed is pvp goons interrupting my RP for no greater reason than to upset people


roleplay doesnt mean much if theres no potential for it to be taken away or dramatically changed without prior warning. conflict, including pvp and banditry, provides stakes and forces people to think about where they go and what they do, making the act of going from one place to another an engaging activity instead of a mindless one. as for upsetting people, the very act of banditry is inherently upsetting; nobody intentionally tries to get bandited, and even when bandits are roleplaying well they still tend to get treated with some ooc hostility by the bandited party. even then, upsetting people ooc’ly through roleplay is not necessarily a bad thing: all roleplay is predicated on ooc emotions, and ooc contempt motivates people to come up with solutions to roleplay problems rather than ignore them, increasing the amount of overall activity on the server. thus bandits, independent bandits and staff-backed server antag bandits, provide a service to the community by acting as a focal point of frustration that players can tangibly act against through roleplay, and in doing so successfully (e.g. defeating a group of bandits on the road) provide emotional and physical release for regular players; none of which can happen if rules are created that deter people from banditry in the first place. of course banditry can be done poorly, and people who bandit poorly should be called out or prevented from doing so, but creating rules to deter or prevent all banditry discourages good bandits and makes the server more dull and predictable

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Mickaehlz is fairly spot on with his assessment. To all the Veterans out there, recall your fondest memories of the server throughout your entire time on the server. It was probably some epic event line or some huge war wasn’t it? That's the beauty of conflict. My fondest times of Lord of the Craft back when I was a noob in 2015, @NJBB @UnBaed and so many others in my friend group back then participated in the massive conflict that was the Duke’s War, it’s got almost got a legendary reputation at this point. When it was time for the Warclaims between Savoy and Adria the server cap had to be increased because there was so many players trying to log in at one time. Need I say more how positive these conflicts are for the server? And there was a hilarious amount of banditry all in between, I still have videos of us (being Lorraine at the time) getting dunked on by Dunamis players, and I still look back at those times fondly and I know that so many others do as well. When the war ended and Adria lost, the entire city was burned to the ground and an entire playerbase scattered. People didn’t just quit the server forever when their side lost, they went out and joined new communities or started their own new ones. If nothing at all these epic wars are good at blending the community together to shake up eons old cliques.

Basically, my point is this. War, banditry, etc. All forms of conflict take part in a narrative, it’s what we all learned in school in how stories work, there’s always a conflict of one force against another. Not all conflict is necessarily good, but in Lord of the Craft’s case, war, banditry (within reason) have contributed to Lord of the Craft’s narrative and made it what it is today. 

 

TL;DR – My roleplay is not more important than any other players, if my nation is conflicting with another and their players come and bandit me, it is all apart of the greater ordeal and not some bandit RPer coming to steal my items and ruin my day. They’re items, they’re pixels, people are what make Lord of the Craft great, not your ST item or diamond sword.

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4 hours ago, Mickaelhz said:

nations. This proves quite a few

 

There's a lot to unpack here, so here we go:

 

  1. Responding to, “I had a 60 man rally in a week... which is more than most nations. This proves quite a few people love conflict,” This is a hasty generalization: conflict and rally attendance are non-sequitur. There are a lot of reasons people show up for rallies; for example, I show up primarily as a show of force so my community doesn’t look bad due to poor attendance. I don’t care for PvP, necessarily, on any given rally. PvP isn’t a good reflection of roleplay. 
  2. I feel that your argument is one-sided. You don’t address the desires of defenders or their potential desire for conflict. Most of your argument seems focused on how much of a drag the rule is on bandits and other would-be criminals, but you don’t really talk about why conflict is essential to the defending party other than your statement that you will prove it to be good. This is something that can be done, but you choose not to do so; for example, you could have brought up that conflict drives the narrative of character’s stories and prevents stagnation. Instead, you focus on the negatives of the rules. 
  3. There’s a bit of showboating on your end about how great you are at rallying, and how you’d do so well; however, this doesn’t really create a strong ethical appeal. There were 78 grammatical mistakes that I counted in a second reading of your argument. It is difficult for me to believe that you are a great bandit role-player when this post seems like a rant; if this was indicative of your roleplay, I would not want to participate in it willingly. 
  4. You never show how conflict is constructive for the server. Nothing in the post really tells me that player-driven conflict is good, and you take it as a given. In my experience, road-bandit roleplay, which is what I feel like you’re hinting at because you focus on the tile rule, has never been good. I can’t recount a single time it was enjoyable, and it always leads to a plethora of ban reports. Maybe you’re an outstanding lad, but there’s plenty of “minas or die” roleplay.

Those were my issues with the post. My personal opinion is the rule is fine as is and it seems to address a loophole that bandit role-players can use to exploit cooldowns. Your rant was mostly on that rule, and it didn’t address the core issue of “conflict being essential,” which is sad because I agree with that statement, just not road-bandit roleplay. 

 

I believe a push towards constructive roleplay, even bandit role-play, is good for the server. I don’t see why a bandit group should be allowed to attack settlements, even the entire tile, so often. It creates stress as people feel a need to respond, and it becomes quite tedious that people attack, usually the same people, every time the cooldown goes off. 

 

If I came off as hostile, know this: I was once a bandit, and I approve of the idea of player villains. However, the current take on banditry is petty and inconsequential. I’ve seen too many generic meme bandits and one-day alts who put little effort into their characters and impose consequences on players who put in a ton of effort into their characters.

 

I would like to see improvements to player villainy and more communication oocly to make these experiences enjoyable, threatening and less obstructive for the defender. I don’t feel like you really create a counter-argument, and many settlements have to deal with constant bandit attacks from players while dealing with server events and nation roleplay. It is overwhelming. There is an argument to be hard on this topic, but I don’t feel like you addressed it properly. 

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2 hours ago, Muddy_Buddy said:

Want to know what’s always been true with LoTC? Conflict causes content.  It’s really as simple as that. Conflict, be it PvE or PvP,  is the driving mechanism for most map progressions. I’m with @argonian, look at the wiki, almost all the cool stuff that’s happened on the server is because of conflict.

 

I understand that people want to RP in cities and don’t want it interrupted every 2 hours with pvp goons. That’s why you can have city raid CDs for settlements. Banditing a road though shouldn’t have a timer, especially for the entire tile. Get bandited? Go get the guards of the city to go on a hunt for the bandits, boom rp opportunity. Your settlement doesn’t have guards? Wow, what a great RP opportunity to start a guard force.

 

People don’t have to like it, but conflict does cause content. Limit conflict and you’re limiting content.

 

Thanks for coming to my ramble of a Ted Talk.

 

oh and i ruined my 69 posts to post this so you know i think its important

 

A lot of the good conflict you’re pointing out is national conflict. The Hanseti Civil War was awesome. The PvP Flay goon squads that ran around doing “minas or die” roleplay was not. Also, people who get attacked don’t do all of these “rp opportunities” you point out. They just ping Discord and get the boys online. 

 

This may be an unpopular opinion, but here’s my two cents: raid cooldowns should be removed completely, increase the cap on how many people can attack, and all bandit roleplay should be organized oocly beforehand with the owner of the tile. It doesn’t have to be concise, just a simple, “Hey, we’re going to attack sometime on Saturday, and there’s going to be about 10 people” will suffice. If a tile owner knows there’s a lot of people attacking, he can ask them to attack next week so it isn’t overwhelming. 

 

I find server rules tedious. Players can solve a lot of these issues themselves; if they can’t, just have a GM step in to moderate and strike a balance. 

 

There’s the potential for meta-gaming, but people already meta-game with Discord. At least this way, they can roleplay sending out patrols and do military stuff the day they know there’s going the be conflict. 

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I always had good experiences with Bandits. People are too safe on LotC, maybe it’s time to change that. 

 

I remember getting bandited by two guys in the library of Dragur last map, and right as they were about to attack me the constables pulled up and saved the day. 

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I agree with Michaels post 100% and I'm glad he brought it to light. I think basket put out his foot in the arguably right direction and I think he can be an awesome mod admin. But I think the rules do need a change, Raiding, villainy, banditing, wars they all have an essential place on this server, it's apart of RP, you can't nitpick what type of rp you want and don't want. Banditing adds a spice to the server in a way where it affects travel and road safety as well as military Rp, making nations actually train their guys how to fight and win. Back when civilization just started to grow and knights, squires and lords roamed the land the roads weren't safe and it was a very high risk traveling on the roads, same goes for banditing. We for raiding, that was another occurrence back in those times, you had Vikings who raided villages, pillaging and slaving. You had Romans taking over cities during wars and you had large nations clashing over resources and territory. I think that's what we need, We need a balanced system to not be able to be abused but to have addition to RP but also have a perfectly balanced system of conflict and villainy. I missed the days where you had to avoid certain points around the map because you knew bandits were there. Or the heart dropping moment when you see a big group of bandits ahead of you. I have some awesome ideas that I've already sent in a interview with the CT team and I would be more than happy to pitch it to you @Anore and send you some feedback or perhaps even some ideas. -Elite

Edited by Elite_Snipes_
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3 hours ago, Cjmate8 said:

A lot of the good conflict you’re pointing out is national conflict. The Hanseti Civil War was awesome. The PvP Flay goon squads that ran around doing “minas or die” roleplay was not. Also, people who get attacked don’t do all of these “rp opportunities” you point out. They just ping Discord and get the boys online. 

 

Your argument falls apart when you start leaning on examples that are multiple years old. If anything, this bolsters the argument of a general stagnation of apolitical villainy roleplay — that is, banditry without a greater political purpose — due to the fact that you’ve had to paw back through multiple major conflicts to find an example of muh mean goons.

 

3 hours ago, Cjmate8 said:

all bandit roleplay should be organized oocly beforehand with the owner of the tile.

 

I understand the blue-sky thinking about this point, especially as it’s a sentiment that Telanir has tried to encourage. However, this level of foregoing in-character tensions to develop greater story arcs has not worked so far. You may be able to beat your chest and point at examples such as bandits agreeing to egregious 5 versus 20 nation-raids, victorious or otherwise, but to posit that as anything but the fruit of players trying to find any conflict in the current villainy drought pointedly confusing.

 

The mutual agreement between nations and parties does not work. The most glaring case-in-point is that warring nations agree on raid rules etc. to allow players to have a differing regulation of raids during wartime. Parties refuse to agree to any differing terms from the banditry default as there is no benefit to increasing or modifying the cap. Organising it beforehand with a wink and a nudge is not a tenable means of villainy on a server where players see threats to their roleplay nations as direct attacks on themselves as out-of-character individuals.

 

The Rubern-Oren war ran from November to April (I may be wrong, but around then) and had no agreed war-time raid rules, so the peace-time banditry terms were used.

The Sutica-Oren war ran from June to August and had no agreed war-time raid rules, so the peace-time banditry terms were used.

 

Outside of the 8-day Orc-Dorf war, the mutual-agreement principle of war raid rules hasn’t been touched since its initial inception.

 

Players in roleplay conflict have little intention nor desire to mediate the extant conflict’s terms; they instead want to mediate its existence outright.

 

This is 😞 and not 🙂 to server roleplay as something greater than individual actions, resulting in a server culture where bandits are castigated out-of-character for being sources of in-character conflict.

 

4 hours ago, Cjmate8 said:

It creates stress as people feel a need to respond, and it becomes quite tedious that people attack, usually the same people, every time the cooldown goes off. 

 

God forbid stress. Consider why people attack you each time the cooldown is off and try to address this problem. Is there some inherent weakness with your city? Is there an in-character problem between these nominal bandits and your settlement? These are problems that can, and should, be addressed in character. The out-of-character fuelling of banditry should be punished if you can find something to qualify it as such, but there is no reason to not remove sources of potential in-character conflict. People bounced to Sutica when it was a weak nation and would rotate banditing within minutes of the cool-down coming off and tiring of this, Sutica has developed both a military and greater intranational political alliances that managed to outrally and cow the single largest nation of the server into surrendering from an offensive war. There are ways to fix these problems that are far more amicable to roleplay and community-building than banning the idea of non-consentual conflict.

 

4 hours ago, Cjmate8 said:

I don’t feel like you really create a counter-argument, and many settlements have to deal with constant bandit attacks from players while dealing with server events and nation roleplay.

 

I’m not going to mock you by asking if you have “talked to the bandits ooc :-D” to reach a mutual agreement on how and when raids should occur, especially if they’re becoming such a consistent problem that they are disrupting server events and roleplay at the national level outside of the multiple-day cooldowns that these twenty minute incursions cause.

 

If you feel like something is harassment or not justified in roleplay and you can’t handle it yourself, call a moderator. If you feel like your nation can’t defend itself in-roleplay, hire sell-swords and provide some greater roleplay to players looking for conflict RP that wouldn’t otherwise defend , nor otherwise engage with, your community. Don’t castrate villainy when the problem is entirely your response to your situation and your own inability to shield yourself from frowny-face scenarios outside of seething until it’s removed from the server.

 

I’m excited to be called “evil bandit >:(” for defending banditry, especially as my post history circles around 45% Oren law posts, having shadow-written countless others. I am by no means a road bandit, but that is not to say that I don’t enjoy bandit roleplay.

 

The shared agreement backstage handshake-and-wink concept of “mutually assured banditry” cannot exist in a server where in-character hostilities are out-of-character affronts.

 

🤔🍹

booyakasha

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The main issue with bandits and roleplay of that type, is it’s not cooperative at all. For roleplay to function correctly you need to have both parties willing to participate. Typically the attacked party in bandit roleplay, is left annoyed, frustrated, without any meaningful gain from it. Especially because if you lose, you die, you forget everything and whatever you were attempting to do, you now just spent 20-30 minutes being harassed by someone else, without any meaningful interaction or character growth. It can be like a full time job creating roleplay and making settlements active on this server, it’s very disheartening to have that ruined because someone wants to do quick “bandit” roleplay under the guise of “making conflict for fun”. Most of the people who actually make cities active and do the leg work to give you settlements to harass, don’t enjoy the fact that bandits come in, attack their playerbases and typically act rotten in OOC. I do not see why people who put in countless hours to make a healthy roleplay community and environment for those on the server deserve to have it terrorized by people who feel like they have some god-given right to attack another community constantly. I understand you enjoy that type of roleplay, but do you ever stop to consider that the other party is enjoying it as well? 

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