Your View: On Course—Off Course?

[AnonymousAlexa 3877]

2 minutes ago, Telanir said:

 

How do we balance this with red-tape? Giving notice…is that RP-friendly, or dynamic…or even interesting? And, suppose we do remove ladders, then the problem of perma-locked settlements returns—gates down, 24/7. (my problem here is not that players behind gates are safe, it is that it's that community interaction is (literally) gated, and new players be sad for sure).

 

I liked the beginning of this map a lot, gates were wide open come-on-in—but flat turning off conflict would be worse. What else can we try?

I think a larger scale battle is far more interesting than a slaughter where pvpers hop into a city, kill a few random roleplayers, and leave. As I said, I think the fairest compromise is having two types of raids: a raid with a one hour notice and siege equipment permitted, and a short-notice raid without siege equipment. 

[AnonymousAlexa 3877]

Please bring back villainy blacklists. Tired of dealing with bad actors that run up to interrupt an event to initiate combat, and then promptly emote "runs away screaming" once CRP is called.

[WestCarolina 1779]

5 minutes ago, itdontmatta said:

 

I'm just gonna jump in here real quick. Respectfully, I'm not celebrating the fact that only 17% of the poll-answers are in approval of the moderation team. I don't understand how it is dismissive. I am actively trying to make changes in my leadership philosophy as I solicit feedback from my team & the playerbase as a whole. If there is an outcry, I haven't seen or heard it up until last night when I posted the poll. 

 

I realize that my tendency to be passive aggressive and point out hypocrisies on the forums can make people feel like I'm unapproachable. If people feel that the moderation team or server rules are going in a direction that is unhealthy for the longevity of our server — please reach out to me. Recently, other admins have been sending me some feedback that people have sent them, and it's very difficult for me to understand it without context or having a discussion with the player who is concerned.

 

I'm free for the next couple of days and I'll be out of town Friday-Sunday. If anyone wants to VC and provide me with constructive feedback feel free to reach out to me on discord. 

I was referring to this as the celebratory part, that it was a 'half-dub.'

I have reached out to you regarding moderators on your team, as well as members of the community but it has always been pulling teeth to do so. I've started to go to Telanir cause I felt far more comfortable going to him after what I've seen, and we had a history working together on staff in the past; I can have conversations about on-going issues with him that feel like I'm being heard. But even still, with various communities and players I've seen and heard reporting staff or reporting a recent group who has made a vast majority of people uncomfortable and unsafe, we still see them given multiple chances, while player A gets a ban for putting a carpet on a shop-chest without at least communicating with them first and giving a warning.

What I wish out of voicing my concerns is to have genuine discussions, yes, but to see how we can start to shift the culture back to instilling trust in moderation & making people feel safe on the server, as well as putting story-telling first.
 

[AmericanSniper52 225]

I personally am upset with the fact that y'all removed rp swords. It was a bad idea to remove them since now you have to pay out the nose for a weapon you'll use for CRP.  Also calling PVP "MRP" isn't smart. MRP has multiple meanings and people may end up misunderstanding. Other than that, things are mostly okay. Just please bring back the ability to make training swords

[Islamadon 4429]

My most recent gripe is that every gate feels like it's shut . .

Whenever I try to go through them, on the off-chance that they're actually manned, people want to RPly take my items to avoid conflict. I just want to RP and explore and not be covered in bubble wrap so people can do SOL unaccosted.

I suspect this could be due to the recent change where now, per the rules, 4 people can perform villainy on a population without it being considered a raid. It's easier to just keep the gates shut and not deal with it...

[Unwillingly 11175]

it feels like server culture is shifting in a direction of utter non-interactionism. stick to yourself, RP in your own house, idle circle sprinting, afk standing, and gates that seem to be closed more and more often with less and less compensation

originally i thought this was just a me issue and that i wasn't trying hard enough, but over the months ive been asking friends and people within my circle, many concurred that RP is dreadfully sparse. any doubt i still had left upon seeing that 173 people think the RP quality on the server is either meh, bad, or terrible according to the recent mod polls

this means that RP is underwhelming, disappointing, what have you, to a large portion of active players. I can't speak for everyone, but personally it feels like RP momentum started off ridiculously slow at the start of the new map, when normally it's the opposite. it SHOULD be the opposite. new maps should be the opportunity to reinvigorate RP, but instead we see now that a lot of players are disappointed with the current sphere of server RP

I sometimes check /locals for either myself or to tell some poor guy in ooc who asks the nth "where's everyone at" of the day. what I see is maybe 2-3 places with more than 10 people, and the rest of the 15 or 20 nations/settlements barely breaking 2-6 people. this has been consistent since the start of the map it feels like. despite this map being far smaller than almaris, RP feels more spread out and sparse than ever

and of the few places that show up as active on /locals, you go there, and see absolutely no one because they built a colossus ******* 300x300 godzilla city for a community of maybe 30 active people, so every time you go to a city that shows as having 12 people, need to play where's-waldo to even find them. an easy solution to this would be to regulate how large cities can be built, especially considering how we now have an even smaller map than almaris, because there's not a single community on the server that needs to have a 300x300 city

for a brief period, I think it was at the start of map launch, it felt like every nation gate was open, but now we're at a point where many if not most of these places keep theirs closed 24 hours of the day and you're lucky if someone comes by to run you through. i'm a little disappointed that we never got to see a rule that moderates gate traffic, even though I remember a poll being issued on the subject maybe a year ago during almaris that would enforce gates can only be closed when a player is there to man them, in which they'd otherwise need to be open. i think that this would be an wonderfully effective rule to apply to communities that advertise themselves as RP hubs

(edit: islamadon also makes the point that people probably do this to not have to deal with raids. I think a fun little social-experiement would be to enforce that raids need to be issued with an hour's notice and see how it influences how often gates are open/closed)

anything else it feels like is just people not wanting to interact anymore, whether they're standing afk or zoning out while MC sprinting around a fountain in the square. of course the easiest solution would be for me to just say "just emote at them," but when the person you're emoting at doesn't even seem like they have a modicum of interest to interact, what even is the point of trying with them

part of me is disappointed we don't have impromptu ET events anymore. not just the ones that are part of larger, grandiose eventlines, but ones that are small, one-off encounters that would serve to incentivize interaction among the people who experience it and give them something to build off. guards consolidating their brotherhood after fighting a monster together, people telling one another about the odd trader in the city recently, etc. i understand why things are the way they are, but i think people severely underestimate how much RP potential these surface-level events can have in the long run. the average player isn't going to be experiencing these large-scale and deeply complex eventlines, and i think more effort should be made to deliver RP to the average person

lotc is what you make it, that's always been a principle of the server, but the avenues of RP we currently have feel strangled and bottlenecked into either the slim chance you come across an eventsite or find RP you're genuinely invested in, and my interest in the server has severely, severely waned over the last few months because of it

it might be a bad take, i don't know, but i don't think the solution to this is adding mechanical avenues of gameplay, such as quest boards with NPCs or mob killing regions. not saying they're inherently bad, just that they're genuinely not what we need right now. people want rp. people want player-on-player interaction, not RPG styled or whatever plugins, which I feel like will be the immediate instinct-solution that comes to mind. if people wanted that they would go to wynncraft

i'm not saying we should spoon-feed people RP either. i'm saying we need to create avenues of interaction for the average player and incentivize RP

[megavoltar 1110]

For an addendum, this 'State of the Game' that pops up twice every year (unless a big controversy happens), reminds me of actual vidya-game state of the games.  Destiny 2 for instance.

They happen rarely, everything comes to a boil, and a tidal wave ensues before radio-silence resumes from the blip

They aren't good

[Lojo613 1420]

I hate the bugman response of "why didn't you just pm me dude" from mods and staff. There is no reason we should have to keep our gripes and feedback private, and the fact that we aren't "reaching out" to the ADMIN to give him our feedback in his PERSONAL DMS is ridiculous. LOTC is an organization, and feedback should be able to be submitted through a professional channel aside from "muh discord dms". Start interacting with the feedback section on the forums and regularly ask for updates from the community. It is on YOU to ensure that the channels of communication for the organization are open. 

[LatzMomo 2088]

The culture of the server has been rapidly degrading and the mechanics being introduced are implemented carelessly. Feedback feels like it's generally ignored. I am not confident anything will come from this and I have lost a majority of my trust in the moderation team because they are not held accountable for their actions and abuse even when presented with evidence that they acknowledge is serious, any reports given to the admins about staff abuse is ignored and brushed aside to obscurity. Moderation admin sets a bad example for his team and the moderation sees this and acts worse, this is also met with no punishment or accountability.

Raid tools are bad and should be removed entirely, there was always a tradeoff to keeping your gates closed and most settlements decided it wasn't worth it anyways and kept their gates open, raiders already have every advantage by being able to raid at any time (when there's no CD) with any amount and because the defenders are reactionary they're at a massive disadvantage and that's why the raid rules were so restrictive before.

The implementation of raid tools was awful, they were removed before build phase and we were not told they'd be added back, we assumed they were gone for good following the massive pushback upon their last implementation. This should have been communicated to us that they'd make a return before the build phase started so we knew to alter our build to account for them, now having a beautiful build has become a liability because of this short sightedness.

I have genuinely felt an apathy towards the server's rp recently as it's not really being focused on by the staff and instead the focus has been more geared towards mechanics and policies that benefit pvp, map mechanics like resource tiles, new equipment like raid tools and new rulings like 'captives must give qaulity rp' are all examples of this bias, the wording of that last rule change regarding capture rp is especially concerning because it was so biased in favor of one party of that exchange, it didn't say anything about the captors giving quality rp, it was completely biased towards one perspective without taking into account the other side.

It is genuinely insane to think that capture RP isn't toxic, during my last capture in a midnight raid I was informed by staff that my timer did not start until I arrived at a location where I would be a captive. I was ran on the road for over 45 minutes with no RP and when I asked the captors what gives they emoted 'continues dragging captive along' I also contacted staff and they said I could not leave despite no rp going on, this means I was forced to stay on the server doing RP (or lack of for most of it) that I did not want to for over 2 hours and 45 minutes before I was released. My character was also killed so I recieved no character development from the experience and only served to enhance someone elses. Also the people who captured me didn't even rp with me when we arrived, instead just peddling me off to someone else.

PvP is meant to be the fast option to get a conflict over with. Why can the winners extend that conflict for up to three more hours after the PvP is concluded and why are they not expected to provide quality rp when the captives are. You have to realize that it's unreasonable to expect someone to RP for three more hours, especially if it's RP that they're not interested in or makes them queasy like mutilation or torture.

When I asked if I could leave 30 minutes before my 2 hours 45 minutes sentence to eat I was informed I could if I would come back and serve the last 30 minutes later, ultimately I decided to eat my dinner at the desk, throw up netflix and check the minecraft tab every few minutes. It's just not feasible to expect two parties who don't respect each other to play well when forced to rp together.

[Terry 1859]

In the midst of my falling asleep, I'll try and be clear and concise.

 

For starters, I agree with those that say we aren't doing enough to defend the Roleplay experience. Lord of the Craft is the premier roleplaying server, and yet in recent times it's felt like nothing more than a tower defense game, attempting to ward off raiders and attackers with nothing but sticks and stones against their advanced raiding weaponry at 2am in the morning when 1/2 to 3/4 of our community has done the sane thing and decided to go to bed for the night.

 

That's not to say I'm for removing raid tools entirely though. For the moment I am, but that is only because there are no proper guidelines/rules, how-to, or proper defense for those these weapons are used against. There is no balance, only a one-sided way to get into the nations who never had the chance to prepare for it when building their settlements. Raiders can simply blow through your gate or climb your walls and the only possible saving grace is somehow emoting three times to destroy the raid ladder or what have you despite it more than likely being a PVP scenario because of numbers or mod ruling. What we need is for the current iteration of raid tools to be scrapped and removed, and a proper discussion and roadmap/plan on how best to move forward with raids, so that both attackers AND defenders feel happy or at best content with interacting with raids. 

 

(I know Minecraft has it's limits with regard to what it can do, but surely we can come up with better than what we have right now. At the very least discuss it all as a community. It is painfully obvious people are not happy with the way things currently are.)

 

That brings me to my next point, the Moderation team. The Team as it is (for the most part) currently lacks what one would think a Moderation team would have. Respect, ability to remain unbiased, professionalism, proper communication etc. And to be clear, that is not directed at the entire team. I believe some on the team are there because they truly wish to help and further protect our community, and I thank you for that. But as it stands, all it takes is one bad moderator to spoil the trust and respect in the rest, as we've seen from various people's comments both here and elsewhere on the forums. Doesn't help that the admin overseeing the team has seemingly done little to help reign in such behavior, and in some cases furthering it.

 

All in all, there is smoke in the air and change is needed ASAP. We're at risk of (and in some cases are) losing players and communities because they feel unsafe, are no longer having fun, are upset with the direction of the server and/or it's staff, you name it. 

[ClassyDryad 1733]

I've spoken a lot on things recently, so I'll summarize them here.

 

Moderation Conduct: There has been a string of incidents which has soured the opinion of moderation. Reqs have become tainted with snide comments and overt bias. Victims of bigotry have to debate with the community why they feel offended while the perpetrators of said abuse are slapped on the wrist and softly endorsed to perform similar actions in the future. Essential services are unavailable for weeks for some and swiftly granted for others. Feedback is dismissed using information initially promised to be anonymous. It has been shown there is little interest in what the community beyond a select few think on this server, and many I know no longer trust that sensitive issues can be handled at all by moderation at this time.

 

Player Conduct: There is a persistent element of server culture which encourages malicious and toxic behavior towards other players. Clip montages of pvp victories thrown in people's faces to embarrass them, extended low quality villainy that keeps people wrapped up for hours of time they don't have, constant use of bigoted terminology in both open and closed environment. I have friends in real life that I wish I could bring on to the server but I know I can't due to the horrid underbelly of the community, and I know plenty of friends including myself who would leave in a heartbeat if not for the connections we've already made. Something needs to be done to curtail this behavior, not weaponize those who spread it to go after people who have done everything in their power to avoid it.

 

LOTC has grown a lot from the earlier parts of its history, the issues we have today are in no part worse nor different than those of the path. I can only hope we remember how the community was dragged from that state before it gets pulled back in.

 

[satinkira 5910]

so much of what made lotc fun feels like it's vanishing from underneath. where are the eventlines? where are the warclaims? where's the dynamic rp? why are the gates closed? why are staff creating mechanics plugins on the server when the mission statement says 'rp, not clicks'? what the **** happened to pasting builds? it was genuinely fantastic having all of the worldlore published, so - with that transparency in mind - why does it feel like nothing's happened with it?

 

maybe there is a legitimate reason for some of these, but idk man. the server just feels so slow and tired nowdays. we gotta pump the steroids back in somehow

[OwOrc 354]

let's go back to almaris.

everything was better on almaris.

[MailC3p 1159]

People are complaining about stuff that has been around forever and for some reason had only now gotten to be an issue. 
 

“gates are always closed” 

 

yeah, because raiders can come in and slaughter your population if you keep them open, this has been a thing since before I began playing

 

”Raid weapons give raiders too much an advantage”

 

eh maybe, iirc you can only bring 3 and even then a ladder can only go up so far, though I agree defenders need ways to fight against it without straight up deleting them.

 

“Everyones in their own little circles” 

 

again, a thing that has been around since before I began playing, when I was a new player I’d reach out and RP with everyone I could but quickly realized whose in what cliche, it’s why I personally don’t like Haense. 
 

And others. Personally i’m fine however, if I never checked the forums i’d have no way of knowing the blights of Lotc because to me, Aevos has so far treated me best out of Arcas or Almaris, so far Aevos has been nothing but fun and positivity for me and I feel as if there has not been a culture shift that so many people claim and I’ve put too much time into lotc in the last week (1 day, 22 hours as I type this) 

 

edit; I’ve done some thinking, and honestly some nations have gates open 24/7, I’ve never seen Krugmar close their gate except for during a pvp raid, I’ve never seen Lurin or Aaun close their gates, and the onlytime Urguan has closed its gates is when they captured the Norlandic King and wanted to ensure people couldn’t get in (they still did, Sneaky got killed by a Norlander so the Urguanites couldn’t get it lmao) 

 

to nations that I’ve encountered only closed gates, such as Norland or Balian, they usually (not always) have someone close by who can let you in, and when it comes to where I currently RP the most (hnor) if there isn’t someone around to open gates, there’s almost always someone on discord your can ping and get the attention of

[Akrassia 133]

1 hour ago, Unwillingly said:

part of me is disappointed we don't have impromptu ET events anymore.

I would like to add to this point. When I first joined this server, one of my first ever experiences within Almaris was an impromptu event that had occurred while me and my friends were exploring this grand world that was built for the sake of roleplay. I believe that spontaneous interactions could be good for not only the over arching story that staff have planed for Aevos, but for the sole player to actually progress in unique ways outside of cultural roleplay or roleplay within closed off city walls. I believe it was either almightysaucer who actually lead an impromptu event in the ruins of Lucinsberg back in my earlier days. This event was something my character talked about extensively for decades to come.

I will not speak much on the topic of raids or pvp, because im not anywhere close to that scene. However, I do believe Alexa brings up some valid points. I feel like giving an hour heads up for raids with raid tools would benefit both parties.