Your View: On Course—Off Course?

[RaijenStars 967]

I will start by saying that all I am about to say is obviously just my personal experience where I personally rped so far.

 

I agree with many people here, currently is it quite hard to actually find rp in this rp server, I have been trying very hard to, but it feels like to find rp in the server you need to first find ooc connections, people rp with their ooc circle and barealy with others they are not close with. 

Ofcourse not everyone does that, and I might be biased or might miss other reasons for it happening, but this is the way it seems to me at the moment.

 

About the very disputed discussion about villainy rp and the closed gates, I personally enjoy proper raids, as a defender, it gives us a reason to gather and have some military rp to those who enjoy it. What bothers me more is not the proper raids, but random people who just come to bring chaos, I have been through so many cases when one random player just shoots someone random from a roof, laugh, then run away with no real interesting rp and then, in the most unpleasant cases of those (not all of them), they try to powergame their way out of it when they are surrounded by many soldiers because they thought they could just attack someone in the middle of the city and get out of it with no consequences. While I understand the arguement of everyone being in the server for self enjoyment, even the ones doing the villain rp, I, as well as the other players in the city who don't enjoy combat rp, are also in the server for our personal enjoyment, and when someone comes up to me at the gate I can't determine if he is there to just casually rp or make another chaos in the city, so yes I irply take their weapons to make sure our community has fun in the city.

Out of the city - they are on their own, people know the risk of going out and get banditted, and it is fine. but I personally view the city like a peaceful place like in games where you enter the city and monsters can't get in so you can rest for a bit (not that bandits are monsters, just an analogy) instead of all the time 24/7 be on your toes.

[Jentos 6878]

Inciting the ST into making sudden and surface events, or even rapid event lines with some depth has the potential to imbibe a lot more "life" into the server. Young little me was so impressed by the fact that ST's back in Vailor used to roll up on you with monsters all of a sudden and with no prior mention. It felt like even travelling you weren't exactly safe from event monsters. Personally, I'd love to see ST go absolutely wild with Event Creatures.

 

My other point is on raid equipment. Despite an overtly negative opinion from the playerbase they've remained. This has long contributed to the idea of the "ferry mods", or a bias, let alone corruption from a large subset of PVP-oriented individuals by the staff team. I'd remove, if not, severely weaken the raid tools, (or even have their usage require a 1 hour advance warning. I say this with much understanding, and I know that for some of the moderation it's really difficult not to choke on pvper c*ck every morning but I implore those moderators to reconsider their standing and invest on the quality of roleplay on the server rather than making it easier for clicks to occur. I will always remember the one time I was bandited and tried crping a guy from a group of pvpers who I will not name who had no clue about how to 'rp', and admitted to me he'd only joined because he enjoyed the pvp mechanics. 

 

Also can someone violently shake the human leadership who consistently decide to create countless new settlements among nations that are already spread thin for RP. That fact alone dispute's Nectorists' grandpa rant. 

[Wizzar 481]

I will try to organize my thoughts best that I can.

 

I think that moderators are trying. I think that they do a fairly good job at issuing bans for rule infractions and appear to be fair when dealing with appeals. I do not believe that the issue exists within the individual moderators. While there are surely instances where moderators have bias or when a moderator's decision is not entirely spot on, they are only human. The larger problem is how moderation is viewed as a whole, especially on a Minecraft roleplaying server where the rules are not very developed to deal with the plethora of issues that may arise. 

 

Too many bad faith actors (by bad faith I mean those who either are targeting for OOC reasons or are acting with no care to actual IRP circumstances) are enabled by the server's inability to confront issues not covered explicitly in the rules. For example, the rules allow raiders to stay for up to an hour. However, when raiders are raiding off cooldown and staying for the entirety of the allowed duration, they are technically following the rules, yet they are acting in bad faith and are disturbing RP. This extends beyond PvP as people can skirt around RP and CRP rules to circumvent what is fair and conducive to logical and healthy RP. Still, I think PvP is perhaps the most abused system on the server when it comes to bending the rules at the expense of the server-at-large. The community needs more protection from the PvP groups who selfishly raid and pillage without enhancing anyone's RP experience (who would be better off on a factions server). 

 

Moreover, I believe the story team has degraded over time. Approaching and discussing anything with the story team is usually a dead end as they are quick to dismiss your ideas and wave you away as they do not want to deal with you. More and more, people are telling one another to not bother with asking an ST or getting permission for something as ST just are becoming more and more negative. 

 

ST bias is natural. The community is small, and the ST are volunteers who are a part of their own micro community, often leaders in such. Yet, it is very discouraging when we are told that ST exist for the community at-large, yet their efforts and attention are clearly focused on specific groups. I do not mind ST helping out their friends, but it is frustrating when individuals are denied assistance from STs who have clearly helped others with the same in the past. While they are certainly not obligated to help, this is a concerning trend. Despite being volunteers, I believe staff should be held to a certain standard of professionalism that is clearly currently lacking. 

 

 

[sincerelyE 81]

2 minutes ago, Jentos said:

Inciting the ST into making sudden and surface events, or even rapid event lines with some depth has the potential to imbibe a lot more "life" into the server. Young little me was so impressed by the fact that ST's back in Vailor used to roll up on you with monsters all of a sudden and with no prior mention. It felt like even travelling you weren't exactly safe from event monsters. Personally, I'd love to see ST go absolutely wild with Event Creatures.

 

For real, monster hunting keeps servers alive. Nothing is more dope than going full witcher/bloodborne on some NPCs. And it doesn't have to be this huge dragon where half of the playerbase goes on boring scouting events and then something out of their control kills the monster in the end. Smaller encounters where a group of 2-5 folks deal with the problem immediately can be plenty of fun, too. And there's so many ways characters can get stuff out of it - for some it may be healing rp/trauma, some might go around telling stories of how they killed a beast and pawn off their teeth, so on and so on.

[SimonItorp 64]

If CT would regain warps that don't require me to keep my soulstone unbound from places I wish to go to quicker, out of fear of getting stuck, I would consider the new CT a very good thing. I will also say that I personally wish PvP would be let go of entirely, apart from large scale warclaims. Too many people, I'm looking at you Ferrymen, do bandit rp that do not persist of actual roleplay and character development. It's more so a scheme of laziness where they wish to get cool things, and thus pop players just to get some loot. I would rather interact with a bandit that is robbing me IRP than robbing me mechanically by popping me when I could actually have a chance at fighting back or something of the likes.

 

Those two matters are my only complain. Everything else is fine.

[mika1278 2683]

I have been enjoying a few things on this server lately, but I rarely now actually find myself roleplaying and rather grinding out resources, building new projects around my nation to improve it and managing people to do their part through either brief roleplay interactions or if I can't get a hold of them, give them a little list of things to do over discord. And if I were to not do that, then my nation would very simply fall behind or lose the advantage I have been working on. Grinding for the server economy is a huge part now. which is naturally beneficial for the people who grind so that they are rewarded economically for their work and smaller realms have an expected amount of resources for their size, but that time investment simply isn't worth it anymore when you have a job or go to college. At first I thought the tile mines would be a lot easier to manage, perhaps making them a generator where you get 1-2 of the resource per 15 minutes or 4-8 per hour deposited into a dedicated resource chest on the site instead of having people run through them would be a nice change to make the workload easier or perhaps have that as an addition to the already existing system so that people can still work harder for higher rates.

The whole pvp vs CRP thing I don't really care for, a heads up would of course be nice to actually have a larger scale battle happen instead of rolling in with 20 people and then 1v20 crping every single citizen as you go through the city with half-assed emotes. (There are some raiders with good quality emotes and reasonable characters however, I like them)
The raiding tools are dope though, that will speed some things up instead of letting it be a slog.

The chunks break sometimes man, that is really damn annoying, gives me flashbacks to Arcas, though thankfully to a lesser degree.

Another thing I would like to point out is the lack of communication between staff and players, I have reached out a good few times on some matters such as tile mine placement and expressing that I under no circumstance would want a mine to be there, the nodes simply get added 3 days later and after the fact I reach out expressing my dissatisfaction once again, only to be told that my assigned location for where I wanted the mine was invalid. Never was I informed of such or reached out about it. Though that is only a recent example and I have come to terms with that situation. But it saddens me that even as a realm leader, my voice is mostly unheard by the people I reach out to and have staff refuse to reach out to me for any issues that might be there. A simple improvement in communication would be appreciated.

Though not only staff has this style of communication, almost the entire playerbase does exactly this where confrontation for a greater good or to clear something up is simply avoided and then ranted about to their direct friend group on the server. It is kind of sad that only a few people are the exception. I would like to encourage transparency, but I cannot know about an issue that I am not told or know about.

I am happy with the recent Naga vs Shuul event by Squakhawk though, it does make everything feel a little more alive and gives me something more rp friendly I can focus on instead of grinding resources to build my place up with. I'd love to see more of this everywhere around the map.

Enjoy my rant and feedback,
-Mika

[CasualNuker 637]

I’d have to say that lately the server is moving off course. Currently I’ve played online during a single raid which occurred in Balian around 1am ET. In order for them to get in they used a single raid ladder topping over our already quite tall walls bringing in twelve people, it was with this that a lot of us in the late night VC were confused because our walls were around 18-20 blocks tall which should’ve been enough but with the new raid equipment I’ve heard the ladders can climb up to 25 blocks tall. That should be removed, personally I think that the tools are cool but they are just too overpowered currently where only a few nations have the ability to defend against them naturally.

 

Another issue is moderation team, I currently feel like a lack of communication always occurs, where if a player needs help instantly and we DM them in-game or discord it’ll be ignored or replies to in a few days. It’s also a concern that I’ve realized almost always now that the mods are becoming biased against certain players, this isn’t every mod but there are people on the team who seem to be biased towards players.
 

Further things I’ve noticed is that new players are largely ignored by the masses of the server who don’t care to integrate them into the server. At the start of the map I had a small community of maybe a dozen players and we would welcome new players in now usually they didn’t stay long but we had two new players quickly integrate into the server and they fell in love with he concept. How many nations by ignoring newer players are missing out on growth?

 

In the end though our faults don’t rest with the staff team many issues lie with us for not demanding a better experience, we continue to play even though certain aspects suck, and until we demand better for the community these can’t change whether it be the raids, moderation or integrating newer players into our larger communities.

[jdesarno 380]

You know things are scuffed when you find more enjoyment mining an ore node every 15 minutes and exploring developer plugins that offer their own uniqueness (When they aren't broken half the time) rather than interacting with actual people on a roleplay server. 

[Adelemphii 958]

I was writing a comment, but it ended up become a long winded rant on how much I dislike both PvP and CRP. I'll simply post the first paragraph I had written.

 

I dislike commenting on posts like these because while I do have opinions, I have no solutions or semblances to ideas for solving these issues, and no desire to argue on the forums. For me, my biggest issue with LoTC is a lack of enjoyment from both PvP and CRP. CRP has its issues where not everything can be consistent, everyone wants to win, and depending on if you do honor combat or a rolling system, it can be largely RNG based. PvP is another factor that I've never truly enjoyed on LoTC, I'm not a skilled individual when it comes to clicking very fast or not getting bored in a blob fight as wars and raids have been for the past couple of years.

[Mannamannaa 1626]

3 hours ago, sincerelyE said:

The whole gate thing has been jarring ever since I gave LotC a try. You have such a massive playerbase, inviting the ability for people to hop on whenever, even on Euro/Aus times, and have enough people to roleplay with. That is not something any other mcrp server has, yet...

... The gates and the ever looming concern of mcpvpers. Too many times now I've spent 30ish minutes checking several towns, found them closed up, and logged off. There's only so much time I can allocate out of my day to roleplay - if 30 mins of that is spent (sometimes unsuccessfully) finding that roleplay, then most days I just won't bother at all.

When I first joined a year ago, I thought about writing up a post about how the coexistence of mcpvp and roleplay harms the latter and keeps the upper echelon of quality roleplayers either away from the server entirely or, if they are on this server, they're huddled up in little pockets in order to guard themselves from being forced into a faction server experience. I ended up not writing the post, because I thought I'd be shouting into the void of a largerly mcpvp-oriented server. But now, reading the posts on this thread, it seems to me that people do want some sort of changes.

 

Maybe it's time to pull a m******craft and make a separate ecosystem entirely for the pvpers, giving opportunity to abolish the jarring pvp defence systems like ugly city walls and hell, even allow roleplayers to be the ones to shape the outcome of politics and major conflicts. 

I understand this might be a completely outrageous take by LotC standards still, but it's been at the back of my mind for an entire year, so I might as well lay it out.

 

This is a good idea.

 

[sam33497 2793]

I don't think conflict is particularly worse than it ever has been. If anything, the development and release of new conflict systems has led to a surge in conflict, while other aspects of the server, such as ST, have fallen far behind simultaneously.

 

I don't think mods are at fault for any 'poor handling' of conflict. I think they do fine given a tough job. It is simply that there is not much else to do in LOTC at the moment. Eventlines are rather scarce, and the ones that I've seen hosted are essentially equivalent to player events. The world is not immersive, and you cannot find quality RP without being within a particular RP group. It is true that the new conflict systems cause nations to be more based around conflict and less around pure RP, but I wholeheartedly believe that if this was supplemented by a more active, living, and breathing world, that no one would think it too much of a problem.

 

I don't think that being raided every once in a while is the death of RP. The current raid cooldowns are pretty sufficient. On the other hand, ST definitely needs to be jumpstarted, but I do not know if that means that there is an inherent issue of the server contained there.

[Ibn Khaldun 7729]

If someone would like to discuss their concerns with me, I invite them to reach out on Discord. I'd like to offer a hand in refining how these concerns are presented and argued in hopes they are received better, understood better, and hopefully resolved or a compromise is reached. Likewise, I'm willing to mediate any concerns between players too.

[Mannamannaa 1626]

I already made my opinions known on the trend of the server to put ooc civ nation-tile PRO politics on a pedestal compared to literally Everything Else, and how the recent additions to PvP have exacerbated that issue. It's why I refuse to ever be Rex again. It's why I am currently taking a break from LotC.

 

Roleplay has no consequences at the moment and all power to make decisions is held either OOCly, or through use of PvP plugin, or by staff. All three of these have been shown to hinder roleplay and allow for blatant bias to affect decision making.

 

An earlier post mentioned people not willing to Leave LotC if they are unhappy... Well, they already have been! The screamers just drown out their voices.

 

Earlier I said I was taking a small hiatus. With the recent events and decisions, or lack thereof, made by certain staff members I now genuinely believe it is for the best I leave the server behind for good. Kor'garr's story can be told elsewhere, in a place where people actually wish to weave a coherent story together as friends. Maybe that's BG3, maybe its a 5e campaign. Yet as the months have passed I find myself unwilling to even indirectly support the direction this server is taking where toxicity and discrimination are safeguarded and even encouraged, whether intentionally or not.

[MailC3p 1159]

3 hours ago, sincerelyE said:

Maybe it's time to pull a m******craft and make a separate ecosystem entirely for the pvpers

Lotc used to have warzones for wars, places where no rp happened and pvp was always on if the person had a different status as you, most PVPers where content with sitting in those all day, they should to bring it back 

[Pancho 2527]

3 hours ago, sincerelyE said:

make a separate ecosystem entirely for the pvpers

We used to use /beta to fulfill our rampant pvp addiction. Ever since that closed, we have resorted to terrorizing the populace. Maybe if that's brought back then some concerns will be put to rest.