argonian

"It took the good Viscount's disappearance and war in Oren before the cowards of Balian would even begin to consider a return from exile, like vultures at the smell of blood. Step one foot in Oren and we'll remind you why you ever left," promises a friend of Rivia.

I mean I wish, but I think Novellen have ruined the Orenian brand so much that people won't even want to. It's already been an age since the last time we had a united humanity.

Stanimar lives in fear of the Lector who discovered Klones and therefore eternal life, but he will nevertheless be dead by the time the Lector is ready to dunk on him, so it's whatever, really.

Post your predictions in this thread. Who will win, and how? When they win, what will they do? What tertiary consequences will come of this war? Why should all spooks be immediately put to death and be banned from existing?

"Our own mortality, the premature passing of our parents, reminds us of our sin. Likewise, the elves would never have suffered infertility, the dwarves greed, nor the orcs bloodlust, had our Fathers obeyed God's Virtue. To deny that these sins and their effects have passed down to us would be to deny that a man dies young. To any such naysayer, I say, remind me of my foolishness when either of us reach our three-hundredth birthday. It ought be easy, if Iblees' curse died with our Father Horen," Stanimar remarks.

That sounds pretty based from the Adunians I don't recall the ending of Anthos really being rushed though. We had the Verge co-exist with Anthos for a while and because no one was using it and performance was getting shitty, it was removed. In any case, I think in situations like that it's fair to eventually make a unwinnable fight, call in the entire ET and spam absurd amounts of mobs and throw stupidly strong spells around (the plugin back then was crazy).

Ultimately the problem with these major ET eventlines is you can just walk away, not care about what happens, and everything will still turn out fine. It makes it really hard to care after the first one or two you get involved in. The disconnect between the actual stakes and the portrayed stakes is just too big. But at the same time, the ET can't just nuke a nation or they'll piss off half the server. Even if they have a plan of nuking every nation Aegis Undead style, the nation that loses out first won't be happy. I thought the Westerlands was a good balance for this. Maybe it was different from an ET perspective, but for me it seemed like everyone, resident or visitor, was there to fight the undead hordes, and so the ET didn't have to pull their punches nearly as much as usual. People were expecting, and wanted, to be constantly harassed with attacks, to wake up and see a village burnt to the ground. The North of Aegis was a similar concept. For the first few months of the map, the Undead stayed almost exclusively there. You could easily wake up to your town being destroyed, but (1) that depended on player action and (2) you were most likely in the North just so you could fight the Undead anyway, so you rolled with it. I think we had similar stuff in Anthos (and even last map? I dunno I ignored the Inferi), but that felt wasted because you weren't hearing of nearby player settlements being destroyed, nor was there any chance for players to destroy outposts of the antag, except when it'd happen all at once as part of a scripted event. Again it just felt like something that could be totally ignored. Moving on, the climax: Done well: Aegis Undead, Anthos Harbingers. The Undead story culminated in nations capitals falling one after another like dominos, with major political upheaval as countries collapsed or capitals moved to other, safer towns. You had literal refugees and the world really felt like it was collapsing. Cool time. The Harbingers were totally different. They didn't didn't destroy nearly as much (although they did kill a couple notable cities); Anthos just kinda got deleted once we got the Fringe because of performance and we were bored of it. But we did get to literally invade Hell, and that was really cool. What was nice about it though again was the dynamism. You had these mob-spawners sending waves of mobs at you, so you'd push them back and quickly erect a stone wall to keep the ground you'd won. Recover and charge over it, destroy some mob-spawners, build a new forward outpost. It was nice determining our own progress. Both of them had their own apocalyptic ends. Next time I'd like both tbh. Have the Antag start off in the "danger zone" of the map destroying shit there, and towards the end they bust out and start destroying player regions, nation capitals, like nobody's business. Do attacks with very little warning, maybe attack multiple settlements at once to spread the forces thin. And then when it comes down to the final conclusion as the world burns, we invade some shit to kill them off. But oh RIP, our map has been tainted and destroyed by evil forces, nothing will grow here any more, on to the next map. The end. The Inferi did kinda have an "invade Hell" ending, and it was a nice event over-all, but unlike the Undead or the Harbringers, they never really busted out of their corner of the map so they always felt totally irrelevant to me. And the final event was cool, but ultimately it felt overly dramatised for what you actually felt and experienced as a player. You had no hordes rush you in PVE, you didn't have famous settlements get wiped away across the map, and unless you were from that shitty little island they were on, you probably didn't really care or notice that it fell. It was this huge big world-ending, uh, ending to an antagonist that felt anything but world-ending. I mean there were even player wars going on right in the middle of it; that's how little people really cared. Also, having an antag like that not be the map-ending event feels really anti-climactic. And one last thing I touched on there: Have PVE ffs. The best parts of the Westerlands event lines were sweating like a madman as you fought horde after horde of mobs, seeing your friend on half a heart and rushing in to save him, before just barely escaping yourself. Seeing others pop around you, your numbers dwindling while the hordes never stopped coming. The Undead and the Harbringers too had lots of really fun PVE events. Sure CRP events are cool sometimes, but can we mix up the endless walls of text with mechanics for once? This *is* Minecraft.

I agree with everything but this. I think a lot of landscapes are "over-engineered" as it is (does every tree need 5 fences 2 slabs and a green carpet on it?) and half the time it adds nothing to the aesthetics while also basically leaving the message "don't touch this. This is handcrafted terrain! It's basically landscarring to cut these trees down and replace them with a farm", which in what's supposed to be a dynamic world is the exact opposite of what you want. A better way of making the map more interesting is, instead of having the World Team (or whoever's replaced them now) focus on minutiae like custom branches, to just have a decent variety of biomes that isn't just "have a gigantic ****-off desert on this corner of the map, a gigantic ****-off grasslands here, a gigantic ****-off mountain range in that corner". Our maps are always designed with the idea that "it's either flat or literally vertical; it's either tundra or there's no snow; it's either a gigantic elven elderwoods or there's no trees", and that's why the maps are boring. Not because the poor, overworked WT team forget to add some brown carpets to a swamp.

it also does a lot of legwork in giving them an interesting subterranean like they want

also anyone who unironically thinks this is good map design needs to actually log onto the server yes, those look absolutely beautiful from afar with a render distance about 1,000x greater than the one we actually have. but log onto the server and beautiful vistas like these become invisible and irrelevant, but what doesn't is the complete unnavigability of the terrain, or the inability to build anything on it without massive terraforming projects. design terrain based on gameplay and how it'll look close-up, not based on views that no player will ever actually get to see

use MCgen it's a million times more interesting and realistic than the dumb shit we always get. you can tell that our maps are designed with everything set to plains first, and then they stick in some gigantic unscalable mountains and a few racial biomes here and there. it really shows and our maps are always painfully boring because of it default minecraft generation is just a million times better and we should use it. just run it a few times until you get a good seed, edit it to make it feel more like a continent, and tweak from there

"Alijahu Akbar," he cheers.

james2k's roll guide (full release version 1.0): /roll 20

"Why would you make a new map just before a war? Is this guy some kind of masochist?" wonders Stanimar aloud.

do you ever get it where your eye is itchy so you gotta close it n rub your eyelid my optician acted like that was crazy talk but ill be damned if it doesnt happen to everyone

@ScreamingDingo does this make itdontmatta the you of the admin team

none of them got banned and I've only ever even spoken to like two of the people in their whole rally you can read before you mindlessly shill for red tags

1.9 is awful