Llir

I've been reading all of your replies, thank you for your feedback and drawing attention to these issues. I see two main concerns being outlined: How prebuild land selection was decided for next map (and rather, who didn't make the cut). How activity currently works. I'll start with the first -- the list we have right now for prebuild is not final, though it contains 15 nations/settlements, and 10 lairs. For lairs this was based off of individual audits for evidence of RP, though for nations/settlements we determined it solely off of activity numbers. I see now deriving this from nothing but the raw numbers alone was a mistake, and consideration should have been given to every group who didn't automatically make the cut. I am committed to finding a solution for the halflings, please reach out to me on Discord ASAP @NotEvilAtAll/@Hearth. Onto the current system... the purpose of activity should mainly be to flag dead settlements for staff, so the land can be freed up for other groups to use. Activity is a necessary evil to prevent land exhaustion and ghost towns, though I realize that this system has had major issues: Too strict requirements, especially for smaller groups who may very well generate great RP, though aren't constantly on. Difficult for staff to maintain, leading to inconsistencies this map as the system was neglected from time to time. Discourages traveling outside of your home region. Creates a gamey culture around activity that goes against key aspects of our Mission Statement. These are not issues we want to bring over to next map. I know the current system sucks, and needs to be changed. These are all points we have been discussing for months in the map development meetings, and have plans to remedy for 9.0. Many of the ideas I've seen have already been considered, and I am glad to share some details on the system design for next map: Activity will be monitored on both a persona's realm association, as well as your current location. These two factors will be tracked independently and both considered when making decisions on evictions. The baseline activity threshold will be lower on average. Activity will not be required to maintain additional tiles, this will only be a mina cost. All manual steps required in the tracking of the data will be removed, replaced with an automatic system that removes both the dependency on staff doing weekly spreadsheet work and potential biases (note: any final decisions on evictions will still require staff approval, there will be no auto-evictions). The strike system will be removed in favour of tracking a rolling average. These are just some central details for the system; much of it is still in work and the concerns raised in this thread will be considered as we prepare a final draft. The central point we've reiterated again and again in our map development meetings is that we want to remove the gamey and punishing aspects of the system. What we implement for next map will be fair, flexible, and easy for us to amend should it not be achieving its goals. This is key to having a fun and successful 9.0, as; Aligning with our Mission Statement must come before the numbers game. And that cannot wait until next map, that must happen now. Effective for the current weekly activity cycle, I'll be taking the following measures to prevent any further repercussions due to the system for the remainder of this map: Activity strikes due to failing to meet 1% for settlements and 3% for nations activity requirements are suspended. Nations downgrading to settlements or losing tiles (aka 'Nation Diminishing' in the current system) will no longer occur. Activity data will still be collected and sent to PROs, though this will only be used for: Determining final ordering for prebuild land selection for next map. Flagging truly dead settlements for eviction. The numbers will just be an indicator and we'll perform a manual audit for eviction decisions. If there is consistent roleplay, you won't lose your settlement. I hope this information can help alleviate some concerns, and allow everyone to roleplay without thinking about activity for the remainder of our time on Almaris. Please feel free to reach on Discord (Llir#5410) if you would like to discuss any of this with me personally. I will keep an eye on this thread, though find having direct conversations to be more productive when discussing details of systems like this. Cheers, Llir, on behalf of the LotC Administration tl;dr no more activity checks this map, major changes for next map

The capital region is a subregion of the tile and doesn't independently collect activity. If overlapping regions have the activity flag enabled it causes duplicate data in the activity plugin, so that may be why you saw the disabled flag on the region. Activity is only counted on the tiles, which encompasses the capital region regardless of what flag it has set.

This is just factually untrue. I can share the numbers with the NL if needed, but going back 12 weeks I can see the Orcs activity has never been zero on any of their tiles. Anyway, I appreciate the thoughts on activity here, we're making some major revisions for next map to make it less central to a realm's survival. More details will be provided once the system is more fleshed out. For the Bywater decision, I am personally handling it and am free to discuss it in DMs with the NL, though I want everyone to know we are not by any means closed to the idea of giving special consideration to the halflings. Gotta keep that shirecore aesthetic going.

okay but what about the malinor we had between aegis and anthos?

I like the idea of buffing water evo but not really sure if materializing weapons that you can hold fits well with evocation in general, and using physical force to control an evocated object doesn't quite seem right. Also, the brittleness of the weapon makes it seem rather useless, why would you do this over just conjuring a projectile? I don't quite get the idea with sub-zero - would it be that ice spells explode on impact to generate a cryo-grenade type effect to immobilize targets?

Greetings friends! Our annual holiday sale starts today and will run until January 2nd at 11:59 PM EST. Use code KRUGSMAS at checkout for 20% off your purchase*. Visit https://lotc.co/store to browse our Crown Packages and https://store.lordofthecraft.net/ to make a purchase. Happy Holidays! *Minimum pre-discount total of $20 required for coupon to take effect.

RP signs on your local town! Food donation chest at CT? 👀 Unfortunately the currency and shop plugins are two of our oldest and would require a very large refactor to support tenths of Minas, though definitely something we'll keep in mind for future revisions. 😅

The Administration has decided to test the idea of removing the Auction House for at least one month. This is after having this requested by the community many times over recent years. Feel free to make feedback threads to discuss the benefits/negatives you see, and it will be taken into consideration following the conclusion of the test. As of today you you cannot place new items up for auction. Existing auctions will conclude as scheduled and unclaimed items will be distributed to your item caches should the system be permanently removed. Cheers.

Application completed. You will be contacted by Staff on the application's status and next steps.

Hey, just looking at this quick from my phone, I'd be happy to clarify some details of how finances currently working and my thoughts on a Patreon. The financial returns look the way they do since the server doesn't run a profit, all the revenue generated is invested back in, mainly to hosting costs, hardware upgrades (looking at upgrading the main server right now actually 😊), and other assets such as professional world painters for future maps, our forum software, and other miscellaneous costs. I don't think any of those things should fall under a Patreon. Also, I want to reassure people that we are making enough to pay the bills, but we definitely don't make enough to pay out to staff, it basically balances out at the end of the day as is. The ranks Telanir and I have mainly are just for extra permissions to our forum software and discord server, equivalent to superadmin type roles, and don't reflect an actual legal association with Tythus LTD, we aren't employees or paid, just passionate volunteers like the rest of our staff. Now, into the main idea. I've had serious discussions about a Patreon in the past for the kind of professional services on staff you discussed, but details like if it has in-game perks, how it's managed/distributed, if the community would even be open to it, or how other staff would feel about it are complicated issues that I'm open to look into, but have definitely been blockers on anything actually materializing. Personally for me, I've always seen the work I do as a hobby and I'm not sure how I'd feel about gettig compensated for it, so I've never really been motivated to spearhead getting such a system started, though I definitely don't speak for everyone on staff in this matter. I appreciate your thoughts and ideas on this kind of stuff and would love to see what the rest of the community thinks as well. At end of the day if people are open to it, it can be run fairly, and benefits the growth and quality of the server then it might be something that can get going. Transparency would have tp be a key aspect of anything that's created. I'll be keeping an eye on this thread and look forward to seeing what people think. This isn't a discussion I was super comfortable on starting myself but I'm happy to see somebody bringing it up.

Under review.

Congrats Rilath! Can't wait to see what you bring to the team. Yee haw!

Why's everything have to be drama and a conspiracy? I was fully behind this redesign, but web design is completely out of my skillset. I would have brought on someone besides Lyon as he was already dipping out of activity, but nobody with the skills ever applied. This isn't an issue of staff exclusively, but rather a lack of talent willing to work for free. Trust me, if I could conjure a person who knows Invision to my team, I would. I don't think the admin team really ever put a halt to any of this. From what I recall we were moving pretty quickly through any approvals and discussions, though I had very little to do with this project. You were working with the designer and kept us updated, you had the same level of access to the backend of the site as I did to adjust permissions and other issues, and as far as I knew you were going to Lyon for anything Invision related. Also I never recalled the reason for not wanting things to impact the main site was secrecy, but rather I just didn't want our main website to be broken while this new theme was under construction. I was pretty out of the loop on this outside of what you showed to admin chat. I'm sorry I wasn't able to help more with this but my strong suit isn't web development, and definitely not Invision themes. The current WIP theme is too broken to work, Lyon is on indefinite hiatus, and nobody has the skills to finish it. Themes for Invision are complicated things that not a lot of people know how to work with. You also ignored my messages for quite a while after you left admin and I tried to figure out where this project was or get access to the assets. I only just got them recently and have shared them with CT who wanted to realign the homepage, and I'm actively looking for web developers but unfortunately for the scope of the work that needs to be done, nobody with necessary skills in the community has stepped forward. I have a general plan but without coders it's not going to happen. tl;dr our forum software is old and complicated and web development isn't easy

Thread unlocked 🙂

First off I wanted to thank @Adelemphii for their hard work on this plugin, and ask anyone to please redirect their displeasure towards myself, as this plugin concept was my design, Adele just did the work to bring it to life. I wanted to take some time to clarify the purpose of this plugin since I see a lot of responses leaning heavily on the membership aspects of it and making comparisons to factions. This plugin was primarily designed to replace many of the manual functions that come with our server's land-management system, i.e. tiles, settlements, nations, etc. These systems are the backbone of many of rules relating to wars, region permissions, locks, build standards, and other conflict such as raids. This makes it important that we can keep who is in-charge of what organized. There are many other plugins that assign ownership to things, such as regions, soulstone pillars, treasuries, locks - when a nation/settlement leader changes there is a lot of work that needs to be done staff-side to transfer those over. This plugin provides a central system to tie all of those together and creates a very useful tool for staff. Then there is the membership aspects of the plugin. The main reason for this was to tie into the war system - having personas tied to a nation helps us prevent people participating in wars just for the PVP, and this system could replace the very manual and labor-intensive war roster system we currently do before fights, which many of you are familiar with. It wouldn't make sense to only have this take effect during wars, as then people could just sign up for any side with no prior associations. Plus, having this plugin in use all the time adds a lot of possibility and cool features to enhance roleplay, which I'll discuss later on. As for the 'invite' functionality - that was required so that we could keep lairs secret and not show up on the list. I want to make something clear, outside of wars, the realms membership really has no effect. You can have it displayed on your card if you want, and generally should tie into where your persona's primary home is, but really there is very little player-facing effects other than when wars come around. Being part of a realm doesn't provide/consolidate any 'power' to an NL - it really doesn't give them anything. I saw some comments about rebellions/coups and that this plugin could be harmful to those efforts, but it really is the opposite. It will allow us to see who is a member of a realm before any plotting actually even started, and assure that internal conflict truly is internal. We already lock region membership during events like this, this plugin won't change that, and code provide smoother mechanisms for staff to handle those kind of things. As mentioned above, the primary audience for this plugin is staff, with some useful features for nations/settlement leaders. Most of the features of this plugin were just ported over from existing rules/systems, there really isn't any day-to-day functionality changed by this system. I will note a very fair criticism is the lock on changing what Realm you belong to. As this plugin was designed based off the existing system the limitation was just copied over from /cex nationality. However seeing how that was primarily for wars, and this plugin could tie into more systems, this feature will just be annoying without serving any real purpose, we will definitely reevaluate it. Really, this plugin is very simple at it's core - it maintains a list of nations/settlements that people can join. However the possibilities of what we can do with this framework are vast, it was a core component of our server's rules and mechanics that did not have any code, and left a lot of gaps in possible plugin development. This plugin fills those gasp in our core APIs that have been blocking us from making other features that are more geared towards elevating and promoting roleplay. Ideas we've considered in the past, such as a custom lock-plugin with automatic controls on citizen/guard doors, mechanics that only function during raids, allowing leaders to make their own sub-regions in tiles and cities, an automatically generated political world map, less strict activity requirements, and cutting staff red-tape in many other areas such surrounding regions/tiles are now possible due to the framework that this plugin provides. Thank you everyone for your feedback on this plugin, it definitely is important to get the perspectives on how our staff-managed systems can impact players day-to-day, and make changes to help make them better. If you have any questions or want to chat about this plugin and/or the systems surrounding it, feel free to shoot me a message on Discord, Llir#5410. We're re-evaluating a lot of these systems as part of 9.0 Map Development as well, so this is a great time to be having these kind of discussions. Cheers.

Great work on all of these features and fixes! Should definitely help with immersion and streamlining the player experience.

*Closes another story on the Roadmap* Super excited to finally see this plugin, great work! If anyone has feedback regarding the rules that have been created around this plugin, please feel free to message me directly on Discord.

Nice

Application completed. You will be contacted by Staff on the application's status and next steps.

Accepted.

Outfit Name: Vogue Piousness Name: Llir Bid: 450 Discord: Llir#5410

This thread has been unlocked to allow for feedback on our systems, the resolution made by Administration, and the handling of the situation over the past week and a half. Please keep discussion on topic, avoid meme-responses, and remain both civil and respectful. Comments that attack members of our server's community will not be tolerated. Please see my response to these types of comments here. Apologies this was locked at the start - we had already spoken with leadership on both sides in-depth and did not foresee this decision getting as much attention and feedback from the wider community as it has. We had imaged this post to be here for information, though as many people seem interested in discussing this issue I am happy to hear feedback. We don't want a situation like this to happen again, so any ideas the community can provide around these rules and systems is very much appreciated. I really love to see ideas and discussions such as @argonian's thread, and hope to continue having productive chats on these issues. Cheers.

Hi everyone! I am happy to announce the results of the LotC's Biggest Clown Contest that we hosted within Staff Discord the past two weeks. Every member of the community was able to be nominated, and then the staff voted on who is the Biggest Clown of LotC. The result has been posted at http://lotc.co/clown Make sure to check it out! Congrats to the winner! - Llir and the Admins

Cool stuff - especially that public roadmap!