Caelria

Caelria puts the message in the fire and smiles an Elven smile. He sends a text to his mom and dad about how he won another argument with a stranger on the internet by showing how much he didn't care about what they had to say. Neither of them replied.

Looks like you stole Werewolf's format. +1.

Vargs don't exist.

You got me, I'm unhinged and also bizarre. Our opinions are functionally the same but also I'm wrong. Are you trying to change my mind or are you being performative? I'm not suggesting you kill and subjugate every Elven settlement. I'm not suggesting every Elven settlement be wiped by the hand of god indiscriminately. I'm suggesting you stop approving new ego/schism settlements as an OOC catalyst for war or to undermine another community the new settlement's founders couldn't control/don't like (the political equivalent of quitting a job as a bartender then opening a new bar down the street to spite them) on a whim, and then enforce existing inactivity rules on the ones that are already dead and exist in name only. That's much more natural than someone on an alt coming in and conquering every Elven playerbase in some misguided pursuit of order.

We're not a frontier enterprise with a constant influx of well retained new players anymore. Unfortunately, the culture isn't quite the same either. Folk are blacklisted. Folk have histories. Folk will refuse to roleplay anywhere that isn't the home they first joined. The amount of fresh players without a history of attachment diminishes by the day. I remember seeing Snow Elves roleplaying in Sutica or as other races for years, just waiting for Fenn to come back and absolutely refusing to rejoin Elven roleplay elsewhere, because other Elves being stupid was the bulk of what they were taught. Others just logged out and didn't come back until it returned. Same for many humans and their kingdoms. Conquest does afford some degree of temporary unity, but what you don't see is the people who disappear and the massive human cost of unification through violence. In a community that is hemorrhaging, exsanguination is a poor prescription. I don't even think the old standbys are necessarily what we should be preserving. The only settlements I think are worth keeping right now on the merit of their activity or culture are Elysium, Oren, Haense, and Savoy (honestly, with how similar Oren and Savoy are now, I'm not even sure they should be separate -- and this is from the perspective of someone who helped start the Neo-Savoy Project); with fasntasy racial capitals perserved to allow people who want those specific fantasies a place to go. I still feel like it's true that players should self-manage and be entitled to do so, to a degree, but having seen the disastrous effects of self-management on the retention rates, climate, infrastructure, and culture of our server I'm no longer so convinced that just letting the biggest swinging sausage control everything is the play. Especially since those swinging sausages, with several notable exceptions, usually aren't very good at anything besides swinging their sausage around. Especially when the recent kiddie pool tyrants have shown they don't care about the health of the community, or really anything besides how big they can get for bragging rights, before they get bored and go inactive. The activity check system is ridiculous. You don't need a spreadsheet to walk through every build at active hours of the day and see that they're almost all either empty or have four afk players in them every day of the week. You should be a lot more upset at the fact that staff is preserving megalopolises for 0-5 active people that entrap new players who lack the experience or awareness to know that there are better options than the idea we should be careful about building a village for every Tom, Richard, and Stanley who wants to rope them into their ego trip. The "war is the solution" caveman faction's idea of burning down every new settlement like this that props up and bullying them into submission won't work if they can just respawn and build a new one somewhere else a week after you do it. This is the way to do things. Enact change by roleplaying with people in house rather than enacting change by splitting the community into two pieces across the map from one another and either pretending the other party doesn't exist or bullying them to inactivity by warring them and calling yourself a winner. Roleplay is interactive. When the meta of conflict is to avoid and not to interact with people who challenge your worldview or ego outside of Minecraft Battlefront II, roleplay dies.

I'd love to see how many Elves roleplay in a nation conquered by PvPers versus how many just log out and don't come back to LotC. Seems like every time that's happened so far they all go somewhere else like Sutica or Elysium (or a human nation that can protect them). Happened similarly to humans in the War of Two Emperors or so I'm told. Systems like this work great in worlds where people can't just log out. I love activity and RP dynamicism, and I agree war should be freely waged, but bullying people who can't defend themselves into one place so your number is really big and then killing anybody who leaves isn't much fun either. Less heavy handed to just not let fast burning temporary alternative settlements start and dilute activity. Not every problem can be solved by brute force actual tyranny either. You catch a lot more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. If you want to do Alexander the Great roleplay at least call it what it is rather than masquerading under the banner of server health, because once Alexander the Great is gone the the empire will fall apart just as fast.

I've felt for a long time that the only way to fix the Elven playerbase is to approve only one Elven nation and deny the creation of any new Elven settlements at all. Do the same thing with the Dwarves and with Orcs. There aren't enough actively participating players to fill the myriad schism communities that plague Elvenkind, or just any race in general on a server that mostly floats around 150. I still remember the discourse about how Savoy's activity increasing directly corresponded to the activity of other settlements decreasing. With our god awful player retention rate, players are basically a finite resource and their distribution needs to be managed or you wind up succumbing to the tragedy of the commons. This'd require management of how vassals are formed, but the multitude of empty landscar vassals plaguing this map has proven to me players aren't responsible enough not to be supervised in their creation anyway. Every Elf wants to be the leader. Crabs in a bucket. "But they'll bicker and fight..." That's called activity. Exit your hugbox. Roleplay with strangers.

You answered your own question. Expect lots of ST salt mining in the replies because you're expressing the opinions of a player in agony and they think them failing you is just you being cringe. This is explosive feedback, but it reflects the sentiment of a lot of players on LotC and shouldn't be neglected in the slightest for its phrasing. These are real problems. EDIT: Read through the replies, found the salt mining.

I think that just about everything, with some notable exceptions, I've seen the staff attempt for Almaris has been a colossal failure. (This will be leaving out personal staff contributions and expected baseline maintenance that most players don't experience. 5-10 person events, WT making a new tree, etc) World Team issue has to be the map size. Player hostile. The vast majority don't like it and have let you know repeatedly. Road speed being the solution has proven to be a pitiful response, and if anything just shows me the teams don't really have any idea how their design is failing at all. Congratulations. Your world is huge. It's very impressive. Bigger meaning better is a kindergarten mentality and thinking that because Almaris is very big that it's very good is amateur. Your design is literally full of holes, and you've had to section off areas so players can't even see some of the damage that's been done. To my knowledge, there has been no work even started on making a new map to fix these fundamental errors. If your management played your own game from the perspective of a normal player, you would understand why this is a problem. Story Team has some very key issues. The ST node system is unfulfilling and resented as either a nuisance or a chore by nearly everyone involved including Story Team members, and the ST's solution has been to unilaterally throw their arms up and say that since there's no better way of doing things they're paralyzed. The ST has performed two memorable events for Almaris. Ando Alur and Elvenesse. Ando Alur was tremendously contentious at the time of its destruction, and I don't think anybody who wasn't a part of the majority green-tag/ST friend group in the city actually had a very good time. I still remember the absolutely rabid response of players receiving ST messages saying 'well you were roleplaying in this area at the time of its destruction so you're dead see you at CT'. Like the World Team with the creation of Almaris, it was very big but very unfulfilling. I hope that what has been going on with the passive RP in the ruins will prove to salvage lingering player disappointment. I would consider Elvenesse to be one of the few successes of the staff for the general server this year, but to have one memorable positive moment for the playerbase all year in a team of twenty people (larger than some story writing teams for AAA games) is not a very high mark. I suppose it's very grounded and realistic that not a lot is going on, but it's definitely not very fun. If you consider one of the responsibilities of your job to be to entertain players, the sentiment that it's the responsibility of players to entertain themselves and that they're greedy for expecting interaction from you as a volunteer should be offensive. Community Team has unilaterally failed to create engaging events like they did in the time of Muffins. New media has not been released by the team, but rather by players like Zilldude, and to my knowledge player retention remains stagnantly low. Under Treshure I was informed there were several projects underway that had been for some time, but with Treshure stepping back I'm not sure as to the integrity of those projects at all. Given the time frame of Almaris, to see nothing significant come from the CT at all is tremendously disappointing. Outside of whitelist acceptance (which I'm told is actually done by mods, CT just review the applications), the general sentiment of players I've spoken to has been that this team in its current state might as well not exist, and the general sentiment of members I know is that it's an easy way to get PEX. Moderation Team has been a mess. War rules have been a joke and rewritten several times. Every unformatted, unfinished, and grammatically jumbled draft I've managed to find looks like a fourth grader did them in google docs the night before a due date. Just absolutely careless work. The gross incompetence of the team wouldn't even necessarily be a problem since to most players on LotC their primary duty is ticket fulfillment, but the rules currently written for conflict simply don't work. The team's inability to make any form of decisive change, or to express the self-confidence to have looser rulings with the moderation team stepping in to treat the real problems like toxcicity (rather than try to create systems to prevent themselves from needing to do work in the first place), has paralyzed any form of conflict on LotC. You will not write a system that moderates itself without the need for a judge without putting everyone in stasis, and stasis is antithetical to an RPG. Add onto this that the failures of the moderation team have put even more pressure on the Story Team to step in and entertain in the wake of players not being able to create their own conflict narratives (without being discouraged by paperwork and secret bans being leveled their way that aren't shared outside of leaks until the player has had a verdict rendered), and the result is that the ST is incapable of handling their new workload (especially their own paperwork requirements) and resentful as a result. This is an inter-team issue. Development Team has been trying to fix their own failed implementation of Minecraft Runescape since the beginning of this map, with Tythus on standby with a fire extinguisher next to servers running at one billion degrees Celsius, and it's embarrassing that we didn't learn this lesson from Nexus. It's pretty cool to have Minecraft Battlefront II coming to LotC though. Development team is awesome and has been doing really cool things, but has been ignoring most of the central issues of LotC in favor of fun passion projects that either go unused or are tolerated by players like five minute ferries to Haelun'or (LOL -- if I were a new High Elf player and I saw that I had to stand still and watch that 5 minute bar creep to get to roleplay I would log out of LotC and never log back in I guarantee you). Just total mismanagement. To my knowledge, every team feels paralyzed because every result has to be cleared with a largely inactive administration who does not play or playtest their own game in any meaningful capacity nor have the time to do so. All in all I'd give Almaris a D-.

I think it looks quite good. I'm not quite sure how applicable, useful, or popular some of the effects will be, but they all invariably add some rich flavor to players and the world that's fairly easy to access. For that reason it gets a solid +1.

Love you, brother.

Personally, I think the fort builds done on LotC do a lot to inspire a sense of lived in-ness in an otherwise empty world. When I walk into Oren and see this awesome fort, I know for a fact I've entered the Empire of Man, to say nothing of the fact it just makes total sense to have the most defensible fort possible. People really do put a lot of work into these builds, and I love to see the creative stuff our players put together.

Othelu Orrar's tortured Elven soul felt the faintest, shimmering moment of pride and calm wash over as it was devoured by the hunters of the afterlife. Surely this particular Elf either shared some hint of his common sense, or had read his postings.

Cringe.

John was not a scholarly sort, but missives of the church did sometimes reach his hands. Ones of cruelty, in particular, were especially offensive. He had led many men through the desert, past the stinking piles of wood and timber bearing the ragged and mishandled corpses of their occupants, to the bloody gates of San Luciano. His nose wrinkled hard at the thought of those men, orcs, and elves hanging there; their faces contorted in agony and bodies consumed by the crows and gulls. A cruel and disgusting practice. It was hard to say whether John had returned to Savoy that night once he'd read the missive, and harder to say what he did if he had, but citizens would find their once horrid San-Luciano bridge soon left to ruins nonetheless. By the sunrise the next morning, each and every cross adorning it was cut apart at its base, to let the pikes fall haphazard onto the oft-trodden soil. The bodies were elsewise stolen, nowhere to be found. John was not a scholarly sort, but he was a man of action.

John was still a young man, and he had never seen an elven war, but he knew that the title the missive bore at least one article of fact. Implicit not necessarily in its words, which were of a political rather than factual nature, but rather in its signature. Remnants. So were all elves remnants. Long forgotten Princes and Princesses laying claim to titles long since swept beneath the shifting sands of time. Elves lived human lives now, their cultures no longer so different from the short-lived humanity to which they thought themselves so superior. In truth, the Imperial elves and those in the elven city-states were nigh indistinguishable except in the point of their liege's ears. The question, in this progressive age, was as simple as how the elves identified. Matters of elven pride, their true curse beyond even that of their supposed infertility. Like dwarven greed, orcish wrath, and human envy. He spared a moment's thought to the elven manor on the borders of Savoy, a moment's regard to the desperate pleas of the Imperial elves, a moment's consideration for the peoples of the elven city-states so desperately clinging to a past that had long escaped their eternally youthful fingertips... ...But only a moment's, for John was still a young man, and his short life gave him little time to spare on such trivial things. That, his inner monologue mused, was a problem for elvenkind. A saying from his family came to mind, for the briefest of seconds: "Those who keep one eye on the past and one towards the future will forever be blind to the present." John hoped, somewhere inside his pitted bandit's heart, that the elves could one day swallow their pride and reconcile their differences both among themselves and with the humankind that they had for so long regarded as intruders on their world. That, he thought, would be a present indeed.

Joseph Brandt was honored by this posting, a rent-free resident of the ecclesiarchy's mind. He knew not what fascism was as it was a 20th century invention and he was a 15th century man, but as a medieval commoner made military leader he thought the idea of pride in one's nation, race, and faith -- and in canonism itself -- was pretty darn cool. ((Reserved.))

Joseph Brandt, the Lord Marshal of SAVOY, spat on the floor of his office as the missive reached him. An unfortunate byproduct of their vassalization under the CRADLE OF MAN. "Hate elves..." he drawled to himself, pausing as he crumpled the note and tossed it into the pile labeled 'letters from Haelun'or'. A pile which was growing by the day. "Not racist, just don't like em."

"High Elves 'ave been a menace evah since tha' Elf Othelu Orrar died!" Bellowed Dolgrim sourly.

"Anotha' kinslaying. Whole damned continent es fallin tae chaos. Good fer business, bad fer tha cholesterol." a sour Dolgrim muttered, biting into a big juicy pork chop on his trip to swindle Savoyards sell casks in Savoy.

Dolgrim took the missive, sunken eyes peering over the document with rising fury unseen outside the lands of molten flame. "Traitor! Defiler! Yeh wuuld declare war on yer own kin? Yer own people? Cast tha sons 'nd daughters uv Urguan under tha stone an' rock uv the mountain? 're we not brothers of blood an' spirit all? Or has tha' dragon Azdromoth spoiled yer heart 'nd vision aloike? I beg ye' brother, dunnae turn yer back on tha Brathmordakin an' your people. Repent, say I! Spill nae blood of your kin but yeh own, 'nd swear upon it tha' ye will raise no arms against yer brothers 'nd sisters from this day until yer last." With a heavy, ragged breath, he lifted his fist from where it had pounded against the stone of his tabletop -- voice lowering to a low and dissappointed drawl. "Let this missive be yer shame, brother, and yer reminder nae tae let yer heart sink below tha call and loyalty uv yer kin."