monkeypoacher

(I feel compelled to rewrite this post bc it was tl;dr and very obnoxiously composed)

I'm glad this is getting worked on but I am alarmed by our community's inability to reckon with the warning signs of this behavior, and the circumstances and dynamics which work to enable it.

For instance, there is no reason we should still allow romance roleplay on this server, period. It's not that players roleplaying romantic relationships are doing anything wrong per se, but if we look at how previous instances of grooming and misconduct happened, a roleplay relationship preceded the attempt more likely than not, and facilitated access to the victim, broke down their boundaries, etc.

Lord of the Craft is a community with a lot of young people who are just beginning to develop artistically. We should be wary of even purely nonsexual exploitation - the kind that is endemic to MMOs and forces kids who were promised they could "become a King, an Emperor, a Wizard, or a Warrior" to man the gates or mine coal for hours on end or submit their expression to rigorous critique to be accepted.

Part of the reason we have this entire problem is that if you wanted to exploit children in this community and had the connections, there are these niches to embed yourself in that let you parasitically feed off our desire to be accepted and a fundamentally unequal distribution of fun.

We should not wait for predatory behavior to happen to stop it. We have the power to change our community so it doesn't happen.

If I was Tythus/Telanir why would I agree to any of this? Wouldn't I rather handle my company/minecraft roleplaying pet project's own finances?

Not trying to be overly negative here, but besides LoTC's current roster of coders and their projects, none of these "professional services" are being rendered - I can't tell if there are plans to actually hire artists/video editors/minecraft skinners (?) in the future. You're proposing that we start raising money for ill-defined projects that might happen contingent on a revenue stream that we have never tried before.

always thought it would be fun to play an orc but composing sentences in blah gives me a migraine headache

((Sort of a weird tangent but this took me back to the setting of the schism war, which was when I started out as a serious roleplayer. Was a blast to read this, and I can't help but wonder how many other stories were just out of emote distance back then. Really nice work as always, and I hope you write more of these!))

imo this doesn't require staff intervention. ppl can reap the rewards of leaving their city open or suffer the consequences of keeping them shut. one size does not fit every community, and some places make more sense if you're not allowed to just walk into them (high elven racist capital, druid grove, etc.)

it would be cool if staff cracked down on fugly parkour-proof ladder-proof walls though. or the number of citizen doors you're allowed to have, while simultaneously making it harder to raid a community into submission. it would be fun if you could sneak into the seedy underbelly of a city thru the sewers or climb over a gap in the wall where it's still being built or something, but because adding these features leaves you at a disadvantage to everyone else no one bothers and the character of the world suffers

no I mean I can't find a city w/ more than 2 players in it who aren't randomly sprint jumping around WHERE ARE THE MINECRAFTS STEVES

i mean the server population is at its normal seasonal nadir when people go back to school etc

staff should accelerate towards whatever it is they're trying to accomplish. more bans. a lord of the craft with no nation leaders would be worth playing imo

13 minutes ago, argonian said:

I don't think people talk about how annoying and ugly it is for countries to be divided by CT/Hub regions, or to get spammed by ((NO VILLAINY HERE PUH-LEASE)) messages constantly. 

 

Arcas may not have had hubs but it more than made up for it by making the CT comprise half the map.

 

Can we just stop having cancerous CTs? Like in the literal sense, in that it serves as some overgrown ******* tumour on the map.

The whole conceit of Arcas was that it was supposed to be perfectly fair. The circle is the most equitable shape; everyone gets to be equidistant from the center. Then the world devs put a giant fuckoff mountain range between spawn and Fenn, defeating the entire purpose because lololol

I genuinely hope they just kill the Cloud Temple (or put it in the actual clouds and have people jump off of it to get to the actual map) because it's such an incredible waste of space. The Order doesn't even exist anymore. It's just a landmark that we put in new maps because there's no other sign of continuity.

Arcas's system was probably the most enlightened in retrospect. But it had flaws, and other than not repeating obvious mistakes (the hub system of this map or the 10,000 mile spawn to capital trek of Atlas) there's no plan out a transit system that fits every arbitrary decision players are going to make when the map is released. We're going to have to see how players traverse the map and build to accommodate that traversal. 

IMO there should be a system next map where players can request permission to build on unclaimed territory for general improvements (roads, bridges, mines, fish weirs, etc.,) and temporary structures (camps) without needing to pay for the privilege. There are always regions of the map which are unclaimed by nations and so remain completely undeveloped, even though there would be realistic roleplay incentives to do so. This makes the map disconnected and awkward-feeling. 

Also for the love of god let people build roads. Let people build on roads, let people build near roads, let people block roads with checkpoints, etc., the WT no-building-on-roads fatwā is a cancer on the landscape. There is Descendant civilization and then there are metastatic veins of Cloud Temple which senselessly carve their way through that civilization. 

Baozhen:

>fancy fine dining

>needlessly elaborate

>on fire

yeah. it's Baked Alaska baby

Just get rid of tiles altogether in the next map. Horribly un-dynamic system lifted from EU4 that barely works for a roleplay server. There's no reason that someone who's actively RPing somewhere should get shafted out of their land because a nation leader sells them out in a discord backchannel nor should staff decide what diplomacy is allowed to happen based on arbitrary lines they drew in the sand. Replace the system with Nexus-Regions style land claims, and force nations to actually earn their vassals' allegiance. 

4k by 4k is a perfectly reasonable map size, we're just bad at using the space we're given. Athera packed as much or more stuff that we have right now into the same square and felt absolutely teeming with interesting places as a result. Plus it's just nice to see people, y'know?

2 hours ago, Abeam said:

I appreciate the niceties, my view is such things require a bottom-up solution, the cliques themselves have the right to self-regulate the behavior of folk in their clique; let them do the work of such.  If you find yourself surrounded by toxicity, leave that clique and go elsewhere, it doesn't require some STASI-tier political purge with informants in every discord, people worried that the moment they offend somebody its a perma-ban, and let's not forget a system like that will be abused OOCly by political evildoers to gain in mineman fantasy politics

this thread is about accusing some chick on the internet you don't know of "secretly being a man."

whatever your political opinions are on someone's lifestyle it isn't a "STASI-tier political purge" if people take exception to you harassing them over it

Does the local auction house functionality still exist? If so, we should keep local auction houses, but remove the global AH either way.

My problem with keeping only "unsigned items" is that the AH would just go on as a band-aid covering up how horrible resource gathering & economy is on this map. 

me when the minecraft ban is compared to the amber heard lawsuit, police brutality, the holocaust 

I would have no problem with bans for ooc plotting to wreck other ppl's communities, except that the dumb "war admin" fosters these exact players & their mentality and then bans them when they piss him off. at least when mogroka was abusing admin he had an ethos, I can't imagine working with this dude

On 7/13/2022 at 9:58 PM, rukio said:

What did you expect after Nectorist and Narthok? 

13 hours ago, SquakHawk said:

Hey guys,

...

 

okay based, can we do everyone else who has this scheming mentality now

14 minutes ago, Cloakedsphere said:

I'd  agree but I also believe certain settlements should be left off. As certain tiles hold hidden player groups. Im mainly speaking on the major settlements and nations. None of the smaller ones that house a very select few.

There could be an optional region flag display-activity region owners could set. Other than that small complication I think it's good for players to have a general idea of who's where so they can find RP.

Tech team should write a plugin that periodically announces how many players are in each settlement or nation capital region:

[ACTIVITY]: haense_capital 23, oren_capital 17, elysium 11, du_loc 7, moriquessir_palace 3

Huge fan of this change in direction for the tech team (or is it mr. the60th creating all of these fun immersion plugins?) Throws me back to old LoTC and makes me wonder when we stopped making little things feel worthwhile.

Historian Horatio Harrenid traces the political map for his treatise on the importance of Orcish Sea Power. In the process, he unwittingly copies the paper town of Du Loc into the work, and is duly humiliated in the annals of history.

1 hour ago, un-w said:

I'm sorry but you cannot tell me this is not word for word factions mechanics






 

edit: in all seriousness I agree with @UnBaed. It's not inherently harmful but i cant help but feel sour in how reflective it is of the way factions servers operate, on top of how it promotes this already cancerous idea of OOC factionism from nation to nation

rare un-W

I think the purpose of this plugin is even more sinister - it's an attempt for AFK nation leaders to cement their power by writing themselves into the codebase of the server, and automates things that should be dealt with IRP.

(plus the only documented use case is for warclaim rosters, which are already controversial and we would honestly be better off without them. I would prefer my enemy have 20 flay alts than have 1 of my ves watch noobs forced to sit out a warclaim bc he didn't join my realm. It's just better for the health of my community and fluidity of roleplay)

It's not just that 1.9 pvp is difficult to learn. 1.9 pvp has a higher skill floor and a lower skill ceiling. It's a skill ventilation duct, one you have to wriggle through like a worm. Memorize a bunch of timers and tedious mechanical inputs to stay alive, but still feel handicapped from making plays by lag, swing timers and saturation health regen which un-does any damage you do. Surge PvP only adds to the problem by dumping a bunch of new timers and status effects that, while making combat less straightforward, doesn't actually add extra skill expression. There is a cap on how much damage you are able to do, and an odious saturation mechanic which rewards you for eating a steak while someone combos you and running away.

1.8 pvp is a glorious skill meadow with a vast open sky. Once you master the only real mechanical challenge of timing your sprint with your attacks (which really just involves tapping w or shift in sync with left click) and the rest of the skill expression is movement, positioning, and tracking. It is the thinking man's minecraft combat, a pvp minigame that allows you to be a Grand Strategist - predict your opponent's movement, strafe around their aim and combo them. Simple enough to master, but with enough extra complexity to be satisfying. There's also a real sense of speed and tempo that is immensely satisfying to my lizard brain.

All of this is to say there's a reason other minecraft networks with much heavier server loads and more stringent technical limits find out how to make 1.8 PvP work. 1.8 PvP is the GOAT, the big earner, the crowd pleaser. If it's impossible to implement on LoTC for technical reasons, then we should accept that PvP is no longer one of our strengths, and try to make other mechanics (resource gathering, brewing, cooking) rewarding instead. 

I still think there are some quality of life changes that could make 1.9 pvp better, if not as good as 1.8. First of which is replacing saturation with flat/no regen - no more shoveling steak in your mouth when someone gets the drop on you, you always know based on your healthbar when to engage an opponent or when to run away. Hunger is an annoying mechanic anyway, forcing people to scarf down entire meals in the middle of polite conversation in RP, so I can't see how it would be missed. The second idea would be to make food heal a small, flat amount of HP, like Grass in Demon's Souls, allowing players to heal out of combat or make risk-reward plays based on positioning. And third would be to cut out RNG. Status effects are a fun idea in concept but compound on the problem of learned helplessness that 1.9 induces. Stuns, bleed etc. could all be induced by consumables or could reward some other mechanic with extra damage.

"Transition builds" or colonization rp/staged building would be a lot of work, but potentially a lot of fun, and a great way to get players involved in the worldbuilding of the next map. Beware any of the dozens of members of the shiftless minecraft noblesse, complaining about how they won't get a palace to RP in day one. These people are parasites, contributing nothing, and should be forced to labor for the commune under SquakHawk's glorious Five Year Plan.

As for the roads: a single linear King's Road or a Ring Road is fine. Just don't do more than one road. Remember, this is where new players are going to end up, with no map knowledge, trying to find a place to RP. You want the hub to be well-travelled, full of potentially helpful or harmful actors who can help noobs get somewhere interesting. You want the road to be a place where random encounters happen.

17 minutes ago, Adelemphii said:

Be warned, you cannot leave a realm you’ve joined without making a /modreq and having a mod remove you. PROs can forcefully have someone removed from their realm by making a /modreq of their own.

What is the actual point of this? Was it just inconvenient to code a /realm leave command?