monkeypoacher

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.

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.

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

lol @ another conflict run by "mercenaries" in war chat polishing the mod admin's shoes with their tongues. happened in the oren war happening now

These questions are meaningless to me because I am a freebuild absolutist. Trading posts will form around natural centers of activity and crossroads, then evolve into city states (think Holm, Belvitz, etc.). New nations will arise from these settlements joining together via diplomacy or conquest. This is how Oren, Hanseti, Malinor etc. began, and it's telling that these nations still exist as the legacy of dynamic RP from over 10 years ago. Staff run themselves ragged trying to make a miserable simulacrum of what roleplay was like with almost no rules and no restrictions on what you, the player, were allowed to do. Obviously there may be compromises (like a land-claim system instead of pure freebuild) but rules that exist to get in the way of dynamic roleplay must go.

Yes, the Law of the Biggest Rally is not ideal. You know what's significantly worse? Nations getting their power from staff, and refusing to give it up. To "create good stories" discord politicos and NLs would have to be willing to accept challenges to their power. NO FREEBUILD, but also staff should code a plugin and build resource pits and do extra work to "encourage new nations" by enforcing activity checks. Got it.

I want to see whatever the opposite of this is. Giving out entire tiles to the King of Haense or the Emperor of Oren so he can fill them with 1000 uninhabited towns and mid castles is exactly what forces us to change maps to begin with. It is objectively worse than freebuild because it still keeps out new players while decentralizing and filling the map with pasted-in garbage. Nations should have small regions and long shadows. If your nation isn't a "mere city-state" other players will know; you don't need more unused land, you need to actually project your power in roleplay. Patrol the roads, send emissaries to other nations, actually earn the distinction rather than begging for it from staff. NLs should control their capitals and not much else. The source of their power should be the strength of their rally and the cunning of their leaders. The playable area of the map should be significantly smaller, and nations should be close together on a single main road. Tiles should be made much smaller (maybe 1/4-1/8 of their current size) and player-claimable rather than nation-claimable, with recurring activity and mina costs to ensure they are always used.

i'm not caelria but the answer is that savoy was doing pretty well up until the oren coup, then lion tried to accept vassalization under oren and simultaneously abdicate, leaving publius the job of somehow saving the nation while orenian discord moderators tried to steal his title & playerbase and his own vassals deserted or rebelled. the moral of this story is never stay up past your bedtime on discord

There. It would have saved both of us a lot of words if you just admitted this outright instead of making nonsense abstract arguments about "10 years" of LoTC canon. You don't like this person, you find what they're doing is frustrating and obnoxious. I empathize. But they are also younger than you, newer to the server to you, and just as much a part of this community as you are. And yes, I shill for everyone. That is what I do. I don't hate you, nor do I hate the ST. Is the ST frequently wrong, do they write frustrating and self-contradictory arguments, and does their attitude tend to get stuck in my throat? Yeah. But do I hate them? Do I go out of my way to make "straw-grasping excuses" to defame them? I don't. There are ST I have no problem hanging out with, there are ST whose writing I personally admire. And then there are ST who I find abrasive, edgy, and unimaginative, who log onto this forum to poke fun at new players and smugpost about their own authority as Arbiters of Good Fantasy Writing. I think these people would be better suited to write their own original fiction rather than lore for a roleplaying community which already has serious issues with new players fitting in and finding a creative voice. But I can tell you that the worst I am doing is playing devil's advocate for a person who really hasn't done anything but be kind of annoying to you for a couple days. I am suggesting ways that you could make this whole situation and the headache that comes with it go away without having to do much more than creatively apply server lore. It really is not that deep. But the bright side is I don't really need to feel better about it. You would be much happier in the long run if you let people on this server, even people you find personally distasteful, have agency over their own roleplay and characters. This is a big server. Some people get really attached to their characters. I don't, and you don't, apparently, but the idea that you don't have to "cater to them" is a problem. It reflects very poorly on this community that people think this. This is a fantasy roleplaying sandbox. It inherently meant to cater to everyone's creativity - not just yours, and not just those of people who think like you. I hope you can at least understand that.

I didn't mention anyone being forced, coerced etc. into roleplaying anything before the fact. I very specifically mentioned this in the case of someone willingly submitting to roleplay and then finding out later that they don't enjoy the outcome. I suggested that the player should be allowed to find an RP way to change their character from a CA race back to their original race, because I think we should be able to creatively solve problems with our own lore. I want to make this clear because I was arguing specifically against the idea that players should be stuck in a permanent transformation "because the lore says so." The lore exists to serve our purposes, not the other way around. The consistency of the lore over its "literal irl years" worth of canon just isn't as important as you think it is. Mostly because lore on this server is frequently inconsistent. It is rewritten and retconned in and out of existence constantly. I would think some flexibility for revisions/additions to lore would be good because it could avoid the sort of destructive rewriting/shelving that outright deletes entire groups of characters. If you have to add a potion/ritual that turns a plant person back into a normal person, what is the actual harm? Can you explain to me concisely what would prevent you from doing that? As an aside, you haven't even been here for for 10 years. I've been here for like 9 maybe. None of this lore even existed then. When I joined elves used sugar as an aphrodisiac, dwarves couldn't use magic, and golden apples erased your memory. There is no consistent throughline of canon from 2012 to now. The best current lore can do is make vague allusions to things that happened a long time ago, but the menial redlines and trivia have largely been lost. Just contradict the lore, dude, it doesn't matter. Be creative. I'm not even going to pretend that I am an expert in whatever made up lore is involved in this case. If this character underwent some kind of magical transformation to turn into a plant they should be able to find a magic spell/ritual to reverse the transformation. If they were cursed, they should be able to complete a task to break the curse. The fact that they apparently can't do this through any legitimate means in the lore is a huge failure of imagination. It's roleplay for ****'s sake! Make something up! Again, I have no idea where you're getting this idea from, besides your own insistence to be a punitive edgelord? This person had their character turn into some sort of plant creature, got soured on that roleplay, and wanted to find a way for to go back to what they were. I don't see where they stand to benefit unfairly, what rules are being broken/altered, or even what rules existed to begin with. None of this is as clear as you think it is. This player decided that it was easier to try and get blacklisted from playing CAs than working with you guys to find a roleplay reason to change back. From my perspective, that looks like a tremendous failure on your part. This is all ******* magic and shit. None of it "makes sense" to begin with. Come up with something. You have special PEX and privileges just to be creative and help players navigate the lore, and you're telling me how narrow your imagination is and how you would rather do anything but that.

I don't see how? I can see how the outburst could get a little annoying but I don't get why breaking the lore is such an incredible crime. This is roleplay, not real life. If someone doesn't want to roleplay something, they should be allowed not to, as long as they can make sure it doesn't disrupt other people's storylines too much. I also think that in many of these cases there is no concrete way to "look for a cure through RP" because a cure doesn't exist in RP. It hasn't been roleplayed and hasn't been thought out. What options exist are limited by gatekeeping and badly written lore. The onus is on the Story Team to work with players, help them create storylines that are narratively sound and lore-appropriate. But I can infer that is not what the ST did here. I'm saying the lore team should just make an explanation. I again don't really see the problem with an Azdrazi reverting to a regular descendant, except that it isn't narratively satisfying. It would not be particularly good storytelling for me to gain something at someone else's cost and then cop out of the consequences. In the case that I'm playing an ultra-powerful CA and want to revert back to being a human for whatever reason, I should lose something or undergo some great tribulation to achieve that. So said plant person should embark on a quest to recover their lost human form. The player should apologize for their outburst. If you aren't satisfied by this then you should question whether you're actually interested in storytelling or just want to be a Fantasy Cop who relishes in meting out punishment for roleplay crime.

This. I couldn't have argued this better. I miss more than anything when LoTC had an organically built, lived-in fantasy world. You could walk in any direction and find a somewhere that another player breathed fictional life into. Chance upon something bizarre or beautiful, have a random roleplay encounter that opens up an entire different storyline for your character. Explore the work of hundreds of players' collective creative vision, all of its beauty and ugliness, and make your own mark on it. I'm game for any system that allows that kind of freedom, be that freebuild or claimable regions or something else, but the one thing that is antithetical to player freedom is making people beg nation leaders or fill out paperwork just to build. If I wanted to roam through eerily uninhabited, picturesque fantasyscapes and obsess over lore obscura I would just boot up Elden Ring. And I cannot tell you how full the niche is for light-rp amusement park style fantasy mmorpgs because there are too many of them to count. What we had on LoTC is special; a totally open roleplay sandbox with decades of player-written lore and a community of thousands of players. It drives me insane that we waste that potential solely for the purpose of gatekeeping, but I've been in RP communities long enough to know that this is an issue that we have to deal with. I do not get why the vistas that you glance at while running from one cardboard activity hub to the next need to look perfect and why someone would chimp out over a dirt hut in minecraft. I don't get why johnny noobert can't be an emperor. We would be having so much more fun now if we didn't waste each other's time obsessing over fictional status. Other players' creativity does not diminish your own. Whatever system we use to distribute land in the next map, we need to learn as a community to live and let live. Been there. Seen it. Sat through midnight discord calls and navigated edater "diplomacy" and I can say with perfect clarity that none of this exists; wars, rebellion and diplomacy are all handled out of character, where roleplay has almost nothing to do with the outcome. "Political shakeups" are so divorced from the game that they're virtually inexplicable in character. Try explaining any of the past 100 years of Orenian history without fabricating events that never actually happened in the game. It's an OOC story of people catching lightning in a bottle and failing to understand what made their brief but genuinely exciting moments of roleplay so special. Forcing people to conform to the Discord political order killed Oren, like it killed other nations before and after it. But the bright side is you can still do all of these high court intrigues on a freebuild map. But you have to be open to competition and dynamic roleplay, which minecraft noblemen and politicos are so horrified of that they will make up abstract arguments against people building in minecraft. There will be nations, wars, rebellions, and diplomacy in freebuild, but the average player will have agency in them - and the ability to build something new if they find the status quo boring or inhospitable. And people will be less able to govern from the safety and comfort of their own private server.

It seems... stupid? to force someone to play a CA character if they find out after the fact they don't enjoy playing that CA race. I can understand the wish from certain parties to enforce consequences/avoid retconning, but if someone really doesn't want to do something irp to the point that they try to get themselves lore blacklisted to get out of it, I think you should work with them to find a roleplay way out of the situation. Drink a potion or something. It's minecraft fantasy roleplay, it's not that deep

since you wrote this you have to build something and we will evaluate it. you have 72 hours. thanks.

he just said it

TL;DR let people claim plots! There should be a compromise that lets players at least start things of their own volition without begging staff or nation leaders. Like, for instance, players could claim small plots of land near the main road in exchange for activity hours, minas, etc. The cost of the land claims can scale polynomially with the number of plots owned so players can organically build out settlements as they get wealthier and more active. Land claims can be limited to areas around roads, major hubs, etc., with the "wilderness" of the map staying untouched. Nation/settlement oligopoly has made this server absolutely unplayable. Besides it being impossible for me to build a minecraft house on this map, it's shockingly difficult to find more than a few minutes of RP anywhere. Cities are filled with players idling on discord or ERPing, settlements are scattered all over the four corners of the map with 1-2 players in them at any time max. I couldn't think of a worse system for roleplay than the one we have already, which splits the playerbase up into isolated, balkanized cliques of a few to a few dozen players and creates dozens of settlements to decentralize roleplay. This server is founded on the idea that any player can, with enough effort and creativity, found his own kingdom, become a legendary warrior or a renowned sorcerer, go on adventures and write their own story. It fails to deliver any of that to the average player. You have to ask permission to place blocks for ****'s sake. This cannot continue if you want this server to be anything more than the digital fiefdom of a few cliques of incredibly sad, bored people. There is no hope for Lord of the Craft. The cycle continues. I'm doing the exact same thing now. There are dozens of settlements, nations, lairs, etc. wherever I go, all seemingly abandoned. Nothing has changed but your subjective experience. yes I very much enjoy rump state barony rp inside a dead nation. you know what I would enjoy more? getting to see another player. building a house. hitting a monster with a sword. a sip of ale in a tavern. anything at all actually

😎 really appreciate the emote count adjustment, makes the magic infinitely less awkward to use

yeah this is a fun design. also: Ruins!

here are my cool map spitballs: one continent cloud temple in the sky smaller and entirely one-way; basically only existing to deliver a tutorial to new players and give returning players a context for death have one crossroads hub (instead of four, which breaks up RP and makes ppl outside your nation impossible to find) in the center of the map, which also serves as the default "Home" soulstone warp. make the terrain more "passable" the closer you get to spawn, i.e. less internal y-level variation, friendlier looking biomes, less foliage. the further you go out, the more mountainous and inhospitable for building it gets. if need be you can flatten terrain further out to accommodate nations like Haense and Norland who need a specific biome create one main road and one main waterway. connect all smaller roads to the main road and connect the waterway from the mountains to the ocean lore/flavor ideas: set the map on the old continent of Anthos, made unrecognizable by rising sea levels and the ravages of time. players can explore ruins of old LoTC civilizations built by people who played in those ancient civilizations better yet, have the next map take place inside the Voidal Tear. This world is breathing its last breaths. The last great Aengudaemons and Drakaar(?) are locked in combat to the death. Canonists preach of the apocalypse foretold by the Holy Scrolls. Few descendants are trying to stop the spread of the voidal corruption to no avail. As it begins to consume the entire known world, in a last ditch effort, the survivors travel into the eye of the storm and are themselves consumed, transported into a new and bizarre world seemingly composed of their collective memories I feel like LoTC has yet to really explore "The Void" as a concept, and it hasn't reckoned with the constant reuse of ideas and the stretching of its canon past the point of being recognizable. It would be fun to incorporate this metanarrative into the game through worldbuilding. Something like the Dreg Heap from Dark Souls 3, a twisted ruin of past civilizations all crumbling into each other, where characters are inexplicably drawn to sift through the ashes in hopes of finding a way to return to the past. The Voidal Tear is an Annihilation level reality-ending threat that just kinda... Exists, I guess? Would be cool to use it as a plot device to significantly change the canon as a bonus this could potentially get rid of voidal magic forever ALTERNATIVELY: have the next map take place in the sunless Inner World ruled for 1000 years by the mori'quessir goddess-emperor. all will prostrate themselves to the will of the Grand Voluptuaria and her army of eunuch slave soldiers ten thousand strong, or be driven to the fringes of a sunless hellworld