Arafel

To actually sit down and finish my skin(s) so I can start playing again.

3 minutes ago, champ said:

never bring this up again bro

I was particularly fond of the fact you could spike your ice cream with dwarven mead and no one would bat an eye.

I miss the ice cream parlor run by my frost witch aunties.

21 hours ago, Sander said:

The people who gave me feedback didn’t think Adunians had their own language, nor did I find such.

 

There are apparently two versions of Adunian. The original, which is fragments of it, posted by Owl forever ago; and a new version of Adunian created by Chikaea a long time ago, too.

When I first joined the server, my character would speak a hybrid of the two. I'm sure the posts can be located by searching for a bit. This trivia is just off of my old word doc notes.

Edit:
I did a bit of digging on my SSD and I located a bunch of PDF files. One contains Adunian Grammar and Phrases, the other a short Common-Adunian Dictionary. I also appear to possess an updated private copy of the Jolfmarr'tal Dictionary from 2017.

Where's Adunian?

2 hours ago, Mio said:

 There's some decent elevation but elevation is fine. The only issue is whether it peaks at the top which 99% of the map doesn't. 

The one part at 30 seconds which may be "completely useless" got claimed by a nation to be their capital and maybe takes up less than 0.5% of the map. Lot's of mistakes from prior maps were thoroughly gone over as to not make them once again.

If it takes <0.5% of the map, how large is the map?

3 minutes ago, Underscore___ said:

This, it'll also feel more natural than just everyone arriving to pre-built mega cities

This x2.

Pre-built mega cities will only hurt the map's reception if they cannot be largely populated within the first couple weeks, as the majority of their districts will become desolate, with the exception of their keeps and gate plazas.

28 minutes ago, GammaRose said:

Two months to build while nations are still picking out where they are, all while there are several players who are in the middle of college. I am of course excited for this new map, as is everyone, but that is an insane deadline that is extremely unfair for builders. A good build takes about 3-5 months, and thats taking into consideration people have breaks from work and/or school. Two months leads to bad projects like Elvenesse's settlement rebuild (and I was the one responsible for doing the TERRAFORMING UNDER A WEEK AND GOT SICK). Elvenesse was a rushed project that only 1-3 builders from their actual build team actually worked on, and I was a late add in! That whole city is FUNCTIONALLY disorganized because it is a rushed and stressed project. 

 

 If this was in June or July, it would be more understandable since it allows builders during college to spend their free time doing building.

 

But May is the literal month people are DOING EXAMS.

EXAMS

And lets not forget that nation leaders also have to lead their nations through the world ending events. With the time-span that people are given, nothing is going to look good unless you steal some map or buildings from some poor artist on E-Bay or something.

Just build tiny towns and start from there once it releases.

Just now, ReveredOwl said:

question for @squakhawkthose big pointy mountains at 30 seconds, didn't we have them before on a previous map and they were completely useless and impossible to do anything with?

This. Didn't people explicitly request they downscale the landscale/terrain and stop drawing it like 2012 mega builds are still the hottest trend?

On 2/28/2023 at 2:59 PM, argonian said:

8. A general abandonment of the idea that new player retention is fostered by babying them rather than by giving them agency (freebuild, overworld resource gathering, etc. are very much connected here!)

 

If this is the approach they've taken since I was last around, it would explain so much. This is so backwards, it's borderline comedic.

Why would you make new antagonists each map, if no one can ever hope to be as good at antagonising the playerbase as the players themselves?

I'm only commenting to remember to return and read through all this later down the line.

How did we meet?

*squint*

I'll be quite honest, the lore/story for a map or the transition to-and-from matters little to the playerbase at large compared to the story they create themselves by simply role-playing on the server.

I remember a lot of storylines, events and locations designed by staff that worked on some story going to waste as nobody but a select few of their friends bothered to unearth in previous maps. I've heard stories about Anthos, for instance; how half the builds got abandoned because players were far more invested in their own inter-personal plotlines and nation/faction conflict; or Asulon, even, where it took the map becoming corrupted after a series of attacks on the server itself for the large majority of the playerbase to find out there was even a world story/questline going on behind the scenes.

As far as what the world may need for a story to develop, I can think of ancient landmarks and ruins sprinkled throughout in a way that makes sense from a geopolitical standpoint. Interesting sites people can work with directly or narratively. Give us gorgeous vistas and interesting geography. Design a proper sandbox, and approach it as you would a hex-crawl TTRPG. Avoid staff-made antagonists and all the large-scale, over-arching nonsense that comes with them. They often do nothing but annoy players as it gets in the way of the stories they want to tell. If it fails to be interesting to them or align with the popular trends at the time, the entire project will have gone to waste. Besides, if we really want an antagonist force, we can come up with one, or become our very own.

The map story should be defined and written by the players in an emergent way. All you need to do is provide us with fertile soil. We'll handle the rest as we go about our daily lives on the server.

this map makes me cry

Why do people?

10 hours ago, shiftnative said:

More rules, more problems.. combat on this server has needed to be simplified for over a decade. The more you add to the list of rules, the more often players will have to break character to acknowledge them. (Or get into disputes over them.)

 

The rules should be clear, concise and at most 15-20 lines long. If people can't come to a conclusion in combat they should leave eachother be. If a player routinely becomes a problem or uses this policy to avoid conflict at the benefit of their character that would fall under power-gaming.

 

Make things clear, give players some autonomy and lead by example. (Please!)

 

💖

I do hope you get around to recording the history of the Adunian people throughout Asulon and Anthos, including their glorious warfront against the Harbingers. You can always ask @The Hedge Knightfor the actual details of what went down back then and how. He's the only person I know of that was actually there and is still alive in the community (I think).

I miss the frost witch ice-cream parlors.

21 hours ago, argonian said:

snip

In Anthos, didn't the Adunian meatgrinder frontline against the Harbingers at Ard'Kerrack cause the entire event-line to get derailed and fall several weeks behind schedule, culminating in the rushed end of that map?

What do you miss most from the olden days?

6 hours ago, The King Of The Moon said:

Shame this system was run into the ground because pvping people 'of a certain type' translated to pvping anyone with any form of advantage, making roleplay redundant to conflict :/

The purpose behind these rules is quite clearly to make roleplay combat more realistic and in turn encourage more people to actually bother taking realistic narrative factors into account with their combat roleplay. Advocating PVP doesn't offer any sort of solution to that problem other than throwing your hands up and deciding that you'd rather have an OOC clicking contest than tell a long term story in our shared roleplaying community. I genuinely believe that people's attitudes can and will improve over time toward good faith where staff involvement is less and less necessary, and these rules seem to be a step in the right direction, wherein PVPs only real merit is for time saving in larger groups (which is still a thing and isn't realistically going to ever go away so long as we have war on this server).

I don't think these rules are perfect, and in my heart of hearts I doubt there ever will be a perfect CRP system, but shitposting with clown gifs and advocating OOC combat isn't really contributing much to the discussion on how we can foster an ideal roleplay environment.

PVP stinky.

11 hours ago, Laeonathan said:

Thats the question.

I don't know if this is quite it, but the more I read the post, the more convinced I am its goal is to make CRP undesirable for players to partake in.

Edit:
What I mean by this is: as someone who doesn't particularly enjoy engaging in combat role-play right off the bat, I could at least find solace in it not requiring me to keep track of arbitrary rules and restrictions on in-game and out-of-game variables such as distance, time, or text character limit. I was able to make short work of it through the same means most other role-play interactions were dealt with, abiding by a sense of fair play, understanding (or trusting) anyone abusing this honor system of sorts would be reprimanded if they took things too far.

However, adding restrictions such as these only makes the prospect of dealing with combat role-play something for me to dread, specially being one who enjoys elaborate descriptions in the spirit of providing other players with a better grasp over the actions and scenery I'm attempting to convey to them. I can try and keep track of 4 or 8 blocks of movement per emote, but the arbitrary consequences of falling X or Y number of blocks is going to have people pausing combat to go look at the rules over and over again. I'm calling it now.

This looks less like a change in the name of balance, and more of a change in the name of convenience. Not the players' convenience, mind you, but rather the moderation team's convenience. They're not formulated with common sense and fair play in mind, like the majority of the rules and guidelines for a role-play environment ought to be. Rather, they're formulated so as to function as clear-cut restrictions that facilitate matters for anyone who may have previously worried about whether or not one or more involved parties were abusing the honor system for their own selfish gain/enjoyment - or, more specifically: to facilitate matters for anyone in charge of moderating such scenarios and trying to figure out whether or not fair play was thrown out the window by someone abusing the honor system.

If you are having trouble discerning abusers from people who enjoy their combat flavor-text a bit too much, implementing rules and changes such as these makes perfect sense. However, it also introduces restrictions that will undoubtedly change the manner in which people approach combat and strategize, while also making it tedious for those of us who couldn't care less whether they win or lose in a fight, so long as it was enjoyable for all those involved. You're better off just enforcing the spirit of established rules rather than the letter of new ones, and making it clear anyone that raises a few sets of eyebrows too many with their way of doing combat role-play is going to get reprimanded one way or another. 

As it stands, you're asking us to keep track of arbitrary restrictions under the pretense it will make things flow more smoothly. In reality, we'll have to remind ourselves of yet another set of variables that will directly affect the manner in which we approach combat on top of everything else one would normally have to keep track of when fighting other people, when all we players ought to be doing is focusing on the character interactions at hand and their immediate consequences, trusting the moderation team will no doubt step in if anyone calls foul or the situation spirals out of sensible hands.

TL;DR

You're delegating responsibilities onto the players. We're here to role-play; to interact with other people in a shared narrative resulting from our contributions and compromises - not to keep track of a movement system, timed engagement, and fall damage, with the added emote character limit on top of the above.

Wait, what problems does the existence of this system altogether intend to solve again?