ShouHeiKun

obligatory Narthok vote

9 minutes ago, Luminaire said:

Just cuz you want him doesn't mean I have to agree..

No need to get defensive. No one is saying you're not allowed to give your opinion. I'm just pushing back on the parts of what you said that I felt wasn't a proper representation, providing my opinion of your opinion. Regardless, the way I see it, in current state there is more possible upside from a new WT member than any possible downside of them not being active enough / staying. I digress.

On 8/2/2021 at 2:11 PM, Luminaire said:

Although I have no doubt in your building competencies, to me you seem far too unstable for a staff position, drfate. You flip flop between leaving lotc and never coming back, to rejoining and applying for staff once ever few weeks. I feel like you are not reliable enough to be on staff, and do not have the right mindset, as good as your builds may be.

 

-1

Many people who played before 2018 left the server and never came back due to how hard legitimate RP has been curbed. Many people like myself come on the forums / rant / play for a week then leave not due to some odd characteristic or unstability, but moreso out of hope that the server will at some point actualize its potential, rather than being complacent with its current deterioration and continue to only make changes to cater to the loudest nation's war rule concerns rather than what players need for retention. His views on importance are in line with what the community wants. The fact that he is willing to volunteer his time to benefit the server is commendable. By all means, gatekeep, but the reason here just seems arbitrary.

Would also like to say I don't personally know him, but from what I have gathered he seems very proficient in identifying how changes in the structure of map can negatively impact RP. WT needs more people like this because if the next world doesn't have big changes it will be very unfortunate.

If the WT appreciate people who are genuinely very committed to improving LOTC, they will accept this application.

People who are not satisfied and can foresee changes that will lead to a bigger and better server are the perfect people to be occupying positions.

+1

Just now, Frogger16 said:

I agree with that completely. I think it's hella important to listen to newcomers experience's with the server. Although, I have seen a good amount of people don't take very kindly to it because of how new we can be, and it can feel like we are invading on their space. Really wish I got to see previous maps and such to have a way to understand both sides on the freebuild discussion but alas I don't think ill be able to relate to the opposing view on that.

If the people running the server were listening to new players and constantly finding ways to get a glimpse into their experience, it would change everything in terms of growing the playerbase.

Very based take in the freebuild thread, we need more newcomers like you to describe their experience / inhibitors.

10 minutes ago, drfate786 said:

 

In order for a smaller map to work players need to want conflict and it has to be promoted, rules can't be used as a shield to defend against orc raids and general banditry. The issue with nation RP is that the community has created a hug box where no conflict is allowed because they're afraid of losing. Simply put, the hugbox has to be dismantled and the players must be re-introduced to conflict. 

Couldn't have said it better myself. Quite a bit is done to promote this behavior. Tying in OOC rewards with IC, such as voting to get mina, donating for soulbinds, etc etc, promotes a very negative mindset which can only serve to encourage people to merge OOC and IC. Many other small things feed into it like for example the lack of a fleshed out combat system making it very easy for OOC tension to build, such that party A gets mad at party B OOCly and now amplifies their IC efforts to ruin party B's experience, and vice versa. There's no other option aside it devolving into each side trying to find whatever rule they can exploit / bait the other side into breaking, or have friends who are staff do their bidding which is a reality that is ignored by many with conflict of interest.

Untrue, I have spoken to some admins on these issues and they're well aware of all of them and want to solve said issues. The problem is that the playerbase itself is conflicted and some individuals on staff like to cause drama when the admins do decisions that they dislike. The world team for example will most likely have a stroke if freebuild is added, mainly because it would have to be an executive decision that they have no control over.

That's what I'm saying. The playerbase is conflicted and I believe a big reason is because of the diversification of issues which we discuss. It's very hard to reach a consensus when most of the discussion around suggestions are happening on small scale. Take the freebuild issue, if 20 people are arguing about it in a thread when theres 4 other issues that 20 people are also arguing about in a thread, the opinions of staff will likely hold more weight. Conversely, if 100 people are arguing about it in a thread, you will be able to see which side the community favors greatly, and the opinions of staff would hold less weight. Furthermore, more members of the community would be indoctrinated to hold the current position and push for change.

Ultimately, there are those who are self-serving and are undeserving of staff or leadership positions. These individuals can be linked to many of the issues we as a community have faced over the years as all they do is cause division on issues that should be pretty simple. They treat LoTC as a popularity contest and will actively shitpost on anyone they deem to be a threat to them or their clique.

Agreed heavily.

9 minutes ago, drfate786 said:

 

A smaller map would just acerbate the situation and make it even worse. We've tried smaller maps and it just led to mass inactivity. The only time a smaller map worked was with Anthos, and that was because Anthos was a period in which player conflict was very sought after. IE, it was acceptable for human supremacists, in the form of the white lotus.. To literally form blockades on the roads with the sole intent of "trimming" elven ears, all to make them look passably human. Try that now and you wouldn't even be able to build a blockade let alone attempt such a conflict without being meta-rallied against.

Which is another thing, player raids were uncapped and statuses didn't exist. You had to know friend from foe and had to coordinate.

The current map is large beyond proportion. It is simply too big. Gone are the days when orcs used to interact with humans, now they only do laughable raids on elvenesse simply because it's the only place they can run to within an hour. Smaller maps mean more interaction both with players and with nations. Border disputes, trade disputes, etc. I believe it's essential. I wasn't aware it led to mass inactivity, or if it was a miscorrelation, but I believe if done correctly a smaller more cohesive map would go a very very long way. After all the alternative is a massive amusement park where you personally can't really impact it in any significant way.

25 minutes ago, drfate786 said:

 

The reason it's diminishing is because of the points I previously mentioned. People want conflict and are driven towards it but are denied it and have nowhere else to go. The nations that are made are made as a result of the world team accepting new nation charters are a result of players no longer wishing to be a part of the nations that are failing them. Instead of leaving, they should be dealing with whatever is in their way IRP but simply can't because they aren't allowed or able to destroy that obstacle.

 

Political conflict is essentially banned, the only solution to any nation conflict is to quit the server, somehow make a new nation (which is becoming increasingly problematic) or get the NL and his co-leads banned/purged off the server through some immoral means. The primary reason the server is stagnating is part of the issue I described above, player conflict isn't allowed so stagnation ensues. Freebuild was integral to player conflict because it mean't that even if you took away a person's land they would still be able to have land elsewhere and continue to oppose you.

Yes, I lean towards maximizing the amount of avenues that players can take within their nation to cause change. But with my issues on freebuild, I am already considering things with best-case scenario in terms of staff and rules.

Even if everything was structured perfectly, and 60% of the time people rebelled and caused change instead of splintering off, what I said still applies. 

Let's say political conflict is reintroduced in full force, it is a very brittle thing to rely on to regulate this as there can be very long periods of peace, nations which don't cause conflict with one another due to there being thousands of blocks to travel to reach one another, and alliances which an older nation is more likely to have such that even if they're weak the new nation can't declare war and fully destroy them.

Another thing to consider is even if the old nation is conquered, often times the new nation will annex the land, when the old nation would need to be razed 100% of the time in order to be healthy for the server. If the new nation simply annexes it, they still split their population (which will naturally be less than the original population of the old nation in their one city) among two cities.

Freebuild also poses an issue where rather than a defeated nation's populace splitting off into various other nations or the new nation, they'll resort to freebuild and have a new makeshift hub built in rocket-speed, many of these people are in a discord community with eachother and would have no incentive to be reabsorbed into the server's wide array of other nations. 

From my point of view, the solution comes in small pieces. Vying for a smaller map would lessen the distance from one nation to another, increasing probability for war. Vying for some form of cart hubs will allow for much more interaction between player groups, increase likelihood for new players to stay due to being able to quickly find rp. Vying for a better system for political conflict / nation conflict will lessen the interval in which new nations are made due to coups and changes being made by people within the nation rather than them requiring a new nation. Vying for a warclaim system which makes it easier to conquer and destroy old and barely active nations without rules or staff inhibiting it. And eventually, the benefits of freebuild would outweigh its negative effects on player interaction. 

59 minutes ago, drfate786 said:

 

That's a failure on nations, the way to think about it is this:

 

Every nation is comprised of veteran players as its leading playerbase, this leading playerbase has "co-leads" co-leads are people who help lead but can also become leaders on their own. If your co-leads dislike what you're doing or feel like they need to segment their clique then that's a failure on the NL as he was unable to keep his co-leads in line. Weak NL's are supposed to be purged through a coup, civil war or external nation declaring war on them.

This natural cycle of selection has been discouraged for over two maps, the staff (and by extent the playerbase) simply don't allow wars to happen and don't encourage them. In fact, everything is done by players and staff alike to discourage conflict and so incompetent or bad leaders are continuously allowed into positions they shouldn't have. Once in these positions, the only option is to leave the nation but then because there's no freebuild you have nowhere else to go. This means that you are effectively shackled to a bad nation lead and any bad co-leads he may have kept.

This is more-so an issue because of a lack of proper wars, coup requirements, etc. There's simply no way for power hungry co-leads to attempt power grabs inside nations without essentially controlling a large chunk of the playerbase. Even if you do control a large chunk of the playerbase, your only option is to take all of them and quit the server. There's no where to go and the world team won't accept your charter without admin involvement.

 

Another issue is that new players aren't cultivated into new co-leads, because there's no freebuild natural leaders are not allowed or encouraged to create cliques. This means that the only way leadership material can grow and prosper is if a nation actively gives these players opportunities to grow and develop which they do not. This is because co-leads are a threat to existing co-leads and their leader.

 

Norland is a great example of this, the original clique (which I am a part of) was very dominant but refused to cultivate new leadership. This meant that when the staff decidedly banned over half of the original clique, Norland was left virtually leaderless and the individuals that had come in previously were clueless on how to proceed. This led to a period in which various power grabs were attempted and ultimately the Elysium clique under Daengie and Astrias took over after my failed removal of Astrias's character IRP. This was then further complicated by the arrival of disowned co-leads that had caused issues for the dominant clique prior. 

In conclusion, freebuild is great because it allows players to learn leadership qualities and seek more from nations which in turn means that weak nations (and their leaders) get culled from leadership positions and power dynamics. Norland originally started as a freebuild, Talons started as a freebuild, Elvenesse (when welves were dominant) was freebuild I believe. Freebuild is needed so that disenfranchised players have somewhere to go when nations fail them.

 

 

I see more of your perspective now. Generally, this would work given the servers population was growing rapidly, but it seems not to be.

From what I've gathered, you're saying if everything is working properly, new strong communities will be built at the expense of communities which have lost their prime / are no longer run properly. This way, the nations wont be endlessly divided into minimum activity nations over time.

The problem with this is that in the context of a stagnating server, for each new nation, a nation must also perish 100% of the time, which it is not / won't ever be.

If a nation does not perish, it's playerbase will still be there, If there's 8 nations among 200 people, that's 25 players per nation. If it turns into 10 nations, that's 20 players per nation, the amount of nations is intrinsically tied to the amount of active players within any given nation. If it is easier to make a new nation than it is to destroy an old one, over time you will see more and more nations among the same 200 players, such that any given nation feels like a ghost town and is arguably active enough to be considered a nation.

Take for example, nation A has 100 active players, but is far out of its prime. One player takes 40 players and makes nation B. With no entire takeover of nation A or nation B, this will always lead to a recursive divide of the playerbase. Now, instead of Nation A having 14 people online during peak, they have roughly 8. Nation B will have roughly 6.

In order for this to be viable for the server, 100% of the time nation A or B will need to be destroyed to allow for their playerbase to be reabsorbed by the server, contributing to nation B's populace or various other strong communities within the server rather than having two semi-active nations. 

The interval in which a nation's population is divided is heavily tied to how easy it is for someone to make a new nation. If it is easy (i.e. you can do it in freebuild without considerable barrier to entry) to make a new nation, the interval will decrease, as eventually you will have someone who doesn't like how things are going / wants power, and they will take people to form a new nation.

Despite the lack of freebuild, there already is a comical amount of new nations being established even now, that each feed into a very niche style of rp that can often times be found or !merged! within parts of other nations. It feels like each time you go to cloud temple there's a new sign for a new starting up nation.

The ONLY way for the proposed viewpoint to be healthy for the server is if it is growing and can afford to continuously divide the playerbase to scale with playercount, right now it is severely in the red and the nations to player ratio is in need of a massive purge which I don't think will ever happen.

It's evidently clear that nothing will be changed if we are all calling for action in different areas, if we as a community overwhelmingly targeted one issue prior to moving to the next in ascending order, there might be a chance that someone will listen. For example, if 100 people were yelling to add fast travel, it would be magnitudes more effective than 20 people vying for fast travel, 20 for freebuild, 20 for smaller map, 20 complaining about warclaims, etc. The latter only ends up with jaded admins who end up following their gut (and whichever group is prodding them the most about it on discord) instead of what the community actually wants, through no fault of their own. Granted this is an idealist take but it's the only way I can see any of anything getting done, with hordes empirical evidence indicating it. 

38 minutes ago, drfate786 said:

 

If people feel the need to divide and go elsewhere it's because they aren't satisfied with what's available, this means nations are failing their playerbases. There's nothing wrong with Freebuild in this sense, in fact you seem to be repeating an argument that others have said without knowing the extent of the issue and how Freebuild would help solve this.

 

Forcing people to RP in one place doesn't actually solve any existing problem and only makes the issue worse.

 

I agree, but a big turn off when I played in the past was the feeling of emptiness that plagued and continues to plague every town. Colossal megabuilds with often times 1-3 people actually RPing within it unless it's high peak.

IMO, one town with 20+ people walking around and living lives inside and feels like an actual town vastly outweighs four different towns thousands of blocks away from eachother with five people scattered around each. It just isn't fun, engaging, or immersive to walk into a city that feels empty, regardless of culture or how well the people making it were able to express themself through unrestricted building.

I believe it would be more productive to tackle this issue, as a prerequisite to tackling the freebuild issue.

Without proper execution, freebuild will always be bad. In order to be executed properly, the issue with ghost-towns and constant dividing of activity would need to be a non-issue as freebuild would again only amplify this effect. Not even mentioning that it would likely be very bad for new players who already have an insanely hard time to find consistent RP, as now many people would be in split off into areas that mainly experienced people would know of or straight up secluded from everyone else.

If we can agree that many (not all) people who create nations aren't doing so only out of annoyance with a current one but moreso that they have the means and people to make a nation which they can rule over -- Making it easier for people to make nations will feed into the current loop where all large cities are drained of activity via their own playerbase segmenting.

I've experienced, witnessed, and even partaked in efforts like this many times when I was none-the-wiser. Many cities, for example Sutica, used to actually be very active and feel /alive/, and now when you go there you'd be hard pressed to find four whole players within the entire city.
 

8 hours ago, drfate786 said:

If we don't implement Freebuild in some form the server will continue to suffer. It's near impossible to get land if you're trying to start a new group and it's led to stagnation and favoritism. Getting a small plot of land to build something shouldn't be a massive head ache. 

Then again, starting new groups is what continues to further divide the playerbase to the point where many capitals are ghost towns instead of bustling cities, we need less diversified rp not more, but with all the new nations it seems it will continue to divide and freebuild would only amplify that

8 hours ago, Dork117 said:

OOC:

MC name: Dork117

Active hours: Varies. 1-7 hours or so.

How come you want to join?: Just need a place with active RP

MCly good at? (Building, Archery, etc): Not exactly sure. Archery I guess.

 

IC:

RP name: Jon Wheat

Gender: Male

Strengths: Farmer and good with animals.

 

 

Besides all this I have a few questions. First off, what exactly is the orders goal or is just some community like order. Secondly I want to know if there is some discord or skype.

0

Upvote

 

Welcome!

Message robobadger or ShouHeiKun in game and we will get you set up!

As an answer to your question

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The order's goal is to thrive as self dependent rulers of the lands for which they settled.

We have a work in progress discord.

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The Order of Azeron

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Opening

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Azeron was a small coastal village, springing into existence shortly after the boarding of Atlas. It's best features consisted of a large farm, and plentiful fish.

Being so close to the road, however, caused many people to flock towards Azeron. As the village thrived, it was targeted.

Others preyed on Azeron, stealing crops and robbing villagers. After years of relentless attacks, a man named Elton took command. He started raising a militia, setting up guard towers and doing patrols.

The brigands caught notice, they rallied up a single horde of men, rushing into the village and causing devastating damage, leaving death and pillaging in their wake.

Elton gathered every able bodied man in the village, constructing a simple wall around the village, It would be able to protect from a horde of brigands, and town guards ensured that.

After some failed invasions, two groups of brigands rallied together, making one angry and final attempt at pillaging the village.

They surrounded the village, laying siege on them at a distance where they would be undeterred by bowmen.

During the cover of night, they would advance, lighting arrows on fire and arching them into the village, burning people to death whilst they slept.

As Azeron stood on the verge of collapse, a couple hundred meters away, on the coast, lies a shipwreck.

The town watch notified Elton of this rather quickly, he sat behind his window, gazing out towards the sea. 

"Why can't they swim to shore, they are only a couple minutes away!" he angrily thought.

As Elton squinted, he noticed they were wearing some sort of armor, he jumped on the opportunity, sending 5 men to assist them to shore.

It was a risky decision and left them open, but the brigands seemed to not notice. The 5 men assisted back 12 weary Easterner soldiers.

Despite the language and cultural barriers, they enjoyed each-others presence.

Night struck again, the soldiers lay confused as flaming arrows whizzed around the village.

As Elton and his men defended the village, the soldiers sat in a room, watching their general as he explained a course of action.

One soldier left the room, and shortly after the crank of the gates opening sounded.

Elton stared furiously as he watched the soldiers run off into the night.

Shortly after, the arrows halted.

Elton went back in his house, venting about how the soldiers abandoned them.

He would hear noise outside, fearing that the brigands have hoisted themselves on the walls.

He grasps his sword and steps outside as he is greeted by a lined up collection of heads.

The general of the soldiers walks in front of the heads, smirking as he glances at Elton.

The two groups of people lived in congruence, eventually having a translator teach the easterners the common tongue of the lands.

They expanded their lands, housed more people, and defended from brigands.

Elton was nicknamed Stonewall for his ability to create vast and strong walls with ease.

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Information

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Azeron is home to any and all races or cultural backgrounds.

Our goal is to be powerful and self-dependant.

We have a farm specifically for residents to harvest.

We can provide food, armor, weaponry, and materials.

New players are welcome, not pushed away.

Directions

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Down the main southern road from CT.

Take a Left.

Take another Left.

Take one more Left.

Walk a bit and you should see Azeron.

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Active Members

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Elton (robobadger) ~ 5-10+ hours a day.

Shou Hei Kun (ShouHeiKun) ~ 5-10+ hours a day.

^-=-^^-.-^^-=-^^-.-^^-=-^

PM us if you have any questions!

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Josh Adhelm (YoMama)

Luca Adhelm (MysticGurl)

Thurdan Orathon (Onances)

Dinger Jotnar (DingersonMCgee)

Arabella Longford (Marigny)

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Application

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OOC:

MC name: 

Active hours:

How come you want to join?:

MCly good at? (Building, Archery, etc):

Timezone:

IC:

RP name:

Gender:

Strengths:

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