Shattered Kingdoms

Hi team! As a new player, I don't want to pretend to know all the myriad details of this discussion, but I'd like to offer my observations as well. The problem seems to be that with a dwindling database, the relics will end up with the people who are willing to wait out their enemies and run raids when they are offline and success can be reasonably reassured. Based on this conclusion, my suggestion would be to disallow the re/capturing of items while no enemy is on to defend. (Perhaps by making the relic fail to spawn, and then despawn within a set amount of time after the last member has logged off. Alternatively you could make cabal grounds inaccessible save for a key that you make out of your enemy's corpse (like cutting out some guy's eye to trick a retinal scan).

I can think of a few problems with this right away so I guess for the sake of time, I'll go through what I've thought of, with the caveat that I'm still pretty stinking new so some of my ideas might be waaaay of the money. If so, sorry (but it's my birthday week, which makes me brave and bold and forum-posty. )
1. People would cap and then just stay offline for days. - This is already sort of a problem in reverse, where people whose item HAS been capped are already more reluctant to log in.
2. It's pretty hard to raid. - Now this might just be me, and let's be clear I'm afraid to fight bunnies all by myself, but for this idea to actually work, the current PVE aspect of raiding might need to be toned down a bit.
3. It's extra coding. - Yeah, sorry, no way around this one, but at least it's not the same level of complexity as building a bunch of different raids.

All that being said, I do love the idea of lasting consequences for warfare. I've never played a mud with that system before and once I learned about it, I was super intrigued. I have a few ideas for that, but they're fairly muddled and I've probably said enough backwards off-the-wall things for one night.

flame gently. <3

Not to sound like the dickish know-it-all vet, but the difficulty of CRS isn't very high.

Assuming top-tier preparation (you likely don't have a ton of understanding of what that even means, given what team lightie has been working with the past couple months), a healer/melee duo can knock out an HQ.

Two melee + healer can do it pretty easily.

Bigger group =/= better. The outer guardian hits everything hitting it, which means stuff like a swashbuckler off to the side in your formation is not extra melee damage, he's now a burden to your group.

Team Lightie just hasn't had any particularly mechanics-savvy "leader" characters/players in 6+ months. Not going to count my own lightie, due to her class. For various reasons usually related to the other people on it, team lightie is historically less attractive to the "vets".

IIRC elves are weak to gas blasts which doesn't help (because they are 'poison' damage or something). Kind of dumb. Somebody correct me on this if I'm wrong, please.

Gas blast attacks should be race-neutral (meaning they should hurt griffons too), and should hurt MR barbs. Cabal HQ ones should be like this, anyways.

Personally, I agree with Finney that this is too time-consuming. When you can barely get together a group to go to the dreamscape, taking days to gank/defend a relic sounds like a nightmare.

This idea is interesting if you scaled it down a bit, but pointless in that it does not address the fundamental problem; that there are simply not enough players for all these factions to be considered "active". I know nobody wants to hear it, but in my opinion, the only way CRS or trib warfare, are going to be viable again is if you get rid of some empty factions and force people to merge together.

I think I agree in principle. Tweaks should be based on findings, not idealism.

CRS demonstrates that you cannot force people to merge together.

The only high positive activity we've ever seen via CRS comes from groups of people who get along and collaborate.

What kind of changes could that finding inform?

The fact that the players won't, or can't, defend normal crs is the fundamental problem.
The player count being so low is a large contributing factor to this.

The main reason that I push for my type of crs is so that we can have some sort of back and forth between factions. The other team doesn't need to be logged when you are capturing or recapturing a territory. This allows conflict to continue even while login times of warring factions do not match up.

I know this whole idea would take a very large amount of coding, but it is a change that is worth the time put into it. Big updates take time to achieve and make the gaming environment a more enjoyable place to be.
The enchanting update or the original crs updates both took time to create and they were worth it in the end.
"This would take too much work" is a [REDACTED] poor way to throw away an idea.

The fact that D commented on this thread shows that he is interested in how a change to crs might work. So keep brainstorming.

This isn't really true. There are plenty of people who have, can and do successfully participate in CRS.

I'm not saying it's perfect, or even a whole lot of fun, but the only reason you can't compete, is because you don't have enough people (or vets, if you must). Making the system larger than it already is, is going to make it even more broken. Like I said, if you really want to implement something like this you are gonna have to scale it down a bit.

Not that it really matters. If you assume that crs in it's current form really is causing people to quit, and numbers to drop, there isn't going to be anyone playing by the time an update gets done. Especially a sizable one.

The game is too big for this playerbase, flat out. We should accommodate the people we have left by not spreading them so thin that they quit also.

I mean seriously, I'm not even suffering losses and I'm ready to quit. It is a chore to log on and attend to your empty faction, while the other leaders (the only other players) attend to their equally empty factions. Less factions with more players in them is the only logical solution that I see. Truthfully, this is probably my last char unless that does happen sometime in the very near future.

This is a good aspect to keep in mind. A -lot- of work went into CRS, and I know I certainly wouldn't be all too interested in trying out a replacement that also required a lot of coding if I were Dulrik.

That said, I like the idea of players being able to impact the game world through some sort of CRS-style aspect of the game. I'm also a fan of having some sort of mechanic that can prevent ninja-ganks of whatever these territories might be, while also preventing staying logged out (as a defender) from being a valid defense option.