The Surly Cantrian wrote:Swymir wrote:Lad and Quillinoi used to be my two favorite. They still kind of are but they are getting farther away from their original principles which made them so good.
Lad. has become seriously boring... I used to love the oppressive regime of Lad... one of the few interesting governments.
Am I the only one that draws a parallel between the absence of large, multi-area, governments and the rush of unbalanced changes to Cantr?
I wonder if those days will ever be recaptured.
Well, you know, I did predict the effect of the changes way back but was roundly cursed at the time. Cantr suffered a decline in players who viewed the game from a strategic perspective, and at the same time combat swung towards a massive advantage for the defensive. This was also coupled to complete uncertainty as to what the effect of combat on any scale might actually be, since such combat never occurs (chasing down the odd suicide thief excepted). Law enforcement also became more difficult to achieve other than purely through ownership of keys.
Rules of the Pecking Order:
(1) If you have a locked building, a crowbar, a sidekick and enough iron for a new lock, you can be mean to everybody.
(2) If you have a locked building, a crowbar and a sidekick, but no iron, you can be mean to everybody except people with crowbars.
(3) If you have a locked building, but no crowbar or sidekick, you can be mean to everybody except people with locked buildings.
(4) If you have no locked building, no crowbar, no sidekick and no iron, then you must be incredibly nice to everybody with enough iron for a lock, irrespective of whether you are carrying a crossbow and iron shield and they are carrying a bone club or not.
The game has also been slowed down yet further by the tiredness system, which takes a little nick out of productivity every single day (and most players don't know how to compensate for it), and by repairing--the repair times, it now seems, are indeed rather longer than necessary to achieve the desired result. To balance the introduction of repairs, there should perhaps have been a global increase in productivity.
We currently have a high turnover of new players since there is insufficient excitement or interest to hold their attention; kissing contests and "questionaires" in Drojf are not it. To put it bluntly, there was a degree of tension between the "strategy" players (characterized especially by the pirates of old and some of the clans and empires) and the "pure" roleplayers (characterized by those who try to create "Middle America" in Cantr, even though it doesn't work). The latter group won out and got what they asked for. This was always a specific conflict of ideas between particular "oldies" in the game and the one bunch, it seems, managed to shout louder than the other bunch--perhaps because they specialize in noise-generation generally.
Of course every time someone raises these issues, and they are raised every week, then I give roughly the same answer. And every time I give the same answer (boring!) I get cursed for being paranoid, etc. And so it goes...
...will they? 
Here's to hoping you don't get found out.
