CLOK BBS

So I have some questions about the Gaea disturbance thing.

If I'm logging in the Haiban Wood Reserve area, there really should be no sort of Gaea disturbance. This is a forest grown by the Coalition for the sake of logging. I had fallen five trees when I had sent out a "PANIC PANIC PANIC" distress signal. I'm almost literally certain that no one had logged in this area all day.

In fact, I have a bit of a problem with Gaea disturbance as a whole. I remember reading somewhere that activating it is on pure chance. Aside from my qualms with druids being alerted to a specific area they themselves cannot access, where trees are grown for businesses and Artisans, it just feels weird that I won't know how much distress an area is in before walking in.

Lun wrote:So I have some questions about the Gaea disturbance thing. I asked someone about an issue I had with the Gaea disturbance bit, I'm going to quote them here.

" The code for gaea annoyance is a little wonky right now. Cutting down any tree has a chance to hurt the gaea, and trigger a message to related parties. Could be the first, or might not be until the tenth. It really really really depends on how lucky/unlucky you are."

If I'm logging in the Haiban Wood Reserve area, there really should be no sort of Gaea disturbance. This is a forest grown by the Coalition for the sake of logging. I had fallen five trees when I had sent out a "PANIC PANIC PANIC" distress signal. I'm almost literally certain that no one had logged in this area all day.

1) That forest was not grown by the Coalition as far as I'm aware seeing as the last HQ burnt down less than two years ago

2) I THINK (don't get mad if I'm wrong) that (at least as far as I last read) it is an intentional design choice to have the Gaea occasionally spout off and whine about every little hair plucked (i.e. the odd tree being chopped)

3) Tell those tree-huggers to get bent and keep logging in your reserve. What're they gonna do about it? Ask you nicely on ESP?

2) you're right, when I poked about this question in the past, I had it confirmed. The trees and area are still a part of the gaea. it's not intended to be a "you can't get us here, we can do what we want zone".

3)As has once happened already, if abused, the area will be re-closed. Again. Please don't mess up our happy little area. Again.
3b) They'll send Sona to be a diplomat. With a greataxe. :(

Whether the trees are grown for a specific purpose or not doesn't matter. They're part of the Gaea. It's not a rational being and won't differentiate between human-grown things and nature-grown things.

Lun wrote:So I have some questions about the Gaea disturbance thing.

If I'm logging in the Haiban Wood Reserve area, there really should be no sort of Gaea disturbance. This is a forest grown by the Coalition for the sake of logging. I had fallen five trees when I had sent out a "PANIC PANIC PANIC" distress signal. I'm almost literally certain that no one had logged in this area all day.

While I don't know about the second part of this, I disagree that there should be zero disturbance from logging there. The Gaea holds dominion over all plantlife, as far as I'm aware. Whether put there by mankind or not. I don't see why, thematically, the reserve should never elicit a disturbance.



Sidenote: Things (tm) probably will happen if the disturbances keep rolling in.

A couple of things:
1 - for a while (I don't think it's active anymore) there was an associated energy drain when the gaea alerted. This is what I have been told and, if it is true, makes ooc sense why folks are getting frustrated. I think it should also be said that specifically the Udemi have become overly druidy. That's changing organically, but it's important for Udemi to remember that they are D&D rangers, not D&D druids.
2 - I don't know whether the intended goal of the Gaea is to alert randomly. If it is, it makes sense as a technique of driving friction between characters. That being said, there are several ooc comments (several made today, in fact) bashing the guild for essentially doing what it's supposed to be doing. I think we need to figure out whether it's intentional or not for the Gaea to alert randomly and sometimes unnecessarily, and go from there. I would just argue that it's hard to set up a guild to attack infested (a guild primarily populated by alts) and also give it dominion of protecting the Gaea against every little threat/annoyance. A little much for one of the largest, but least active, organizations ingame.
3 - Can we create a message upon survey to say if forests have been thinned? I know a lot of characters don't want to annoy the Gaea. They just do it by accident. Seeing a "these trees are noticeably thinned" could go a long way towards decreasing ic (and possible ooc) annoyance.
So, I guess I would mainly ask: is the code currently working properly for the Gaea. If not, can we then request a pause or removal of gaea pain messages until it gets fixed?

If "all plant lilfe" is the issue here, then could we have the disturbance meter change from being 100% of the time, every now and then, at complete whim of the RNG gods to something more manageable like an actual disturbance gauge that we can peter out?

Say I fell a tree and it's at moderate to about to warn everyone, I see a message saying "Animals scurry out in a panic" or something.


The problem with Thing (tm) happening is that we, the logger, have literally no idea that we're doing something until someone tells us. What if I don't have a pendant? What if I'm a newbie? The fact is I'm not but there's the possibility. There's no mechanism in place for the logger himself to know he's in the wrong aside from the off chance that there's another druid around who isn't so keen on running off to do Things (tm) to the poor hapless logger.

vidor:

Not every Druid is a member of the Udemi. Just like not every Udemi has to be a Druid.


Lun:

That's just one of the risks associated with logging, to be frank. I believe Rias has stated he wants to work on the actual message generation. But there's a lot of other little things that are involved, besides just a flat "How much is the Gaea pissed off" Meter. Which, to me, is really cool. Nor do I think non-Druid PCs should necessarily receive warnings about the Gaea about to be disturbed. It's not some set in stone thing. The Gaea is a living, breathing thing with a mind beyond human capacity.


Frankly, there's very few Udemi that I have ever run into that will cause blatant trouble when an area is overlogged. The more dangerous PCs tend to be played by Players that give people warnings. The mechanism in place to warn the logger that he or she is in the wrong, would be PCs that can feel the disturbances in the Gaea. Reducing IC interaction by creating a handy little Gaea Meter would be a bit annoying for those Players that enjoy the Forest Ranger type RP, and have invested into Druidry.

Let's say I'm a thief, and I go and steal 15 riln from someone, and they notice they're missing riln and get upset and say on the pendants "Someone stole some riln from me at the Twin Dagger Tavern!" Should we say to them, "It was only the first time you were stolen from today, and it was only 15 riln, and you shouldn't be upset or say anything about it until it happens at least 5 times or until you lose a total of 150 riln"?

I think if a Udemi is threatening to kill you or something equally nasty because of a single disturbance, they should get a talking to from their leaders. Are they threatening to kill you or are they just asking you to move on? Most of the people I hear just say something like "There's distress at the Shroomwood forest, any loggers please move on." They're reacting how they feel they should react, you react how you feel you should react. Hilarity ensues.

I do wonder sometimes why, as an organization, Tse Gaiyan goals seem to be all over the place. "Defeat the resen!" "Protect Gaea!" Those are two different goals, sometimes radically so.

They are moving more towards "defeat the resen" a message which I support. I like their connection to the Gaea, I'm not sure it's clear how the resen are against the Gaea, and how that plays into the Tse Gaiyan. That sort of stuff has always seemed vague to me. "defenders of free thought" works more, as infested have their thoughts and actions affected obviously. I do believe they need to, at an individual level, lean more away from the "protect the Gaea" to "defeat the resen", but we can't dictate how individual characters act/respond.

They're also interested in maintaining general harmony between humankind and nature, though. Just, every individual Tee Gaiyan might have a different idea for what the correct harmony is.

I just go by the rule and seemingly safer route that druids are conflicted souls, so they deal with conflicted things like the recen and gaea.

I don't like, and have never liked the fact that it's all pretty much a lose lose. Druids feel or hear what they feel or hear and the rest of us just never know by looking around us when an area has overforested or overhunted. Loggers, particularly experienced ones (and the same can be said for hunters) should know the signs of an area that shouldn't be touched.

Not only that, but our playerbase fluctuates. More players log, more the Gaea does too. That in itself is an imbalance that could possibly need looking at. Everyone says that the lands are large, etc etc, but there is only so much that can be logged and how much. Just try logging to make mine supports for two different mines and you'll see what I mean.

If I remember correctly, the Gaea code used to be a lot worse than what it is now, but I could be wrong. I do agree with Vidor that taking something to chat as soon as you get a negative response isn't really helpful.

My other thing about this is I get a bit weird with posts like this when someone gets annoyed so they talk about the RP, although be it generally on the boards. I know when it happens to me, and I read it, I usually just give up on a line of potential RP because I'm going to hear about how it's unfair or that character shouldn't have done A, B, or C.
This post kind of feels like that to me.

I like the fact that Tse Gaiyan has a bunch of differing personas, though it was real bad on the nothing but druidry bit for a while, but I mean it's a bunch of different people coming to fight off infested, so they'll have different thoughts and stuff. It's when the druidry gets in the way of their other stuff, in my opinion.

Anyways that's just my thought on the subject.

Regarding logging distress, yes, if the RNG hates you enough, you'll cause a disturbance on the very first tree. But the chances are fairly low and it does account for recent logging activity. The more recently felled trees, the higher the chances. Someone else was doing a lot of logging in there the night before this post, and I'm not sure if the system had fully recovered yet or not.

Regarding the Tse Gaiyan, I'd like to leave that for Vinz to address, but I'm pretty sure we've discussed this publicly elsewhere before. Udemi as a whole are are not a druidic group. As an organizaiton they learn druidry as a means to an end, but it is far, far, far from their primary focus. They are all about stopping the resen. If they had to destroy a forest to do it, they very well might. Individual character viewpoints may vary and often are different though, characters often love to join a guild and then play a unique/different aspect of it than what is considered the norm, but don't just lump them together with the entire organization.

With all that said, it's probably time for Locke to close the reserve again.

As one of the more active Udemi/Gaiyan right now, here's my thought on the whole thing.
The interplay of Gaea and Infested is a large problem. I think part of it is that people looking for a druid guild see Udemi and say "Oh, groovy, let's do that then." The distinction between ranger and druid is one which probably should be made a bit more clear. Even now there are ic measures being taken to create a place where people wanting the druidic rp and experience can go where they don't have to be super aggressive.
A lot of it really does depend on how the guild is working, though. I mean, there was that idea on whether mercs should take hits on other PCs. I think it is meant to represent the full range of people who are giving their lives to fighting the infested. And I feel like it does. I can tell you that, within the TG currently, there's definitely a push away from the "don't hurt the Gaea or I'll hurt you." People are getting in trouble for stuff like that, and for spending more time chasing loggers than fighting infested.
I think one of the greatest limitations is something I mentioned earlier: we have one of the largest guilds (though I don't have the numbers), but most of our folks are alts. So it's a little difficult to amass an army when, in the last month, we've maybe had a max of four or five Gaiyan online at one given time (usually drastically less).
All I can say is: if you don't like the culture of the Gaiyan, come try to fix it. Make one, play one, and engage leadership and current members in rp about what the goals "should" be. But being grumpy about the state of things, whether on chat, on the boards, or even ic as an outsider, really won't make the changes you're probably looking for.

I do want to say thanks to the GMs, and Vinz specifically, for all of their work with the Gaiyan. I love having GMs that respond and work with players to make a positive change in the mud. They create the game, we play it -- this whole beautiful thing is teamwork, and I love the team.

One thing that I feel people are forgetting about as well, is that there are other people other than the PCs that are logging, foraging, fishing, farming, etc. The entirety of the lostlands is not made up purely of only the PCs and their guild leaders. It's true that you personally may have only chopped one tree down, but some npc might've chopped down 20 before you. Not that is done mechanicly , or maybe it is, who knows, either way it's a good thing to keep in mind.
Also, as far as the gaiya and the udemi goes, since they ccan feel when it's hurting and that's a serious annoyance to a udemi both IC and OOC, it stands to reason that they're going to get a little upset about it and tell whoever is in there to knock it off. However, it is also possible that it is the infested that are causing the disturbance, so it's always good to make sure it isn't the infested rather than over logging from people.