The Crimson Wind should voluntarily store

That's not what people are saying. People are saying that if there's a problem with raiders, especially ones who are completely autonomous and don't have any of the layers of protection that you'll find in an actual clan, you're supposed to try to beat them. Asking them to voluntarily store because the nature of their characters has a tendency to result in death is completely at odds with the Armageddon mindset. They're basically doing the one thing that justifies regular pkilling.

You don't have to immediately roll up a character who beelines toward them with swords drawn, but if they're a notorious and widely recognizable group of reviled raiders, it's perfectly reasonable to play a character who seeks to bring them down. Doing so against an individual who wronged you is bad form, but it's completely different when it concerns a group of people who are Public Enemy #1. Spend a year in the Byn and then have your character decide that their road to fame and fortune is to defeat these raiders. That's entirely acceptable.

Honestly, the Crimson Wind represents an aspect of Zalanthas that should be an everyday fact of life. The only reason it raises eyebrows is because it's something that's almost never an OOC reality. Years go by without anyone playing a noteworthy raider, let alone a whole crew of them. It creates roleplay, it gives a lot of other players something to work against, and it adds some much-needed danger to the game world. Without PC raiders, the game becomes text-based Skyrim and very few things can challenge a character with decent combat skills. Once you've played for a certain number of years, surviving the ecosystem becomes trivial.

While I have no idea what goes on in the game lately, it doesn't sound like these guys are wantonly killing on a daily basis. People I talk to say that it's an occasional thing and that they don't usually kill you unless you try to run away or have fucked with them before. And if I have to be killed by someone without any preceding plot, I'd much rather that it's an established group of known raiders than some random hooded dude who just decided to test out his latest spells on me.

The only times I've felt that it's justified to want somebody's character stored is when they have way more power than any character can normally obtain (e.g. the ridiculous pseudo-dragonthralls that staff inflicted upon the game in that one "plot" years back) or when they abuse their clan structure to freely kill people in a way that nobody can really do anything about (e.g. certain templars who would periodically log in, execute somebody, leave the game for weeks, then repeat the process). If a small and unsupported group of mostly mundanes with no clan safeguards can't be dealt with, it's the fault of a weak and complacent playerbase.

Also note that raiding is one of the only remaining ways to play a meaningful anti-establishment character. When they gutted sorcerors, those were effectively removed from the game. When they fucked with elementalists, people largely stopped caring about them because they're just mundanes with +5 power. When they made spice expire over time, the spice dealer role died.

You can play a pickpocket or burglar, but nobody really cares about those because, at the end of the day, they mostly just make useless money. Almost nobody has anything but bazaar fodder in their backpacks or apartments. They aren't roles that inherently make anything happen. They even got rid of the fancy apartments that required very high skill to pick.

And since they added all those soldiers who spam-patrol all over the city, the only way to be a combat threat inside Allanak is with a maxed assassin. There was a time when it was possible to mug people, or for a crew of serious thugs to walk into a bar and take someone out, but people don't bother when the whole place is crawling with soldiers.

So raiding is basically the way to go if you want an illegal/antagonistic character who can't just be ignored. All the other badguy roles have too many obstacles, too little presence in the game, or just no realistic way to make people care. It's no surprise if players with troublemaking tendencies gravitate toward the raider role.

I suppose there's always the Guild, but it's such a weird clan. I haven't seen it have more than two or three members since the Gin and Quick days. If you want to play an assassin, it's certainly the best place to do so, but most other aspects of that clan are pretty hollow. Spice trade has been a dead end ever since they made it decay over time, and nothing much ever happens in the actual 'rinth. It's a good clan for flavor but the practical applications are minimal. It mostly exists for templars to have something to pretend to be occupied with. More of a social role, really.



That never really goes away. Whenever you're not playing, your mind will play tricks on you and convince you that there's all kinds of extremely awesome shit that you're missing out on. I fell for it again and again, even though the reality was that the game was always a bit more dead every time I gave it another shot. Its history and potential is the reason we still talk about it, but it hasn't lived up to either of those for a long time.

I was going to write up a long post about all the problems I see with conflict in the game, but it basically comes down to this. Everyone had the tools they can use to effect the world taken out because Staff decided they had been misused. Now there's no way to effect the world anymore. Nothing happens as a result.

If you look at nobles that problem becomes super obvious. Nobles are supposed to be powerful because of their influence: Tor through the now-defunct Red Scorpions, Borsail through the now-defunct slaves, Oash through the now-defunct mages... See the pattern? And yet staff wonders why people don't just RP regular politics, or even regular people going about the troubles of daily life.

You can't RP a power struggle if nobody has any power to struggle over.

No offense to the players of the gladiators, but I do think it's kind of a lame, one-trick pony. Some of the gladiator players do really good and others ... well ... they're limping along.

Everyone should voluntarily store. The game is dead anyway. Why have the pretense? Players should just decide that there's nothing left to do, bow out, and take whatever little creativity they have left to another game, or even better, a valuable pursuit.

Tbh, the Crimson Wind are some of the only people playing the game right. They're stirring the pot, making interesting events happen. Wanting them to store is ridiculous.