Lore Update: Arken And Silven

[MonMarty]

This has been a rather under the hood change that went largely unnoticed during the whole Proficiency update, but was worked on in tandem. Following the Arken presence in the last progression, we performed a poll with select social groups, and gathered opinions of about 70 people. After the poll was performed, we gathered the data together and drew some conclusions:

• Arken were too impersonal. There was no relation building, they came to feck up your stuff, and then left again. There was no attachment to any of the Arken in any way.
• Arken were not clear enough on what they could and couldn't do, it created confusion and weird scenarios where characters did not know what was happening to them.
• The Arken seemed to appear at random and had no real structure to them. Performances between Arken was also widely different, with some rated high and some rated low.

We were however surprised by the high return rate. Between 70 and 80% of the pollers wanted to see Arken back in some form or another, so we decided to downscale the importance of Arken into a background plot. The Dragon related Arken are now mostly if not completely dead, which means we're segwaying into using the Arken passively as a background vessel to allow plotline forming between players and portraying staff that doesn't concern the general progression or the Elven War. This means Arken will essentially be released into the playerbase that are more personal, more rule bound and more systematic, while also extracting them out of the progression so it doesn't turn into a "kill the Arken or you're not a patriot" situation. Gangs that want to fight each other instead of Arken can do so just fine, and Nobles who want to focus on the Elven war without worrying about the Arken can do so as well. Those who do not care for the Elven war however still get a chance to influence events beyond themselves by getting involved with the Arken Hunters and Hunted however:

• There are Four groups, the Hunters, the Hunted, the Other, and the Dragons.
• The Dragons are the lawful state. The Regalian Emperor and the Dragon Wardens and Scholars of the Court. They want to explicitly capture (not kill) all the Arken in their Arken devices and will be seeking out both Hunter and Hunted in an effort to capture them. This group does not formally exist yet and will likely soon be formed by the Dragon Wardens.
• The Other are the players, everyone else, the nobles and the gangs, people who are not explicitly involved with the Arken, but who may choose to take a side, join, or completely ignore the ongoings.
• The Arken are divided over the stronger and more powerful Hunters who have more abilities at their disposal and are generally more dangerous, and the Hunted who have a couple of escape and defense mechanism that they can use to gather followers to their cause to defend them. Arken Hunters can only be captured or disabled (not killed) while Hunted Arken can be killed only by the Arken Hunters, and captured by everyone else.
• To determine who portrayed what, we took the people who scored over 80% return rate (Wumpatron and MonMarty both scored over 90%) while we permitted everyone who scored above 50% and staff who had not yet tried portraying the role to play Hunted. When everyone has had their turn, we will release another poll to gain more information about the contextual performance of the staff members in question in giving roleplay to the players, and shall then decide based on those numbers about who to allow to play a Hunter on the next cycle.

All of this essentially turns into a big three way cat and mouse game where the state hunts all Arken, the Arken hunt each other, and outsiders can join forces with any and all of them, each with varying narratives and rewards for investing.

The Arken have all been basically written about on the Wiki now. You can find information here: https://wiki.massivecraft.com/Arken Keep in mind, this information is only really readily available in Regalia to someone with over 20 Void/Exist Knowledge Proficiency, or people who have had personal interactions with the Arken in question. This page largely exists to help players understand what the OOC boundaries of the Arken are so they should feel less intimidated by their hypothetical power. Furthermore, the Silven Page has had a minor update here: https://wiki.massivecraft.com/Silven#Arken_Interactions which helps make Arken a bit easier to track down and also a bit more fun to roleplay with for personal narrative. Additionally, this thread https://forums.massivecraft.com/threads/silven-parentage-registration.64124/ has been created to properly record Arken relations to accomodate the change in Silven Lore.

 

[HoshiWomp]

Cool! I was wondering what you guys were up to. Are the different powers granted by the Arken to their followers purely gained IC? Or is that part still being sorted out?

 

[Wumpatron]

Cool! I was wondering what you guys were up to. Are the different powers granted by the Arken to their followers purely gained IC? Or is that part still being sorted out?

Click to shrink...

My thread hopping self has brought me here, yes, the ability to gain powers and followers is all conducted IC and IG for that matter.