We're pleased to announce some major updates to Order conflict systems. We plan on doing more here, but this is the initial set of changes!

Order ire:

Order ire is a new system which tracks hostile acts between orders, similar to hostility for other organisations. The immediate question of course is why we made something new instead of using hostility, and there are a few reasons for this (which will most likely become more obviously apparent as the system gets used):
- Granularity. We needed more control over the various tiers of hostility and in particular over how much each tier would be 'worth'.
- We wanted things which would rapidly expend ire. This didn't make a ton of sense for hostility in the contexts we had/have planned.
- Hostility interacts with other systems under the hood, and the things we're intending this for just didn't really play nicely with those.

So with that out of the way, how does it work:

Orders build ire on an order-by-order basis, and this breakdown is all visible under the ORDER IRE command. Many things build ire, in a rough order of impact:
- Desecrating shrines (successfully).
- Killing members of an order.
- Killing a champion of an order (see champions below).
- Judging shrines.
- A champion killing a champion of an order (see champions below).

These actions generally build ire on both sides, though the attacker builds much more. Order ire is cached and updates around once a month (all ire since the last update is added to your totals). This is to stop it from being possible to game the process to work out order membership.

So, what's the point. What does ire do?

This leads us on to the original primary motivation for doing this, which is making crusades more relevant (I hesitate to say again, because its always been a bit of a novelty). So, crusade changes:

- Each grade of ire you build against an order reduces the crusade essence cost against that order. This is listed on the ORDER IRE next to the relevant order.

- Base crusade cost has been raised from four million to four and a half million. We might tweak these numbers further.

- The DEGRADE power is gone. You state who you are crusading at the time of initiating the crusade, and this is made apparent to everyone on the CRUSADE command. The shards begin falling immediately upon crusade start.

- Starting a crusade drops your ire against the target order by a substantial amount, to stop trivial back to back crusading. The target order's ire increases by a fairly substantial amount (around four defilements worth for context), to get them on track to retaliate.

- Master shrines now recover much slower from a crusade, so these should be more worthwhile for that purpose now.

- When a crusade begins, the instigator and defender orders both gain the veneration and fervour miracles for 24 hours (if they don't already have them active).

- Crusade windups have gone from 24 hours to 48 (the second message now comes in at 24 hours). We felt slowing this down a bit would be better on both player fatigue and more fitting with what we have in mind.

Order champions:

A patron may now designate a member of their Order to be their divinely appointed champion. This champion interacts with the ire system as laid out above.
Further, champions may challenge champions of other orders to mortal combat(akin to the challenger's warhorn talisman), so long as their order has built ire to the fourth grade or more (currently Contempt).

This is done by going to a shrine of your god and using the WITNESS ME AGAINST <opposing champion> command. The target must be on the same continent and visible to you for you to issue this challenge. Naturally, these battles are to the death and count towards ire generation.

Champion titles are configurable by the relevant patron, and there is a line on honours designating someone as a champion. You can see your champion on the ORDER command output, listed just under the mortal order head section.

Likewise, all challenge messages are configurable by the relevant patron, so expect to see these coming out in the coming days and weeks as people settle on things they find appropriate.

Writs:

Writs have been removed. These have been problematic for a long time and have never really served the purpose they were intended for, either being farmed to an unreasonable degree or useless, while also focusing only on the person typing the command instead of the group they are often with while on a defile spree. Most such situations are already being resolved practically via RP-PK, and we are happy for that to be the primary method of handling these matters going forward.

Shrine powers:

You can expect some updates to some shrine powers coming soon! This update got rather large, so we decided to split those into a second one.

Penned by My hand on the 19th of Lupar, in the year 972 AF.