NotSerfs

Yes, your stats will be reset. You have to get 400 PtP wins each incarnation to get an Obsidian Dagger. Getting those wins in a reasonable amount of time is a matter of having enough swords (at least as many as your Command point Limit) and keeping them occupied constantly.

Don't worry if doing it every incarnation seems too tedious. The Valyrian Steel Dagger can substitute for the Obsidian Dagger now and is easier to get. After all you probably don't need too many of those weapons so it's absolutely okay to skip a few.

This is only interesting for those who play on Kongregate:

If you are tired of the daily whispers from disruptorbeam, you might want to delete one of the messages from your inbox. This will open a dialogue where you can opt not to receive any more messages from disruptorbeam via the Kongregate message system.

When you right-click on the quest tab and choose "inspect element" (Firefox), the following line should be already highlighted:
<a id="actionbtn_120381750" class="btngreen activate_quest"> … </a>
The number within this line is the quest ID you need to post in the Rookery to get help.

If you play from other sites like Kongregate, you need to modify the link, too like in the case above.

Jut add the
/play/join_quest/number
part to whatever adress your browser shows when you normally play the game.

Since just recently someone stated that all the talents that didn't add directly to your strength were useless, I felt like elaborating on what I think the talents can do for you and perhaps help you make the choices that suit you best.


Generic Talents
Every one of the three actions of all three traits has 5 talents that work exactly the same way.

Let's start with the 3 that add to your strength, namely Lvl 1 (+3% to attack per level of the talent), Lvl 20 (+3% to defense per level) and Lvl. 60 (+2% to actions per level).

The attack bonus is obviously a strong choice because it helps you in quests, adventures and PvP. Even if you are not specializing your traits it could be a good idea to at least back up your fealty bonus with additional strength so you can excel there even more. I do not know for sure if this also boosts the damage you deal in challenges.

The defense bonus on the other hand has very limited use. It only applies to PvP attacks that are launched against you and in some cases like barter, aid or bribe, spending points on defense would be close to outright ridiculous. I would only even remotely consider the talent if I new in advance that I was going to be attacked a lot with a particular action and even then I'd need to have a high base stat for the percentile bonus to do much good. But if I am under attack, it's likely that they attack me where I am weakest.

The bonus to actions reads (+2% to actions, +2% to attack, +2% to defense) and there is some discussion about what that actually means. Some people assume that there are 3 different boni here. the only sound interpretation of what a bonus to actions would do is that it is a distinct bonus that applies expressly to challenges. That would also mean that the attack bonus doesn't work on challenges.
The other interpretation is that "bonus to actions" is just another way of saying that it applies to attack and defense simultaneously. The added description of bonus to attack and defense would then be redundant and is probably just there for clarification (or for confusion depending on your stance). I personally believe this one to be correct. Some gold items have recently been reworded (perhaps you remember the list of boni not fitting on the card earlier). The official explanation for the rewording was that they wanted to remove redundancy in the descriptions and that lends itself well to the assumption that the talents deserve a rewording, too.
Regardless, it's a good talent to boost you further in a certain area but I'd only recommend taking it for actions after you have maxed out on the attack bonus because the basic talent gets you more bonus per talent point and the additional defense bonus doesn't quite make up for that.

Then there is Lvl 30 - perform actions 3% per level faster. This will reduce the time you take to complete a quest, an adventure or a PvP action using the specific action. It will not however make your actions refill faster after using the skill in a challenge (don't deny that you had hoped it did). I like the speed reduction generally because I get my swords back sooner and might just send them on another journey before I go to bed when otherwise I wouldn't have wanted to stay up another 30 minutes just to wait them out. The time save is biggest for some of the late quests which can take about 8 hours. Those would be reduced to about 6 hours.
However there is some cases where time saving can be more crucial. One prominent exception would be the aid action. If you want to aid someone who is under attack, your action would have to resolve before the attack does. I'm not certain if this is actually even possible without time saving but in any case you would gain a few precious minutes by your aid resolving faster. The same holds true if you want to sabotage the attacker to make his attack on your friend weaker. Your sabotage would have to resolve before his attack does, so time is of the essence here.
Since I barter a lot with Alliance members I also gain a lot of mileage from by barter time save talent because it's just an action I do very often.

Lvl 30 sworn swords heal from wounds after performing the specific action 3% per level faster. Now that one is fairly useless, okay. Don't be afraid of wounds, it's wickedly difficult to even try and kill one of your swords intentionally, they won't die on accident. The only nuisance is that their stats are reduced while they are wounded and even that decreasse is quite minor. Just send your sword on a long quest or adventure and they will probably have healed already before it's finished. I can't even think of any reason or specific situation where you'd be happy to have invested into that talent.


Specific Talents for certain actions

Fight
Spoils of War Gold gets you 3% per level more silver for successful fight actions. I would have yet to try it out but I have a feeling that this only applies to PvP. If you use fight in PvP to reliably increase your silver income (like farming an inactive friend with low stats), you will see a nice boost to your income. If it's worth the gold and talent points depends mostly on how much you do it. Just as an approximation: If you bought silver for real money you'd get about 3.000 silver stags for the 2$ it costs to buy the 10 gold required to unlock the talent.

Lockbox Gold is the other way round since it saves you 3% per level in losses from PvP. Mind you, it only saves you from "Fight" actions so it doesn't help against harass, steal or swindle. If you find yourself in a situation where other players fight and win against you so much that you'd consider buying this, you are probably in deeper trouble than any decisions on the talent tree can save you from. An easier remedy would be to always spend your silver to stay below your protected value which reduces losses by 100%.


Harass
Salt the Earth increases losses to the attacked player by 3% per level. If you use harass to hurt someone else, this will make it hurt more. However I am skeptical of its actual use since you probably won't know if the other player really had silver to lose or if he was already down to his protected value and couldn't lose anymore. Spying won't help either since it only tells you the player's attributes and not his wealth.

Concerted Attack Gold will increase the timer of an enemy fault by 5% per level. Faults are the debuffs that result from successful sabotage attacks. If you have the option, applying a new fault with a 100% timer will probably be more efficient than increasing the timer by only 40%. Well and then there is other uncertainties... does he really have a fault? Right, your teammate sabotaged him just recently but the fault could have been healed instantly by a bribe or swindled away. Also it would be difficult to time - since the fault only lasts 3 hours you would have to make sure that your attack resolves before that time is up. This will probably force you to attack before the sabotage has resolved and you don't even know if it was successful. And finally we don't know for sure if you will add 40% of the original time or just increase the remaining time by 40% which - depending on your timing - can make a huge difference.

Raid Gold gets you a common resource with a chance of 5% per level for each successful harass. That's a nice bonus if you harass a lot but chance are that once you are strong enough to harass with enough reliability and often enough, that lack of common resources won't be holding you down anyway.


Aid
Encampment makes the defender virtue you give another player last 3% per level longer. Instead of 3 hours, it will last 3:45 or something. This would be good if you aid not so much against a specific attack (which is too troublesome for the small effect anyway) but to make a player stronger in general. Why and in what cases you would want to do that I'll detail sometime later in another post.

Generous Host Gold works like Encampment just the other way round. Aid you receive will last 3% per level longer. I don't know if it will stack when you are a Generous Host and the other player has Encampment but I see no reason why it shouldn't. So you might find yourself enjoying the bonus for up to about 4:30 hours. Of couse you would have to have some kind of contract with other players to reliably send you aid on a regular basis to make the investment reasonable.

Return Favor Gold will give you 10 silver per level each time you aid another player. I don't know if the action must succeed for you to get those up to 80 stags but I'd guess no, since the recipient gets the defender virtue regardless of how good you rolled your dice. If you aid others a lot, it wouldn't be morally wrong to get something out of it for yourself, would it? It's still a small bonus and bartering might be better overall if you are in it for the money. So just take it as an added benefit to the aid actions you would have performed anyway.


Barter
Mutual Benefit makes the trading partner of your barter actions earn 5% per level more silver. I consider this one to be a very good talent. Frankly, bartering is usually an act of kindness. Sure, you get the silver, too but most of the time you would have something more profitable to do for your swords. Adventuring get's you resources or rare items on top of the silver and most are quicker than bartering with someone else and plundering weaklings nets you much more silver. The only real reason to do it is because the benefit is dependent on your own level and not that of the recipient and that he or she gets silver to build up without having to take an action with their own swords. Now that we have that one clear - barter is about helping the other not about gaining silver for yourself - the talent makes a lot more sense than if you look at it from the egoist's perspective. 5 of your merchants will now hand out as many stags as 7 would have done without the talent maxed out which is a good thing.
Update: I am now certain that Mutual Benefit will also increase the gains of anyone who sends merchants your way. That means that you could advertise yourself as a worthy trading partner by maxing this talent and making it known.

Negotiator Gold works like Mutual Benefit but now YOU will get those 5% per level extra coin. Note that they say "successful barter action". Is the action unsuccessful if you lose? I think not, so this would just be a case of bad wording. It's not wrong to get more for yourself for helping others and you might even come to think that with 40% bonus bartering is almost as profitable as the harmful PvP-actions. Since barter could easily be the single most often employed PvP-action for you, I'd consider it sound to invest here. But max out Mutual Benefit first since it is what bartering really is about.


Swindle
Realization makes you learn when you have been swindled after the fact. Now I don't really know how this should work. It clearly refers to the fact, that swindle can sometimes appear as barter to the target. Chances are that they would realize even without the skill when they notice that despite having received a barter they now have less silver than before. And they probably are suspicous when they have received 7 swindles and 2 barters in a row from the same player. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out something here. Still if you receive barters a lot from outside the alliance and you care about it, you could sink a single talent point here, no big deal really.

Unseen Costs Gold gets you 3% per level more silver each successful swindle. The same thoughts that have been given about the similar Spoils of War talent for fight actions apply here. If swindle is kind of a primary form of income for you, okay. Otherwise hardly worth the investment.

Bad Deal Gold gives you a 4% per level chance to transfer one of your faults to the target of your successful swindle attack. Now this one could be nasty. Someone out there to sabotage you? Send them 5 charlatans that swindle them and they will suffer the fault themselves - take care of timing but you will figure it out. It's a remedy for faults that doesn't rely on others helping you with a bribe. But on the other hand - are those faults really hampering you so much? They are minor if applied in solitude and if you suffer many, then getting a 32% chance to rid one of them is only one third a solution.


Bribe
Oppurtunist Gold gives you 5 coins per level for a successful bribe action. That's a whooping 40 stags after you are maxed out on it. Really? How often do you bribe someone anyway? It's only reasonable when they are targeted with sabotage and suffering faults and the point is about helping them out, not gaining something. Gaining isn't wrong but it's so little for an action so rare.

Staying Power Gold tries to make bribery useful by offering you a common resource at 5% chance per level. Still no deal. A common resource at 40% and 40 silver stags make bribery still a waste if you aren't healing faults. And you probably won't have enough faults to heal to see a return on your investment here.
(Okay, assuming we have a prolonged conflict with another alliance who always make sabotage attacks AND we elect players from the alliance whose sole responsibility is to heal faults by bribing everyone who has been under attack THEN perhaps IF you are one of the official bribe specialists you might want to consider investing here...)


Spy
Counter Intelligence gives false info to the enemy if you successfully defend against their spy attack. Sounds good. Probably sounds better than it is considering how spying works. If you haven't spied on your opponent, you will see the chance-of-success-bar for PvP-actions but not know the exact defense value and thus can't calculate the exact chance of success in advance. Now with some experience, you can guesstimate you opponent's values at about +/- 10% accuracy. Now if that "false information" clearly contradicts everything else (like it saying you have 20 combat when you actually have 400) it's useless because the enemy immediately knows, the info is false. If it is false in a believable frame, it's useless too. Or what is the advantage of having someone commit to an attack with supposedly 55% probability of success when it's actually only 52%?
Things would be different if the probabilty bar would adjust according to the (wildly off) false info but if that were the case, no one would ever spy because he risks having worse info than before.


Sabotage
Accomplices makes your faults from sabotage last 3% per level longer. Since applying a fault is all there is to sabotaging, having them last longer is good. They will still instantly go away with a bribe though and if the player doesn't do anything during those hours because he or she is offline, it doesn't do anything. But still if you are really into the saboteur's bussiness, you might want to have this.

Relief Effort Gold makes faults you suffer go away 3% per level sooner. Like other sabotage countermeasures, this one probably won't do much for you unless you suffer such attacks constantly. Theoretically you could get the same effect by waiting half an hour before you go on quests, adventures or PvP-missions.

Second Strike Gold gives you a random resource with a 5% per level chance every time you sabotage someone. It doesn't say random "common" resource like the harass-talent "raid" does. But that's probably just a case of inexact wording and you won't gain uncommon resources from this one either. As for the rest, it's just like raid - if you already intend to do plenty of sabotage, then it's a nice addition but nothing too fancy.


Steal
Sticky Fingers Gold gets you 3% per level extra silver from stealing. In that it works like the buff talents for fight and swindle and is just as useful. Or useless, depending on how much you are going to rely on stealing.

Hidden Pockets Gold makes you lose 3% less per level when being stolen from. As always there might be cheaper ways to protect your silver that work better. Using the approximation from the beginning, you would have to lose 12.000 coins from steal for this talent to save you the 3.000 stags you could have bought instead of the 10 gold to unlock the talent.

(To be continued...)

If you are reading this, you are doing things right. You have already followed the most important rule of the alliance: Look at the Alliance Forum. If you haven't registered yet, do it soon as you will then have access to some more threads.

Allow me to welcome you to the Alliance, we are Not Serfs. I am Jessica, one of the Hands of the Realm. Which leads to some more introductions:

Winnie Wylde (Debbie) is the founder of the Alliance and our Queen. She rules supreme and her word is law. However she's absolutely friendly and helpfull all the time and I mean really friendly (not Cersei Lannister type friendly).

Second to the Queen are the Hands of the Realm who help running the Alliance. Hands of the Realm can make independent decisions as long as the Queen is not around and those decisions are final. Basic tasks include running the Alliance challenges, adjudicating conflicts and just being helpful in general.

Those are the hands (in no particular order):

Jarilo Perun (Gregor) has been negotiating treaties with other Alliances. When Debbie had to lay down the crown for a while due to stressful real life, he stepped in and ruled the Alliance in her stead. His time zone is CET (I'm giving you time zones so you can guess when people might be around).

Kazimir runs the forum for us.

Nym Allister (Carolina) gives evildoers a sound beating. Her time zone is Argentinia.

Rudy Silverbones (Rudy) has finally finished reincarnating. His time zone is North America.

Alysane Goodbrother (Lindy) takes pieces of mud and stone and turns them into marvelous contributions for the Alliance.

Jessica Fairchild that's me. I don't know if I will be around for long anymore but as much as I manage to drop in, I'll still try to be your walking encyclopedia about the game's invisible mechanics, bugs and strategy.
In case you found us via an ad from Kongregate and were wondering, that General Cardican person is also me.


The Philosophy
The idea of Not Serfs is to counter something, that seems to take place in most other Alliances of the game. Many people contribute to the growth of the Alliance but due to certain game mechanics, the senior members get the most rewards from the contribution of others. To remedy this, we have established a small set of rules that are mainly designed to distribute the spoils of Alliance Challenges more evenly among all members. If you believe these mechanisms to be failing or otherwise feel you don't have a fair chance, speak out (politely) to the Queen or one of the hands, our rules are constantly under development.

That said, these are the rules:

Donating to Alliance Challenges
Alliance Challenges are moderated by the Queen and the hands to ensure that they take place at a time which is most convenient to a majority of members (time zones are being taken into consideration, no child is left behind). That means that you must not as in you are absolutely not allowed to donate the last item that's missing to start a challenge. Donating the last item immediately starts the challenge and ruins our plans for better chances of participation for everyone. Apart from that donate to your heart's desire

Participating in Alliance Challenges
Though every participant receives something for joining the Alliance Challenge, the best treasures are given to the three players who score the most points. Because stronger players can score points more quickly, we have staggered sign-in times according to player level. The player who manages the challenge will anounce in the Rookery (Alliance Chat) at what time you may join the challenge according to level.
Also if you have been among the top three and got treasure as a result, you must make sure to not score in the top three again until two challenges have passed. You are still encouraged to participate, though.

Joining normal Boss Challenges of other members
In some threads of the forum you fill find a rule that forbids to finish another player's challenge. That rule doesn't apply anymore. The bug that made it neccessary, was removed. We have no strict code on whether you are allowed to steal first place from them. My personal stance is that by asking for help they forfeit their exclusive rights to the best treasure and it's free for all. As a gesture of courtesy, it's recommended not to finish another player's challenge instantly (which can easily happen when you are much higher in level) but wait a few minutes to give other players a chance to join too and get the base reward, too. But that's not a hard rule either.

Initiating Player to Player actions with Alliance Members (PvP)
You are free to run the helpful interactions Barter, Bribe and Aid anytime.
The fairly neutral interaction Spy is not forbidden but would be considered impolite.
You must not initiate the harmful interactions Fight, Harass, Swindle, Steal or Sabotage against an Alliance Meber without their consent.


That about sums up our rules. To get some further information I'd like to direct you to the following threads as an example and starting point:

More information about PvPing
http://notserfs.createaforum.com/basics/pvp%27ing-other-alliance-members/

What Reincarnation is all about
http://notserfs.createaforum.com/basics/reincarnate/

Free stuff! Promotional items, mostly consumables (Facebook)
http://notserfs.createaforum.com/free-talk/facebook-fan-page-gift-links/

General helpful information
http://notserfs.createaforum.com/basics/tip-of-the-day/


For more How-to's just skim through the threads, the title usually says it all. If any questions persist, feel free to post, pm or use the Rookery in-game.


Enjoy your stay in Westeros Not-Serfs-Style,
Jessica

Conflicts is the total number of PvP-conflicts that involved you, players attacking you and you attacking others regardless of who won.

I can't check exactly as I'm still under protection but the entry that the Obsidian Dagger refers to should read like PvP actions won or something like that.

Edit: I have confirmed now. The entry reads "Number of PtP wins"

I'm afraid, this sounds a lot like bug exploitation which is most likely a violation of the terms of service. I'd advise against using this method repeatedly.