City Novicehood
We are planning on some changes to guilds and cities in about two weeks. This is based on some conversations from the forums over the past few months.
The main part of the changes will deal with moving professions and novices from guilds to cities. Guilds will then be free to recruit and use whatever promotion requirements they desire. Previously we have had to squash some of the more elitist requirements.
I am looking for feedback and suggestions on the items listed below and also for features or tweaks that will make things better. Feel free to add your city and guild wishlist items. We can think about adding them as we are already working in that code.
Here is a list of changes we have already coded but we are waiting to release when we sure we have things where we like them.
- Removing the professions from guilds.
- Adding professions to cities. Cities will have access to any profession
a guild in the city had prior to this change. The city can purchase
additional professions by contacting me.
- All city professions can be learned from the city tutor.
- City tutors can teach lessons in any city profession skillsets.
- You must be a master in one profession before you can learn a new
professions. This will apply both to tutor-apprenticeship and
player-apprenticeship. This is mainly to keep newbies from being confused
or overwhelmed too early.
- Creating CITY SCORE <newbie> and CITY SKILLS <newbie> for ambassadors.
- Adding auto titles to cities when a player joins in the introduction. This
is also an ambassador command, CITY [PREFIX|SUFFIX] <profession> <title>.
Each profession can be assigned its own titles.
- Denoting city newbies in CWHO so they are easy to spot.
- Removing the GNT channel and making GT default for all players. This is
mainly because we do not want to split up the player base in this way.
- Removing TOPGUILDS and GUILD HEALTH.
- Changes to the intro to deal with putting newbies into cities.
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Comments
Will there be any new incentives to encourage guild membership or do you see a long term future without guilds entirely?
A better alternative would be to keep classes associated with guilds while implementing the rest of these changes. I would also suggest implementing a whole city-wide novicehood system similar to collegiums/novicehood clans in other games. This allows for advancement as a novice to be handled by anyone (like an aide) in the event that a guild member is not around (it also gives a more personal touch instead of an NPC, though you could keep NPC advancement as a backup alternative). You also have a central repository of information for novices that the city can provide by implementing such a system. Once the novice passes their initial novice requirements, they go through their guild for all further advancement as per the norm.
As for the damaged roleplay, I think that already started happening when guild charters popped up and classes started to get merged into multiple guilds. I don't think this will do that much greater harm to guild RP, and maybe has a chance to improve guild RP as people will join guilds whose theme they have an interest in, rather than simply joining to gain access to a particular profession.
My primary concern is that, given the general interest in RP in the game, guilds will see a steady decline and eventually be...pointless.
This is something that we've talked about up here, but the exact mechanism through which we would accomplish that isn't something we've determined yet. We want to avoid hard-coded things like novice quests, both because they aren't good for a changing world, and because upkeep of them requires a lot of volunteer man-hours.
I think novices should be everyone's responsibility in the city and I think it's universally easier for everyone to pitch in and allow the novice to have integration into the city proper when there is a system in place to help them through their novicehood and everyone can help them regardless of their guild. Novicehood requirements tend to be the same across every guild anyway. Once they pass the "collegium requirements" as a novice, they gain access to GT and start working on guild requirements from there and specializing.
@Eoghan: You may want to allow guilds to overhaul themselves then if that is the design decision you're going to go with. I can't really imagine an Idrasi guild without Predators at their core, as an example.
So this either finishes the job and makes guilds truly purposeless, or it grants them a chance to find purpose by stripping them down to their core reason for existing - to provide another RP hook.
Lusternia also tied guilds to the kinds of guards that could be summoned. As an example, a bard called bard guards that knocked people out of the skies. Warrior guilds had the martial guards. Each guild could call upon different discretionary powers to benefit the city/commune as a whole. Warrior guilds could use a power that would empower their guards if they came under attack and the Druid guilds did something like the old Council powers where you could forest enemy someone (not that I'm advocating bringing back such a mechanic, this is just a brainstorm session).
Ultimately, I think you'd need to tie the guilds into some kind of mechanic, be it conflict/culture/or what have you that makes them more than glorified clans and simultaneously gives them identity and ties them into their respective city/council. However, I think that'd ultimately be a lot more work than what this change is supposed to serve and that is helping novices. I don't think gutting guilds is the answer and the solution can be reached by implementing a group (like collegiums) where they can have their questions answered by anyone at any time and anyone can do their advancement.
The point is to ensure that people who don't have an interest in participating in specific guild or guild RP at all are not forced to just so that they can access a particular class they want to play.
A lot of the guilds already have some mechanical benefits with the exp bonuses and the like. I like the idea of tying in the RP of the guild into a mechanical benefit that helps the cities, but the problem with that becomes if the guild is dead and that mechanical benefit is a necessary edge, the city with the lowest pop gets screwed even more than is already the case.
Iunno, I'll have to think about what might be a shiny, interesting incentive without pushing even more imbalance based on population.
From older player perspectives, that has no bearing.
Most of the big changes seem to circle around new player retention and I think that's a big part of why this is being looked at (please correct me if I'm wrong).
We have a bunch of dead guilds. If you create a new player in this game and join a guild you think sounds interesting and end up never talking to anyone, you are a lot more likely to get discouraged and stop playing. If you join and you are immediately linked up to an active city (even our dead cities are far more active than some of our worst guilds - hello Saboteurs) then that increases the likelihood of retention.
What it doesn't do, however, is negate the role a good guild can have in keeping people engaged and invested in the game. City RP has -never- been a major draw for me. It's never as tight knit or as focused in terms of RP potential as a guild can be.
Oh, and Jeremy... I still love you pookie bear.
I think you should take it a step further, honestly.
Implement some form of circle-wide channel and run it as a circle novicehood. Joining a city on the downswing like Stavenn or Ithaqua can be extremely rough for a new player, and making it circle wide increases the group of people that newbies are given to interact with.
It might seem like it's forcing the organizations to get along, but honestly? The system is already like that. Obelisks are circle-based, events are circle-based, circles are already treated as an over-org comprised of the member organizations for almost all purposes, etc.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
I joined Achaea right after their Renaissance and I have to say for them at least it worked much better, I was able to learn two professions and get help understanding how they work and what to learn and equip. All without ever joining a guild. When I finally did join a guild it was for the roleplay aspects of it, not the necessity. I then promptly abandoned Achaea because it'll never be as fun or simple as Imperian.
This decision is going to strengthen cities and benefit newbies, but it's going to hurt the guilds, a lot. Guilds will be free of the responsibilities of handling novices, but they'll also lose the default boon in membership for their profession, and a few of them will lose a big part of their identity, be crippled by it, and die. Guilds are going to have to undergo a rapid evolution (how rapid will be determined by how fast this change is implemented) or they're going to have to die. With professions not being tied to guilds I can see some of our wealthier lunatics dropping ten million gold to get charters for whatever guild their megalomaniacal-plutocrat imaginations find fitting (If I see a Puffin guild I will end you all). And while we'll probably see at least another merger or two. In the long run Imperian will limp on. I'm sure we'll lose at least one person over this, but I doubt we'll lose as many as when we lost the gods and got, stuff, in exchange.
Guilds are going to go from being a clunky necessity to being a frilly and meaningless garnish.
I liked Sumie's idea of cooperative achievement-style quests. Kabaal and I were discussing it a bit and he had some good daily (monthly) quest goal ideas that I'll let him elaborate on. Streamline the benefits guild membership gets (all guilds should have the exp bonus for guild membership, for example).
I wish there was a way we could do unique roles attached to guild membership for the conflict generators (like the shards and caravans), but everything I can think of ends up being imbalanced in favour of higher population centers and screws low pop places.
‘Every sword’s a weight to carry. Men don’t see that when they pick ’em up. But they get heavier with time.”
E: might as well call them cults.
1. Give the guilds the option of concentrating on one of these three things: defensive combat, offensive combat, hunting.
2. Cut the number of guild ranks down to 10.
3. Assign a bonus of 0.25% damage resistance, 0.25% damage (physical damage for physical classes, etc.) or 0.25% bashing damage per guild rank.
4. Double the bonus for guild master.