Alright. I know I said early this week, and it's now late this week, but you folks started discussing again and I wanted to let it play out.
This is going to be a reasonably long post, as I want to address the majority of the opinions that have been expressed here.
The role of guilds, contrasting guilds and sects:
The role of Guilds differs from the role of Sects primarily because while Guilds are ideology/role based, they are NOT intended to be belief/faith based. Sects ARE intended to be belief/faith based. Sects should be based on a religious or semi-religious theme that requires some faith and offers some personal faith-like meaning to the members. We have dropped the ball here some and approved cults that perhaps don't fit this role as well as we would like. Others fit this role as they are written, but have deviated from the faith aspect and become more general. We want to avoid cults and sects being watered down by non-faith concepts, and will be working hard with players in the future to ensure that is the case.
The role of guilds:
Our vision is that guilds will become (in some cases, remain) organizations based entirely on Roleplay of a given ideology or organization. Several people have raised concern that this weakens the position and role of guilds, and their ability to create a compelling story, but I feel that it does the opposite. By decoupling guilds from professions, they have more of a chance to define a role within their parent organizations and within the world. The role does not need to be bound by a given class or set of classes.
They will be keeping a rank structure that they can handle in whatever way they feel is best for the role they seek to fill.
They will keep guildhalls, and be able to place guildhall modifications as they have been able to.
We will open up other profession enhancement rooms to the guild, since guilds will no longer be tied to professions.
Guild credits will continue to exist.
We do not have current plans to mechanically expand guilds. This is primarily because we want guild-related choices being made based on role, not on mechanical min/maxing. We may approach this again in the future and reevaluate it.
We have been very open to working with guilds to modify, strengthen, or even completely revamp their theme over the last several years. This will remain to be the case. With this drastic change to the relationship between professions and guilds, we want to encourage ALL guild leadership to approach us (either individually, or through orgrequests) to define your guild the way you want it to be in modern Imperian. Some guilds will require small adjustments, and others may need to be revamped completely. We are MORE THAN HAPPY to work with guilds to make this happen.
***Some organizations feel they no longer have a role, and want to focus on shifting things towards the cities. We aren't interested in outright deleting guilds at this time, but you can "delete" them through mergers if that is something you feel is in the best interest of all of the orgs involved.***
The role of Cities:
Our vision is that Cities remain the main method of introducing characters to the larger roles and circles in Imperian. We also want to ease the task of introducing/training newbies by placing that focus within the larger organization. At the same time, cities are circle-defined, and it makes the most sense for professions, which are also thematically circle-defined, to be housed there.
To aid the introduction of newbies to Imperian and make this task easier, we're going to add a few mechanical things to cities. Some were already mentioned, some are new as of this post.
First, the things already mentioned by Jeremy:
Adding professions to cities. Cities will have access to any profession a guild in the city had prior to these changes. The city can purchase additional professions by contacting Jeremy.
All city professions can be learned from the city tutor. Professions your city has not purchased cannot be learned from the tutor (though you can still be apprenticed in that profession by a player).
City tutors can teach lessons in any city profession skillsets. -- We may keep this open to all circle professions.
Creating CITY SCORE <newbie> and CITY SKILLS <newbie> for ambassadors.
Adding auto titles to cities when a player joins in the introduction, similar to the way it happened in guilds prior to these changes. Suffixes and Prefixes will be assignable per-profession. There will be an associated ambassador command, CITY [PREFIX|SUFFIX] <profession> <title>.
Denoting city newbies in CWHO so they are easy to spot. At the moment, the plan is to note them with an asterisk (*)
In addition to this, I plan to create a method of defining city-based Achievements. The idea here is that you can create achievements using any stat viewable in ACHIEVEMENT STATS, and define city-based rewards. This is a way of creating a reward system and advancement system that is somewhat automated.
Awards will include Favours, Gold, and Credits. We're not sure how the favours will need to be balanced yet to keep the current time requirements on favours, but we're considering options.
You will be able to define prerequisites, leading to tiered achievements.
I am considering also creating an option to make a "resetting" achievement. These will reset the "city" version of that achievement stat upon completion. This will also include "repeatable" achievements, allowing you to effectively continue rewarding someone for the same tasks.
Things we are not doing:
- At least for now, we are not going to create an overarching circle org, like kingdoms. I personally feel that the separation of cities and councils still allows for interesting roleplay opportunities that I don't want to remove at this point. This is an idea we will continue to consider and may reapproach in the future, but for now it isn't something we'll be doing.
- We are not going to decouple circles from cities. We understand that many of you dislike what you feel is a rigidly defined role for organizations, but we feel there is still a lot of leeway within each circle. If cities wish to change the way in which they fit within their circle, that is something we can discuss. Like with guilds, we want to work with players and player leadership in cities to give them a role that they will enjoy.
- As mentioned, we aren't going to be adding additional mechanical roles to guilds at this time. For now, we definitely want to keep the focus on building a compelling role.
I love the customizable city achievements. I'm leery of city appointed suffixes for newbs, because that's another RP point taken from the guilds, imo.
I'll save my critique of other points for later.
Guilds will still contain the suffix and prefix powers. Since guilds will no longer be assigned upon character creation, it no longer makes sense for them to automatically assign titles.
Sects ARE intended to be belief/faith based. Sects should be based on a religious or semi-religious theme that requires some faith and offers some personal faith-like meaning to the members.
Ok, so I get this is why people in sects/cults have "faith" and the org itself has "belief", but honestly a number of people are in sects/cults solely for the benefits of the rituals provided by said sect/cult, and I'm not really seeing why you have to be religious-y here to gain access to those benefits. Given how strong some of these rituals are for PvP, you are essentially forcing any person interested in combat to also be in a sect/cult, and I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind this rationale. Can you elaborate on this point further?
Sects ARE intended to be belief/faith based. Sects should be based on a religious or semi-religious theme that requires some faith and offers some personal faith-like meaning to the members.
Ok, so I get this is why people in sects/cults have "faith" and the org itself has "belief", but honestly a number of people are in sects/cults solely for the benefits of the rituals provided by said sect/cult, and I'm not really seeing why you have to be religious-y here to gain access to those benefits. Given how strong some of these rituals are for PvP, you are essentially forcing any person interested in combat to also be in a sect/cult, and I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind this rationale. Can you elaborate on this point further?
Yes, it is true that cults and sects offer significant mechanical advantages. That is a separate issue from the question of what the organization's thematic role should be.
In-role, the faith of the members of the cult generates a group power or belief in an ideal. This allows for the manifestation of divine-like power wrestled from the remains of the gods that still float throughout the world. If a sect doesn't have an entity that manifests as a representation of that ideal, it is still present. That's the power that fuels the various sect-related mechanics.
Out-of-role, these are powers that are going to be housed by an org of some kind. We chose to include them in sects, as that was a natural progression from orders.
You could consider people joining a cult solely for the mechanical benefits to be paying lip service to their faith. The organization is still faith-based, and the members' opinion of the organization is immaterial. As a real-world corollary, many people join religions solely for power.
I see no reason why the guilds can't have the same achievement setup thing that you want to give cities, though. The work is already being done, and I'm assuming the rewards are being pooled from the city's own resources instead of being automagickally generated. I know you said "no new mechanical benefits", but the achievement creation thing fits guilds more to me than cities. No reason both can't have it, though, since more "Do this activity while you're logged in!" motivation is always good.
Other than that, I've kind of accepted that guilds are IC clans with halls now. Not a terrible thing, but the "health" and such of them and how officially tied they are to one city could be looked at. Guilds could serve as some of the "grey" area that cities and religion basically don't offer.
I like the auto achievement awards for cities! Thanks! My character desperately wants to move up in City rank but I don't want to be an ASW by begging around for tasks to do
I see no reason why the guilds can't have the same achievement setup thing that you want to give cities, though. The work is already being done, and I'm assuming the rewards are being pooled from the city's own resources instead of being automagickally generated. I know you said "no new mechanical benefits", but the achievement creation thing fits guilds more to me than cities. No reason both can't have it, though, since more "Do this activity while you're logged in!" motivation is always good.
Other than that, I've kind of accepted that guilds are IC clans with halls now. Not a terrible thing, but the "health" and such of them and how officially tied they are to one city could be looked at. Guilds could serve as some of the "grey" area that cities and religion basically don't offer.
I also see no reason we can't expand the org achievement system to include guilds. I would certainly not say it fits guilds more than cities (since its primary purpose is to provide a way for novices to be introduced to things, and novices are going to fall under the purview of cities), but it wouldn't hurt anything to also give access to the system to guilds.
Regarding "health", TOPGUILDS and the Guild Health system are slated for removal along with these changes.
As a side note, I would be very happy to have resetting achievements.
Have you thought about adding a small amount of quest experience for said mechanically embedded achievements? Or is that already a thing?
That would be awesome
That would be possible, but I won't commit to it yet. I'll have to discuss it with the others up here.
As a note, in case there's any confusion, these achievements (and their rewards) would be defined by the city. They wouldn't be created by the administration.
Adding professions to cities. Cities will have access to any profession a guild in the city had prior to these changes. The city can purchase additional professions by contacting Jeremy.
All city professions can be learned from the city tutor. Professions your city has not purchased cannot be learned from the tutor (though you can still be apprenticed in that profession by a player).
City tutors can teach lessons in any city profession skillsets. -- We may keep this open to all circle professions.
Can we please stop doing the class restriction thing? Is there anything of value gained by keeping Templar/Priest away from Ithaqua or the like?
- At least for now, we are not going to create an overarching circle org, like kingdoms. I personally feel that the separation of cities and councils still allows for interesting roleplay opportunities that I don't want to remove at this point. This is an idea we will continue to consider and may reapproach in the future, but for now it isn't something we'll be doing.
Really, I think the only thing we really need is a circletell/circlewho(CRT/CRWHO?). Something so that the Ithaquan/Stavennite/etc who logs on at an off-prime hour isn't necessarily rattling around alone if they're not in the circle's main ring, and a way for circle members to connect easier for hunting and such things.
A full over-org with positions and stuff really isn't needed, but a communcation channel that's not a player-controlled clan or a massive ring would be awesome.
"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."
Just so you all know, Eoghan and I (and the rest of the volunteers) have been discussing this quite a bit, so his post was not his all his own thinking but an official post from us.
PS: Thinking about the channel suggestion for circles.
If we do get a circle wide channel, it would be nice if the documentation on it specified that part of its purpose is welcoming/helping any newbies in the circle (because it seems like a perfect channel to use for that), and that newbies (but not necessarily only newbies!) can ask the questions about coding and mechanics that they're inevitably going to have - without having to dance around OOC with ridiculous language (which is pretty much how Newbie itself works - those questions are allowed). I always love listening to those conversations, too, because I tend to learn something. I can't imagine this being a problem in current AM anyway, but I don't know about the other circles, and things can always change. Having it clearly documented helps ensure people understand that that is part of the channel's purpose and not to jump on someone for asking those questions. Of course, it would have lots of uses beyond that - very likely city/council caravan announcements for one, and hunting as Khizan mentioned.
I hate practicing necromancy (no I don't), but @jeremy, are you still planning on implementing citywide novicehood or any of the other ideas in the OP?
I have some reforms I'd like to propose to how Stavenn handle novice integration and it's hard to do if i don't know if game mechanics are going to change under us
I am going to start coding these changes tomorrow. Nothing is really ground shaking here. Obviously it moves professions from guilds to cities and simplifies all the novice stuff, putting training more on the city instead of the guild.
This will only take a day or so. The main bottleneck is the universities, but they are already started. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please do so.
Add the following to cities:
1. Move profession restrictions guilds to city
2. Create a university for each circle with mobs that can teach the professions.
- Graytrem Hills for Demonic
- Vardarian for Magick
- Bardosi for AntiMagick
3. Novice help file
Remove the following from guilds:
1. GNT Channel
2. Novicehead and aides
3. Novicehelp file
4. Novice requirements
5. Guild promote command
Guild side effect:
1. Guilds can merge easier as there is no 3 profession restriction.
2. Create a university for each circle with mobs that can teach the professions.
- Graytrem Hills for Demonic
- Vardarian for Magick
- Bardosi for AntiMagick
I really feel this would be better served to have mobs in each org, or a single mob in each org that can teach. That way we can add any flavour we want that fits with our organizations rp down the line.
Having this city/council bound instead of a random university seems more practical. Having it united between orgs could easily give a novice a bad taste for an entire circle. I know that for a while (not now), I wouldn't induct novices/lowbies into demonic ring because it was awful.
It also allows for more RP opportunities.
Being able to choose your organization has been something that I have hoped would return for quite a while. Randomization often leads to additional frustration when a novice has to quit the org and go through the motions of joining the one that they need or want to be in.
In addition to not having the universities out in random public areas, I agree that the 'newbie roulette' needs to die. Cerise being able to induct newbies is a great addition, but it's not the fix we need. As I have suggested before, we can keep the randomization option, as long as we add the ability to choose. I.e., newbie Caethari joins the game, chooses a profession, is given the option of org A, org B, or random. This way, newbies who have actual knowledge of where they want to go can go there, and newbies who don't can jump right in. You don't have to erase anything, just add something else back in.
A single mob in each city/council that will induct newbies into any profession in that circle. (3 mobs)
A single mob out in the open that will induct any newbie to any profession. (1 mob)
A university as outlines above. (20 to 30 total rooms, 15 to 20 new mobs)
A university in each city/council. (20 - 30 rooms as some cities already have rooms for this. 25-40 new mobs.)
Option 4 is the best, but will take much longer to do because we would have to make so many new mobs.
Thoughts?
Out of that list, if I am understanding it, a single mob that teaches all professions in each organization is the quickest and simplest route.
I would implement a relatively generic speech about the professions available in the circle, and then let us use orgrequests to further customize them. That way if I want a mini spiel about how the Blight is great and we have cookies too I can add that in to anyone that wants to pick defiler, and if I want to talk about how we're better than demons and make them do the cleaning for us I can append that to diabolist before they agree to the profession.
I agree with @Aleutia. One thing that would concern me about a university in each city/council is that it adds more rooms to the area or an adjacent area from which raids can be staged and would vastly change the security dynamic of every organization, including siege layouts, guard movements, etc.
I think the best route, personally, would be to do a single mob in each city/council that will induct newbies into a profession of that circle. It's quicker to implement, it's simple, and with orgrequests available, would allow us to submit more detailed requests for the language of the tutor/mob to best fit each organization's theme.
I like the idea of a 'university' that can be thematically modified to each organisation.
I say give us the teacher mobiles, and let each organisation do as they see fit with modifying their surrounding to evoke the necessary ambience/style; then submitting requests for new mobiles over time.
That would be simpler, yes. We could put them in the city/council university or acadamy or whatever they have.
I think we posted about the same time!
I listed my concerns about universities/academies above. I know that, as a whole, Khandava wouldn't want an entire area dedicated to it. Ideally, if it were up to us, we would put one mob in Monarch Square that could teach all the demonic professions and talk about them a little, and call it a day.
If Cerise has the 1337 back-door hook-up for all the cities/councils, I think one mob teaching all profs can work.
Comments
I'll save my critique of other points for later.
Yes, it is true that cults and sects offer significant mechanical advantages. That is a separate issue from the question of what the organization's thematic role should be.
Have you thought about adding a small amount of quest experience for said mechanically embedded achievements? Or is that already a thing?
That would be awesome
Really, I think the only thing we really need is a circletell/circlewho(CRT/CRWHO?). Something so that the Ithaquan/Stavennite/etc who logs on at an off-prime hour isn't necessarily rattling around alone if they're not in the circle's main ring, and a way for circle members to connect easier for hunting and such things.
A full over-org with positions and stuff really isn't needed, but a communcation channel that's not a player-controlled clan or a massive ring would be awesome.
"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 have some reforms I'd like to propose to how Stavenn handle novice integration and it's hard to do if i don't know if game mechanics are going to change under us
Thanks
1. What @Aleutia said above. I feel really strongly about that. It can be used as a major point of introducing the novices to the RP or the org.
2. Allow novices to choose their org when they sign up. Right now, theyre randomly assigned to one of the two orgs in their circle.
I'm sure I'll think of others later.
(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
Out of that list, if I am understanding it, a single mob that teaches all professions in each organization is the quickest and simplest route.
I would implement a relatively generic speech about the professions available in the circle, and then let us use orgrequests to further customize them. That way if I want a mini spiel about how the Blight is great and we have cookies too I can add that in to anyone that wants to pick defiler, and if I want to talk about how we're better than demons and make them do the cleaning for us I can append that to diabolist before they agree to the profession.
(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧