Should we destroy all orgs and have players rebuild following a cataclysmic event?
After reading a certain thread, I thought it would be interesting to see an actual poll. Should we destroy all of our old orgs and place all circle members into a small towne setting and allow them to rebuild their empires into the city-states and sponsored guilds that they desire? All player directed and admin supported throughout the entire process. When I read the originating thread I almost started drooling at the thought of it. What do you think? Discuss below the details that you think would make it work - or the reasons why it would not.
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Curiosity satisfied. Interesting idea though.
I'd like to destroy Antioch and Ithaqua and rebuild something combined. Ithaqua's kind of a crappy ghost town and it's been that way forever, and Antioch's got the problem where the whole anti-magick thing is sort of freaking pointless now. A lot of our population wasn't even alive before the death of the Gods, so there's no attachment there and there's basically nothing to drive any kind of anti-magick idea. You know why we don't use magick now? Because the game punishes us for doing it. It's entirely a metagame consideration and nobody even bothers to pretend otherwise anymore.
I think that combining the organizations under a new name would probably be the best bet to avoid hard feelings, and I think that doing it would be a great way to handle the sort of "Well, now what?" feeling that the city of the gods has now that there are no gods. That's part of the reason why we tried to team up with Urzog.
Probably don't need to blow them ALL up, but I'd like to blow up two of them.
"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."
That is true.
There are two things that need to be taken into consideration, though.
The first is that keeping something is only important if that something has value and code/rooms/mobs/quests/stories have no intrinsic value. An ugly gold ring that never gets worn is still made of gold, but a 20 room inn that never gets used is worthless. A 30 room village that raises player engagement/involvement is more valuable than 200 rooms of closed off ghost town.
The second is that stories end and that's okay. It is their nature. Stories are meant to end. If a city is overrun by the Horde or blown up, you're not throwing that city's story away. You're just writing "The End" on the last page and closing the book. That's a good thing, because it means you get to start another one. Antioch's story has been going on for 10+ years now. It's outlived the Gods it once served and any semblance of a real purpose along with them. It's okay to close the book on it.
"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."
How's this different from the status quo again?
E: Going further, is it really that difficult to save a backup of the world as it is now? Oh hey we were totes wrong and it destroyed the game's activity levels? Let's do the time warp agaaaaaaain
E2: Edited messed up the quote box? But it still appears correct when posting... let's blow up the forums too, while we're at it.
(may vanish for periods of time)
Oystir: "I'm discontent with the way my guild is running."
Forum: "That doesn't matter, nobody cares about guilds."
Oystir: "I'm trying to care about guilds."
Forum: "Nobody cares about guilds."
Small org sizes is part of the problem, a shallow and only slowly growing pool of players is another, but apathy on the part of the players is ingrained so heavily that some of it isn't even considered something we can change to enrich the lesser areas of the game.
If I were personally to look into coding and administrative efforts to improve the organizations of the game, it'd be small things to benefit actually being in them. Smaller org-specific events would be awesome (I'm talking guilds, not cities), the merging of two guilds is a perfect opportunity to bring in an NPC and do something with the two guilds [one of which is obviously not up to snuff since they're merging]. Towne membership could have some aesthetic benefit, we could make a way for towne activity to buy certain simple effects and then maybe five townes can compete to have it for a year, thonors for each towne that only townemembers can do, some sort of aesthic appeal to them, I could go on but I won't because #nobodycares.
And yes, I understand, it's more toys that people will probably snuff at and not appreciate, but that's *the point*. It's like actually caring about the ministry of Culture - I've seen it done well - the mindset isn't 'people are gunna ruv this' it's 'i am going to keep making these opportunities because having no opportunities is worse than being ignored and unappreciated'.
Nobody cares, so nobody cares. But like has been said, a #killall won't give anything but a small adrenaline injection towards the enthusiasm towards organizations. That can be done in many other ways. If you're willing to do things to create a new org, why not do those same things for your existing one?
We are fortunate to have an administration that is willing to take an active hand in giving the playerbase what it needs, but we're asking for new toys even though there are plenty of board games we never play with, we already don't take care of our own toys, and if you expect a treat or toy every time you get bored then you are going to come across a harsh realization, we do not poop money and the divorce is over, we have full custody now, we are not going to spoil you to compensate for our emotional guilt. But we showed your mother, didn't we?
Yeah, we showed her.