I recently wrote a pretty nasty note on Wildecraft reguarding public cartels, and a Trademasters responsibilities. So I just want clarified ideas on what it means to be a Trademaster.

I had thought that any designs in a public cartel could be used by the people associated with the cartel freely (ex: Mags can use Mag designs, and so on.)

An incident occured recently that the TM had made two of the cartel's designs the exclusive property of someone in the Commune. Meaning only they could ask for the design. There were no posts written about it, it just got done. So I got in a lot of crap for just making one of each of designs. A few polite tells, and a few not-so-polite tells.

Can TM's do this? In the end, it's not the TM that gets in trouble, but the unfortunate trader that gets the bad rep.

I do that in my private cartels, but as far as I know, city or commune cartels don't have any specific limitations on who is allowed to create the designs in there. The only other thing I can think of is if there is a news post, or a city official has sanctioned it. Sounds like BS to me.

Unless Commune law allows for it (IE, they have explicit permission to do it), no. The cartels belong to the commune, not the trademaster.

Thanks. That's what I thought, but got a bit confused.

And public cartels are also democratic so you can contest Trademaster that you do not like/who is doing crap job.

In the misty days of the past, I got the trademaster of Serenwilde's jewelry cartel to make a design for a brooch that was to be given as an honor to people who did cool stuff for the commune, and was not to be made by anyone else. Took about a week for the first extra copy to show up. I remember we gave one to Vix when she won the first power contest I held as Power Minister. Never heard from them again.

So even with the full support of the Regent, the Moonhart Circle, and the Trademaster, we couldn't keep a single item whose description made it very obvious it was intended to be given out by the Moonhart Circle only from being made by any jeweler who felt like it.

I'd say that whoever is trying to restrict something public now, good luck to them!

City/Commune cartels are cartels in name only.

In practice, they're more like "libraries of cultural designs". The only clan-like perk they have is the news board. There's not even a way for the trademaster to restrict access. If your part of the culture and into the trade, you have access to the designs, period.

So, whoever thought they were creating "private property" designs was being quite unrealistic.

Compared to (say) Aetolia, I like how Lusternia encourages designs to become public. But I think they went too far if the only way to make a private design is to buy an entire cartel for it. They should have made it so that the same mechanism for submitting a public design could also be flagged for a private one, but attached a hefty fee for such designs -- say, 10,000 coins extra (which the crafter would invariably pass on to the customer).

That way you'd still see most submissions be public, thus turning the creative efforts of players to the job of building up the crafts; but still make it possible for all skilled crafters to serve customers who want something unique for a special reason.

Then again, they could still add such a system; it'd just take a new field on the designs that was 0 for "public" and otherwise the user ID of the crafter who designed it, and then the design would only appear for them. Should I post this over on Ideas?

Well... there's already a private flag, which does cost 10,000 gold and restricts access to the item... however, it's only private in that only members of that cartel can make it. If all members of your organization with that tradeskill are in the cartel... well, it's really not that private after all.

Hence why you have to buy your own to keep things *truly* private.

Mine decayed like a year ago.

And now brooches are super comm heavy too so I can't make a replacement. I did mention brooches of honour in my bardic though inspired by the one you made!

Sweet!