Id like each of the guilds patrons to take on the responsibility of removing players from their positions who are inactive and in areas critical to the guilds running such as GM, secretaries, champion etc.
Most people who are going to be away for an extended period of time in real life are good and step down but some just dont care what happens in their guild and only care about a title and these people need to get dropped.
GM's usually take care of this promptly as they actualy care about the daily running of their guilds but there will eventualy be GM's who just dont care and these are the worst, the ones who pop in once a real life week, do some mail and leave.
I see no point in allowing somebody to sit on a position who is never around, you can do your job good you can do it badly but you gotta at least show up to do it or your taking the fun out of the game for the rest of the guild and stopping some other player who would at least be around to make the world more lively. Stagnation is a huge reason for players leaving both guild and game and I hate seeing people leave because their guild is about as active as a tomb.
A simple nudge from the guild patron should be all it takes to get the GM to make the right decision in timely removals and replacements if it looks like things are grinding down but if thats not enough it should be understood that the gods will act in the best interestes of all the players and drop those who are not participating fully in the game.

That's the GM's job. If a bad GM is leaving people in their positions, then contest the GM.

The problem here is that the guilds are new and not many people have rank, so it's very possible that the people who do want to contest just can't.

GM's select secretaries loyal to them as a result 99% of secretaries want to keep things running just as they are and very few will want to contest an absent GM as they were put in office by that person and dont want anybody else to take over who could potential remove them from power. In addition the price for a failed contestation is usually the end of that particular secretaries guild prospects so unless its a sure thing guild contestations will rarely happen. What will more likely happen is people get bored and leave the guild or game.
Well theres eight other guilds you can go to you say. But why should one person be allowed to stagnate an entire guild and all its players just because they have lost interest in the game?
I think if the gods just made it known they would step in and remove people who werent active from positions that are critical to RP and the functioning of the game world it would be a big step and most people would just take their word that they would enforce it and there would be alot more back room discussions and private messages urging people to step down if they couldnt be around enough to fulfuill their obligations to their fellow players.

I do think the difficulty is that if you are the one to -start- the contention, and you fail, you're pretty much toast while that 'administration', as it were, remains in power.

But it's the people around who'll get to vote, so if the GM is truly stagnant the contestation should work. If it fails, it means they have the support of more of the voting populace of the guild, and you have to accept that.

Theoretically.

More commonly what happens is that word gets back to the GM and the other inactive people via IMing and so on, the GM comes back and makes a few posts about how they'll be back in the realms soon, the inactive people all vote for the GM, GM wins and goes inactive again.

Or so it always seems.

The secretarial slots also go stagnate as people pack it with their OOC friends and then when their OOC friends go dormant they say. "Just keep me as a sec for a couple more weeks, I might be back", person doesnt come back and thats one sec slot just idling dumping more work on the other secretaries and hurting the functioning of the guild.
Extremes can exist where out of 7 or 8 secretarial slots only 2 or 3 are active and the others are nowhere to be seen, thats not a guild, thats a power blockage that needs to get broken up and in these situations I dont think the players have the power to resolve the problem, generaly these things take MONTHS real time to resolve on their own and by that time the guild is a hollow shell of RP with nobody talking to each other and absolutly nothing going on to advance plots or make it interesting for new members slowly turning the guild into nothing more than a glorified chat channel.
Which is why I think in these situation the gods need to step in. It doesnt have to be heavy handed, most people are not dense enough to ignore a msg from their guild patron asking them to either become more active or gracefully step down.
Which brings up the other point that most GMs and Secs are either A) power junkies or friends of said powerjunky and would rather cut their own arms off rather than give up a title and power over newbies, they would rather retain power and title than see the guild flourish. (not all GMs and secs, Im just referring to the ones who sit on positions while absent) Which is why I have such a problem with absent players in postions that are so important to RP and the well being of the player base.

Delver, can you please put spaces between your paragraphs? Please? I don't want to sound insulting or anything but it just makes it a lot easier on the eyes to read.

Agreed pretty much Delver.

Remember, everyone who can vote was favoured by guild leadership to get the right to vote. Hence, generally, they like the guild leadership and the leadership likes them. I won't even get into what I saw happen in Imperian with guild leaderships totally consisting of OOC friends.

hehe, sorry bout the spacing thought the indents were working

I dont have a problem with people who promote their OOC friends, after all the only difference between an OOC friend who you hang out with online and one you met in game and hang out with and talk OOC in msg's is distance.

You'll never stop that from happening. Having said that however the OOC friend relationships are the ones that lead most often to the situations I was talking about in my earlier posts. But realisticaly your never going to stop that, thats just life.

All Im talking about is clarifing the system of checks and balances for the benefit of the guilds.

And while were talking about checks and balances IC Nepotism should be recognized as the blight it is on the guilds power structure and banned by the gods. It looks sooooo bad when you see that GM PowerPuff is running a guild and 3 or 4 of the 8 secs are PowerPuff's, its like wtf. At that point your not in a guild but a private club and any contributions you might be able to offer are less important than if your last name is PowerPuff.

At that point any votes the guild has to make break along family lines. Instead of what is best for the guild people vote to help promote another PowerPuff's ideas regardless of the benefit to the guild, as long as it keeps the PowerPuff's in power its gotta be good. After all who wants the evil Studmuffins from having more members in power?

Theres all these guild requirements and flaming hoops newbies have to jump through to make gr rank but time and again in the guilds that I have chars I see family members of higher ranks just rocketing up to voting gr so they can help promote their family members agendas. That stuff should be squashed hard.
I mean whats the check on that? Complain to the sec whos promoting his family member? All that earns the charecter is a perma gr1 ticket. Complain loud enough and you get a GDF....you rocked the boat so its only fair.

Its stuff like that where the players have NO recourse other than to suck on it or leave the guild that the gods need to step in on.

I really hope what Im seeing is just the game going through growing pains. I know the gods are working their butts off on so many things right now but maybe in time they will get around to addressing these things because if these two things. (absent players in positions of power and nepotism) are not dealt with alot of really good new players I think will just walk away from the game before they really get a taste of what the game has to offer.

People who really like the game will gravitate towards those guilds that dont have these problems in them and thats fine for those in the know but what about all the first time players coming in to try Lusternia who get stuck in a lame guild that nobody is around in and nobody will even talk to unless they get branded as a PowerPuff? A short boring game life followed by suicide at under age 20 for the majority I think.

Nepotism and abuse of power is a valid RP set-up too.

It can be overthrown, and has been many times over. It's just that people tend to go "it's too hard" and leave rather than actually attempting such.

This would be more interesting if 1) Instead of one big family, you have several smaller families with blood ties among each other (like, the GM's daughter marries Joe, so Joe becomes a secretary, and Joe's nephew becomes an under secretary) and 2) You didn't pick your family members so carefully, so that there would be more of a chance for internal strife in a family, because usually I don't see family members being supported despite unpopular ideas, instead I see everyone in a family thinking much along the same lines, so it's only natural to support each other.

In every IRE mud I have played, I have had some sort of position that required me to either be voted in, or appointed.

I don't know any players OOC, as those who talk to me OOC find I quickly forget who they are, or talk for a few weeks then suddenly dissapear.

However, I have this wonderfull ability to get myself into some IN group and quickly spot who the major players are, and integrate myself with them. Ofcourse I sometimes play this the opposite way finding the right people to insult so that soon theres all this drama in my life. I think if your not able to do this in some way, then your probabbly not quite ready for those positions of authority.

Hope that doesn't sound like bragging, its just how I see it removing emotion and all those "proper words" from the situation.