I realize the Divine are already in a discussion regarding this, however, I would like to throw my support behind the fact that the Library and Culture systems should not exist as mechanics for Librarians to try and "game" the system to get the highest possible culture score through publishing anything that comes across their desk.

As an example, for those who are not aware, I logged in yesterday and checked what books were outstanding to be critiqued. Lo and behold, what did I find? No less than 20 novice essays had been published by one of the Libraries. These essays were all clearly written by novices in one particular guild, and were just as clearly required writing. How can I deduce this, you ask? Simply, because nearly all of the authors are still novices, or are no longer in that guild, or are rogues, and generally they all have little to no reputation.

How did these once-upon-a-time-novices publish these required essays, you ask? Why, simple. The Librarian copied them all into scrolls him/herself, and therefore they are all listed as being authored by him/her, except in the title page where it briefly states "Authored by X, Transcribed by Librarian-Y".

I cannot state how utterly appaled I am that within a week of libraries being implemented this nameless person has tried to game the system by publishing essays which s/he has collected from in-game years of required novice essays. It is simply ridiculous. Let us ignore for a moment the fact that this person smearing their name all over the libraries by "transcribing" and publishing the work of his/her guild's novices is a vainglorious and detestable attempt to garner some form of fame.

I have been very proud of several Magnagorans who have gone out of their way to write exceptional treatises and theories, some done and being edited, some nearly done, and some still in the drafting stages. These are exceptional, multi-page works which will provide interesting reads, regardless of which city you live in (as several take no stance).

In sharp contrast, of all 20 novice essays submitted, only 1 was worth reading and truly interesting. The rest are just drivel written by novices to try and appease their superiors in the guild to let them advance to the next rank. This sort of trash should not be published and flooding the Great Libraries. If you want to keep a catalog of your guild's novice essays, then do so in your guild's library, or archived but not published in your city library.

I implore the Administration to take steps to prevent this from occuring. I would hate to see a system designed to bring interesting reading and cultural background to Lusternia degrade into a race to see which guild can require more essays from novices. I have refused to do this thus far, and will continue to refuse to do so until a decision is made.

I further hope that the leader of the city/commune whose Librarian did this will take a serious look at the integrity of such a person, and give some thought to replacing this person with someone who actually grasps the concept behind the library system.

This makes Quiggy sad . Sad Quiggy becomes angry Quiggy.

*Kicks said person*

I'm glad the Contemplations of the Moon Coven (optional stuff for one of the methods of advancement) are to be spoken, not written

*hates essays, and systems that encourage them*

Don't implore us. Implore your librarian to make a critique raising the points you think are valid.

If a critique is found valid, the library the book came from will suffer credibility. On the other hand, if your critique is found invalid, your library will suffer credibility. Thus, it is encumbant upon the librarian to make well-thought and valid critiques.

Don't count on the administration to oversee what books get published. That's the entire point of the critique system so that players (through their librarians) can monitor themselves.

People will always be idiots, Nok. That's why we need to have silly restraints in place, and that's why they weren't already: because the staff believed that those appointed as Librarians (and aides?) would have more sense than to try such sheer idiocy.

Edit: /me forgot critiquing. In any case, there is a way to stop it, but boy, imagine the negative impact that's going to have.

I'd have to agree, it sounds like this is going to cost the Library that did so for quite a long time with all the negative reviews they will garner.

One thing though, if a book is successfully critiqued after publishing, does it disappear? Or just have those bad reviews associated with it from then on?

I'm not so sure the critiquing for this thing is valid as far as the rules go.

That is my concern as well. The rules in HELP PUBLISHING make it fairly clear that things should only be critiqued if they are abysmally horrible in terms of grammar, spelling, layout, etc. I believe the standard used in that file is "if you can tell it is rubbish by glancing at it."

While I would certainly consider 20-odd novice essays to be rubbish, there's very little grammatically incorrect with them, and what I have found could be classified as nitpicking, bar a few cases. Is it really the intent that as long as whatever junk I write up is grammatically correct and has an appealing layout with a minimum of information (a few paragraphs, at most), that I can publish it and earn my city a cultural score?

With 20 of them, I'm sure you can imagine wanting some clarification on the topic before issuing a set of critiques that are not standard to the scroll with no prior critique precedent upon which to base it.

Well, being from said nameless guild, I can assure you that those essays have been sitting in the guild library in magically preserved letters since they were written for this very purpose. As soon as we got a real library, we imediately began working to move them over.

In addition, we have held several contests over the years to get good works ready for our library. I don't know about you, but all I see is good planning.

Not being from said nameless guild, I don't know how good the writings are. But if it works, then every guild will start churning out near-worthless drivel to get published in order to get tons of works published and their culture score sky-high. If you have been planning to move the works over to a real library eventually, fine, thats super, good job, excellent planning! But you shouldn't publish them unless they are unparalleled works of exquisite quality, worksmanship, and scholasticisim/creativity. Im not sure, but most novice essays don't really count.

Has anybody considered that maybe the other guys just want to get a big library so there's a lot of stuff to read and let everybody read them? The culture score is great and all, but I just want really full libraries so I can spend a lot of time reading. Right now its frustrating when libraries only have one copy of everything. :-( The only book I've been able to check out is the one I donated copies to.

If Celest wants to keep track of all their essays in game, I say go for it! It gives a living history. Now, whether it's worthy of bosting Celest's culture score or not is a decision for the reviewers and the gods.

A couple of questions:

1) If the Divine ever want to write something for the Libraries, will they be able to? I can understand if they don't want to interfere with the culture score, but I wouldn't mind just reading some scrolls from them. I just want to make sure it won't be considered "violating the culture score" or getting special treatment.

2) Can a person get a library card from another city? I'm thinking about getting a card for Celest and maybe Glomdoring (although they don't have a librarian yet). Or is that redundant with the publishing process?

Can't you put books in that aren't published for culture purposes? *not sure how this works*

I was under the impression that all libraries had the same books in them, am I mistaken?

Aye you can. They did not have to publish them to have them in their archives.

While I agree with Nokraemon that such a collection of essays is somewhat poor I think that you are overreacting. I mean, it would be nice if only cool books would be published but just look at your next bookstore and you will find so much crap that this collection of essays will appear as if written by a very good author. Of course it is not fair to compare the books here with rl-books but then they have a lot in common and there will always be good books and bad books.

Let's not get too torqued up about the culture score...Let's just work on making books first and then we can worry about power and stuff later on.

Once again, Kudos to the Divine.

It helps to realise that unlike "novice score" the "catalog size" is a standard amount that gets added to the largest library, it does not increase as a library publishes more books, the amount of culture gained remains the same.

As far as I've been told by the Divine I've spoken to for the Library system, the critiquing system is meant to be used for grammar and spelling and formatting, that sort of thing. If, instead, it's meant to be based on the content of the piece, please tell us this instead. It's frustrating to see things like this crop up when we're being told different stories out of different sides of what should be the same mouth. Those books wouldn't be in the library were I not specifically told to publish all of the books we put in that we didn't want to be private.

Frankly there are some really silly concepts in my mind being employed as far as the library system is developing so far, and I really think it would be useful if the Librarians could give some input to help it work better for everybody. Maybe this could be arranged?

Books don't have to be published. This person could have simply submitted the novice essays to the library and they would still be viewable and able to be checked out like any other book without impacting the culture score.

This pisses me off. I am going to form a lynch mob. Someone get me a pitchfork.

Books that aren't published in a library aren't worth anything as far as the current system is concerned. There's no point in not publishing a book that's more than just drivel unless you're just archiving it for storage. Don't tell us to try to expand our library then get upset when we expand our library. If the system made any sense there would be a worth to all books added and a greater worth to published books, and published books should be open to all forms of criticism, not just grammar and spelling errors that can be easily taken care of by writing the text in MS Word. As it is it's a pretty silly concept given that everyone's libraries end up being the same effective "size" purely based on what they publish, and these books then end up in all the libraries. Poor design spec, but one that I think could be salvaged with the proper tweaking.