Edit: Bleh.. forget it.

Heh, my idea wasn't quite like that, I don't plan it to be much like the lineage-based vampires at all except for the fact it isn't a newbie option.

I was imagining more of an latent aetheric (energy that runs through all planes, not the same as ethereal) magic in certain people that could be awoken by a different method in each city or commune. That method would involve a hard-coded quest that was almost impossible without the complicity of other players in the organization. The skills would involve manipulating the aetheric energy (with 4 specializations), using it to influence the strings of fate that connect all sentient beings, and something else. The drawbacks of choosing to embrace this awoken ability would be both statistical and cultural, but I haven't quite balanced it yet. It's all very much in my head at this stage.

Anyway, thanks everyone for your comments, I think I have some ideas of what to avoid now.

Edit: I forgot it's 'aetheric' here - that nifty aetherway stuff.

Cool idea. We hear a lot about aetherwaves and aether, making a skillset related to it would be interesting.

Basically I think that to keep an elitist guild elitist you need two things:
1) You can only get in with the help of someone who's already a member.
2) Recruiting another member is a power tradeoff that nobody will want to do more than three times; most people will only do it once, if at all.

As long as it isn't other players deciding who inducts you, it's fine. The moment other players can choose and cannot we have the same problem than with forestal guilds in Achaea, where to be classed you needed to be friend with somebody higher than you, people felt excluded and a lot of people couldn't enjoy that part of the game because they weren't friends with the right people. That's why lusternia put autoclassing it

The whole point of such guilds would be that the only way to get in is by having contacts. It's for experienced players, for people who have been in the game for a while and want a new challenge. Besides, Lusternia doesn't have autoclassing except for the class you get during chargen; if you quit your guild, or if you don't pick a guild while your character is being generated, you have to ask an undersec to get into a guild.

And once you get into the guild, you're automatically "classed."

So, you can only be of a certain guild if you're in the right families, group of friends, you know the right people OOC (yes, we know OOC doesn't matter in game, but this is a fact that happens) and you jump through all the loops said people who just happened to be there at the beggining tell you to.

No fun in there, sorry. I'd very much prefer this controlled by Gods or game mechanics, if only to make sure it's fair. Just because you're a non social experienced player you don't deserve being automatically out of a nifty new skillset or sudenly have a strong urge to go and lick the leaders boots.

This doesn't happen with the common guilds, why would it happen with an 'elitist' one? The only effective difference is that with an elitist guild you'd have to join through a member, instead of being automatically put into the guild by the chargen process. Yes it would be hard to get into such a guild (If the proper limitations are in place), and yes some people won't ever get in, but if you put that kind of thing exclusively in the hands of gods or game mechanics it stops being an elitist guild pretty fast. The game belongs to the players, and I'd prefer that as many things as possible are kept in the hands of the players. An elitist guild would add flavour to the game, and give older characters a new challenge to work for that doesn't involve getting demigod or transing everything. It's not an elitist guild if anybody after a certain level can get in; it's a high-level guild, and those are not fun. Trust me, in Aetolia, if you really wanted it, it wasn't all that hard to find a vampire and get embraced, even before there were too many vampires.

Somehow I can just see the people who suddenly change thier rp to fit into the elite guild with thier friends to pwns everyone.

I think it would make more sense if after you played for X amount of hours and your charachter has been around for X amount of years, you get the option to open up a new skillset based on the guild your allready in.

The elite guild wouldn't be stronger, that would be stupid, since that would hit game balance like, uh, something heavy. In fact playing such a guild would be harder than playing one of the standard guilds, and it would have a very rigid RP; it would be for people seeking a challenge, not for someone after a nifty skillset.

And the idea of having a special archetype-related skillset you can pick after playing for so many hours is interesting, although I think that instead of playtime it should be bestowed by a god, any god, and would variate slightly depending on the god that allows you to take the skillset. More interesting, it rewards players who RP well and not just people who stay online a lot, or old farts with characters older than open beta.

Thing is, on the average guild, you're put there at the beggining, and to kick you out you need to do something wrong or everybody would look strange at the person who kicked you (there have been occurrences of strange outguildings, I am sure, but so far it isn't a problem).

In the case of an elitist guild, you'd end up like trying to gain entrance to certain clans, where what matters is who're you friend to, or like gaining entrance to a family. The leadership would have a kind of ownership on who enters said guild, and thus oligarchies are easily formed (you no friend, you no guildie) because the leadership has enough friends there to stay even if a contest is raised.

At first, vampires started off very elite and the roleplay was awesome. However, the mechanism for induction was available to everyone (because there was no guild) and thus you eventually end up with all sorts of persons who just ruin it.

I'm talking:

- I'm a sun-loving vampire who worships the Light - oh how I suffer

- I'm a supressed vampire who can never achieve a higher bloodrank and as such, I am lesser than my maker. REBELLION!

- I'm vampire hunter D. I'm a vampire who hunts vampires because I saw this cool anime show about it.

=====================================================

With no central structure, no one to give backbone to the guild... it just fell apart. It was like giving every Nikua-ish person out there the ability to inguild.

On another note, the idea of an "elite" guild also sends the impression of "elite" abilities, which is not the case at all.

In fact if you look at the Bloodborn, Hematurgy is one of the most unfeasible skillsets of all time. While it does have some powerful abilities, they are so difficult to pull off that in any given combat situation, most of them are not worth having because attempting to use one could potentially kill you (or give you 10 afflictions, web/break all your limbs, etc) if messed up (which includes receiving any hindering affliction from an enemy).

It really got to the point where it was honest to god sickening.

Thinking about going back to Aetolia and be vampire hunter?

Me and Lamaril wanted to be Luminar vamire hunters but meh, i wasnt as good in fighting as he was, so it was he who was vampire hunter.

I learned how to fight here and i still have a lot to learn.

Dood, Blade! Screws Vampire Hunter D.

Heh, I was embraced by Lucimal, he got a clan, and Kijin and I (Kuja) were all of a sudden "princes". I was sooo a MUD newbie though, I didn't really have a grasp of what all was going on.

And this whole elitist class thing reminds me kind of classes in RO, after you get level 100 or something, I think you can go higher, you get the option to turn your assassin into an assassin cross or something like that (never did get higher than lv 65, so I'm going based off of what I heard from someone else).

i like the idea of elitist organizations, but i don't think they fit into the context of lusternia.

that gives me a pretty neat idea, what if there was a game where every organization there was required invitation, and so most people would be like pesants, and very few people would belong to fighting classes, or be monks(non-fighting, like a game that didn't revolve around fighting), or other things. like lords and such. maybe mages too, like they must ask a mage to become an assistant first, then when the full mage decides(or just decides not), they can choose to allow them to become a full mage? something odd like that...

Hajamin's idea has merit, if it was worth all the coding and design work to allow players to custom design character abilties in the same way they custom design clothing/jewelry/etc.

It'd be beyond cool to have a MUD based on something like the pencil-&-paper RPG Hero System, where you could custom design pretty much every aspect of your character, right down to race, based on a point system.

Players are willing to spend 1,000 credits for a manse shop. How many would they be willing to spend to design their own unique race which no one could play without their permission? Or just to start their own exclusive guild?

But beyond something that miraculous, where every player had the right to design and oversee his own little prestige group if he was willing to pay through the nose? No, I wouldn't support the plan. Bad idea.

Human nature being what it is, your "prestige class" would either remain so ultra-exclusive as to not have been worth coding in the first place (just a stupid little clique of brown-nosers); or become so open that anyone could get in, thus rendering the whole experiment pointless.

The sheer stupidity possible within the guild system as I found it on Achaea drove me to spend most of my time there with neither guild nor class.