Why would people set up requirements like that at all? I mean, they have to grade folks and who in their right mind wants to make that much work for themselves?

I remember the interview for rank three in the guardians of Light on Achaea, you missed one question and you failed. It was about an hour long too. If I remember the Occie novicehood test, you had one chance to pass or you were expelled. The last question was whether or not you thought you were ready to pass. Made me nervous to answer that one.

In some IRE games the credits go directly to the GM or city leader. The city leader/GM then spends them, distributes them for prizes, sells them at below-market prices to people within organizations, etc.

It's primarily a difference of opinion for me. I tend to hold the attitude that elected leaders and ministers, secretaries, etc, make fun for other people, because being in such a position tends to involve work. Personally I think there should be some reward in that beyond a massive headache. Perhaps not sole control over the 5% "bonus" given to cities and guilds, but if a person spends easily 50% of their in-game time doing "work things" designed to make the game fun for others, s/he should see some reward beyond the occasional "Gee, Jigan really does a good job at this!"

Though incidentally, in-game political power does not translate directly to substantial disposable income.


I plan to look them up and see if there's one that works for MM2K. However, as Xenthos said, systems like that tend to be quite slow. Though specifically, I actually mean things like "Person has added 2 power by bringing a citizen to the Light" x 10 which all occur at the exact same time. So instead of that times 10, you'd get "Person has added 20 power by bringing 10 citizens to the Light" with just the one time stamp. Admittedly it wouldn't solve the whole problem; it could probably only condense identical things, so it would condense things like putting essence in the nexus x 20, nexus-world critters in the nexus-item there (fish -> urn, etc) and supplicant-style additions.

Well, nothing wrong with the leader deciding to make some sort of guild salary either. I know in Moondancers and Serenwilde, we did just that, so those who do do the work stuff, they get something for it every now and then, and it also leaves credits for the org to use in sales, prizes, and all that too.

The Serenguard still do that-- every IG year the GA, GM, and GC get 5 credits. Being a leader is a load of work if you are any good at it.

Psh, being a leader is easy. I can understand the CL having a hard time, but being in any other position is hardly any amount of work.

Ever served as a GA? If so, you did it wrong. I'm busy enough as the GM, but I'm not half as busy as I was when I was GA. That position is evil. I love it, but it's evil.

Are you joking? It's in text, so it's hard to tell. But I really feel like you've got to be joking.

I like this idea much much better. I don't like the idea of having proceeds from credits I buy going to anyone I don't choose, such as a mentor or the like. It's much better to have them sold to people who actually need them for lessons. I remember trying Imperian and having issues with the way that's done. Your guild leader's an arse? Great! When you buy credits, it lines his pockets!

Though, I do agree that it takes a bit of work to run an organization. Therefore, setting up some sort of payment system from within the guild would work if they want to do that.

I thought GM was really easy, personally.

I really loved Achaea when I first started playing. The customization of characters was really exciting for me. I think I started playing at least 10 years ago. When I first started it was pretty wishy washy. Made characters and forgot about them, and a few that I had commit suicide. Back in 2003? I created a character in the Sylvans. I loved it so much and felt it was like a second family for me. Everyone was really fun. I wasn't so much into role play then. It was also hard to attempt much role play because I was around too many people who just wanted to have fun. My OOC clans were just insane, too. So basically it was just me coming up with stupid games in between doing some fairly excessive guild requirements. I never got any decent positions though, and got passed up for a position for someone who was at least 30 years younger than I was at the time. Made me feel really unappreciated. Never got past city rank 1 even though I helped out with ever forest fire.

Houses made everything worse. There was no order to anything anymore. I understand that the guild requirements were stupidly time consuming, but I wish they didn't use houses to stop the problem. Put the whole thing down to almost no role play. I actually left because I wanted to spend more time with my husband (then finance).

I tried going back more than a year ago . It just wasn't the same. A lot of the people I use to know where there, but it didn't have the same atmosphere, or maybe I was spoiled from playing Lusternia. I just love this game! I'd list everything but I've written too much already.

I wish Celest offered credits/money for their Ministers. Maybe I'll help to make it a rule in the Aquamancers. Being a guild leader I have almost no ability to hunt and it's hard to find time to do other things too.

Never served as GA for any serious amount of time, but both GM and GC are easy. People may want to make it sound like it takes constant work, but man, you just sit around and act powerful.

There's actually nothing stopping GMs from rewarding people like this. I know some guilds will periodically give credits to guild officials as payment.


I'd blame the client, then. The processing that the system and the game would be doing is identical - interpreting lots of strings, parsing through it. The values aren't stored in a form other than a line in a file, so there's actually no in-game efficiency advantage other than leveraging the power of the game server to do the processing rather than a client which may do a poorer job.

As far as grouping the lines together, I actually dislike that because it would increase some ambiguity - instead of knowing how many times you added power, you are now unsure if it's a combined effort or one. Would be pretty simple to adjust this with a client-side system if you preferred it, though.

Ninjakari used to give their leaders each 30 credits every five years. But I felt guilty because less and less people were buying credits, so I stopped it.

We also didn't buy during credit sales, so it was somewhat even.

I don't know if Serenwilde does it any more for leaders and ministers, though they used to. I wouldn't mind it though either .

Yup they still do. Not sure how often, but it is I think, 15 credits for GMs and 10 or 15 credits for Ministers.

It only happens once every 5 IG years, but yes, the GMs, CL, and ministers still get credits.

I started playing Achaea quite a few years ago, when I was still young. (I'm nearly 20 now - I think I started playing Achaea when I was 12-ish.) I found it a lot of fun for what it was, but I wasn't really approaching it with the same mindset a lot of people here seem to've. To me, it was just a fun way of wasting afternoons. "Roleplay encouraged" seemed to mean as long as I wasn't blatantly OOC I could do silly things with impunity. I remember a lot of my early characters were extensively modelled on Final Fantasy characters: I was especially fond of my Kefka occultist! As I got older and (slightly) more mature I started getting more interested in the whole roleplaying aspect of things, and it was then I realised that Achaea wasn't exactly cornering the market in that respect. I tried the other IRE games, Aetolia and Imperian, but they never caught my attention the same way Achaea did. (Irrespective of how fine the roleplaying might've been, since I didn't really play long enough to find out.)

So I started branching out into messageboard roleplaying, MU's, things like that. I'd like to think they honed my roleplaying ability a little. (Probably untrue, though.) It was a couple of months later when I saw an announcement on the IRE website for their newest MUD, so I gave it a look... and was instantly taken in by the history, ambience and skills. I played on a variety of alternate characters before sticking with my Geomancer. I still remember those early days of Lusternia fondly, guarding Nil during the tainted fae event and participating in the mass raids on Faethorn. I'd boulderblast a room and instantly level up by killing about four people, heh. What I liked was how accessible everything was. In Achaea they had novice requirements that could keep you busy for RL weeks: in Lusternia everything seemed tailored to get you equipped as fast as possible and into the wider world.

I quit playing for quite a long period (a few years, I guess) and now I'm back! Back to write pointless summaries of my IRE history.

Yeah, we all enjoy doing that far too much.