Lag.

Punishments.
Force them to interact by dropping tasks on their shoulders and punishing them for failure or simply asking them to.
Delegate some work and get them talking to one another.
Threaten them with a loaded Shaddus.
Set them on fire.
Offer rewards for completion of special tasks.

Reward one single person, publicly, for completing a task you gave them. Thus, a line is drawn in the subconscious, suggesting that similarly assisting you in your happy fun time may end up with rewards too. Occasionally give out another reward, ensure they try to one up one another, have them vie for the top award. Get them in a life or death struggle for your affection, and then stomp on the fingers of the person who climbs up the hill to your feet. And then laugh as they fall all the way down the mountain only to vainly stand and try again. And when they reach your feet once more, give them a guildfavour for providing you amusement and doing so against adversity. Train them to do this until they learn to love it. Stockholm syndrome will get them to like the pain associated with failing you, and the pleasure of assisting you. They will learn to obey or die trying. And then they shall raise an altar to you, in which they will offer the bodies of those who failed to achieve your grand design, and to prevent them from viewing your visage, and allow them to never remember what you look like, merely what you are, you will wear a mask. And then your mask will remain, and the maggots who squirm underneath you will struggle to fulfill your designs, and assist you in leading your guild.



Or offer cupcakes. That works too.

I miss my guild, I know it's fine, but but.. I'm so used to being there.

Edit: People messaging me about not receiving credits, well, you will when I can get around to it.

My net profit on artisanry is now down to negative 6500 gold in the last two years. After the previous customer refused to pay for the labor or refund me for the 2500 gold worth of onyx I put into the design, I managed to get someone who actually paid for a job. Then I got a customer who wanted me to do a throne design but wouldn't tell me what she wanted. I charged her the 1000 gold for my time doing the writing for her, spent about an hour writing, only to have to spend another hour having her harangue me about it and change her mind over and over and over, and eventually rewrite it. Surprise surprise: she didn't tell me what she wanted, and then I didn't do exactly what she wanted! I probably spent another hour total in all the subsequent changes (even after it was submitted she changed her mind about it several times and each time required me to message her back everything about it). What do I get for my trouble? She is now accusing me of dishonesty because of the 5000 gold that she paid for the design fee (like that's in my pocket!) because it's in the cartel she originally wanted it in. So now I had to refund it out of my pocket and get the design trashed and mail her a copy of it. I wonder if the next trademaster who gets stuck with her will have the same troubles of her changing her mind constantly and failing to say what she means and blaming him for it, or if I'll have smoothed out all those wrinkles for him, since he now gets a completely submitted and approved design from the get-go. Even in the latter case, I feel sure he'll end up regretting the time spent working with her. Gaaaaaaah!

-hug-


Also, I saw that Jigan.

Life as an Artisan is hard, we should form a support group.

We should. Especially since that's not actually counting the grief of constructing that throne, which I'm sure will be an adventure in and of itself.

There is one very important thing to consider, I can't follow you to Celest



No stealing my only aeromancer motivation.

I wouldn't have given the design back after all that.

Come to Magnagora. We have Art!

And I really do feel for you Lendren. I don't know where you get customers like that though, I have never had this happen to me and you were -way- too nice to that person and charged them too little. I try to tip lavishly, especially Artisans!

Disconnects should keep the same defenses as a death. Laptop died, I turned it back on and was running lusternia in SECONDS. 30 power worth of defenses gone.
Actually, I didn't even keep the small stuff I normally do like perfection and kingdom.

I think it's kind of lame that Hallifax's guards don't have greet messages for when citizens walk in and out of the room. Not too mention those who have a Mandala don't get the special greet messages everyone else gets for their orgbix.

Hm, I don't think Gaudiguch has anything for the belt either, though our guards do greet people so I guess it's a bit give and take.

I overslept and missed my part of the epic quest.

Stupid Full Moon.

Some defenses are lost whenever you reconnect to the game for whatever reason, but if you still have some it means your character was never actually logged out. If you lost them all the character must have actually been out of the game.

I think that's how it works, anyway.

Heard some rumours and quickly acted upon them, only to find that they were indeed just rumours and I had just made a fool out of myself. Oddly enough, it astounds me that people would lie to others in a silly text RPG.

Feels bad, man.

It may be a game, but alas, people are still people.

I would rather not have to deal with the inevitable backlash of how that 1000 gold comprises theft or something. In fact, in the interests of not having to deal with people who should only be dealt with via shovels to the face, I'm asking people to contest me. TM of a commune cartel is a lot of grief and a lot of net loss (I can't count the number of 5000 gold submission fees I had to front) and no actual advantages.

You should never ever ever ever ever do this. It sets precedence for people whose "alts" remember everything from "former lives", and any moron who seriously goes public and tries to make you look like a scammer over the submission fee will just look like... a moron.

I think such things are easily-enough added, it just needs the leadership to have a chat with the Patron. I could, however, be entirely wrong and adding such things could be a nightmare on par with revamping the family system, the commodity system, and forging all at once on dialup while riding a unicycle and being pelted with peanuts by a monkey the Librarian.