Idea: Administrators should just force-strip all VAs down to Vernal Demigods.

I mean, you're already doing this in general anyways, only the blame / ire is getting place onto the people who have to make the votes and hard decisions to 'remove' something that people have earned.

Just go ahead and do us all, then let us the players choose to pick who to re-raise as an organization. It's a subtle difference, but the 'punishment' is coming from the Administration and not creating as much resentment / division amongst the playerbase.

This removes the entire need for 'drain' as well. You can also figure out some power scheme so that re-raising them works out to about the same cost as now. And you can take the burden off our hands. We can either choose to raise new people at the normal (2mil-2mil-4mil-etc) costs, or re-raise a Vernal Demigod at the reduced cost.

Leave stripping it as an option for people who need to have it removed in the future for whatever reason; don't make us punish people who are still active and are still doing good things for our organization.

The whole situation sucks, and it's even worse that we're the ones who have to mete out the punishment.

Edit: Note, I haven't run this by anyone at all for thoughts / opinions. I am venting.

It's not a bad idea. You're certainly not the only one who hates the fact that the time has come to choose who loses out from among several who are active and deserving of an org's high honor. Losing everyone would suck, but at least it would suck for everyone equally.

Not a bad I idea, I guess. But also doesn't really seem all that necessary unless some people are going to be immature about it, and none of the active VA seem THAT childish to me.

I agree. This is a more graceful transition to the demishop changes.
It kind of inflicts a black mark on players RPwise that you can do nothing about.

We've only got two active ones anyway, doesn't hurt us much.

Anyone else see the irony coming from the ascendant who raids for 8 hours straight cause he got zap trained?

How about we just say, "Xenthos the player is going to be immature about this." Ding ding ding, now it's necessary!

It's nice for the players in the sense that it eases their guilt because they can think about it differently when it is essentially the same thing. Instead of voting people off the island and feel terrible, it's more like losing an election and feeling less bad.

It is the same thing when you are looking at it logically, but understandably it can still have an effect

Pretty much. Right.

Still going to suck either way, but at least it's not saying, "Hey you, you're worse than me, goodbye!"

Xenthos, do you need a hug?

I agree.

Or you can man up and decide what's best for your org or what's best for you and ask to be descended so you are not putting your org in the position of being the bad guy. I realise very few of you will do that, but hey, it's always possible someone in the game thinks about someone other than themself.

We have no shortage of people offering to step aside.

That does not change the fact that absolutely none of us want to, or that the situation sucks; simply offering does not really make the decision easier when they're all doing it and you know that the people involved really want to keep it.

Doing it "for the sake of the organization" != "Doing it because you are happy about doing so".

PS: I am told that certain other guildmasters "won't vote for me no matter what," so this is pretty much the only way I lose it at this point. As such... perhaps I am, in fact, trying to be fair / egalitarian here. If everyone else is going to lose it, maybe I should too. We can all start over. Recampaign or whatever, but I don't feel that we should be in the position of doling out the Administration's punishments / prunings for them.

This's their decision, it would be nice if they would not force us to be the bouncers.

The recampaigning sounds just as stressful as the pruning to me.

Perhaps, but I don't think it's quite the same. Campaigning to ascend may be stressful, sure, but it's campaigning to gain an honour. At that point, you don't have it, and if you lose you don't lose anything you didn't already have.

Campaigning to not get pruned is a completely different matter because you've already earned it, you're active, and you're invested in what you've already got. If you lose, you get voted off the island by your peers / friends (to an extent).

I agree, admins should man up and take responsibility for their forced decisions onto players instead of forcing the players to squabble with the forced changes. There is no RP in admins forcing down these changes (at least I saw no event from the almighty gods saying you can't do that anymore), so I'm not sure why should RP be involved in dealing with them.

If Glomdoring wants to strip all their Ascendants and then re-raise one or two, that's certainly something they're welcome to do.

However, I can't imagine just 'stripping' everyone and then letting cities raise from there - it just seems like a messier, less desirable situation - to save a few egos, you're asking for quite a lot more coding, and to wound quite a few others.

Except that we are punished via even more power loss for doing this, so there is a mechanical disincentive (to the tunes of multiple millions of power).

Why not just go ahead and do it yourselves? This is your decision, after all. Why are we your bouncers?

Well, I realize you're upset, so I'm just going to back away from it.

Well, yes.

However, I do think that if you just strip us all, give us 500k each for the 4 we were going to drop and 1 million each for the 3 we were going to keep, we can at least try to move forward in a more positive manner instead of spending days arguing over who to remove stuff from, with time limitations. We can choose to re-raise on our own schedule, not have to worry about drainage, etc.