oh my bad, sorry

A. You really shouldn't be complaining about a system concept being bad when that is based upon a bug.
B. This family upgrade added a ton of things that have been asked for in the family system, such as being able to have the parents approve the child one at a time. You don't even need to poach kids. Just run your influencing-script over a guard cluster a few times.
C. Honour quests should totally be giving honour because, well, they're honour quests.

Does the size of a publication or theatre production affect honor gained from it? And are there any further gains associated with winning prestige?

I guess I get why you'd want to move away from passive gains for family honour from a gameplay perspective, but just I can not wrap my head around any amount of bashing being/influencing remotely comparable to holding elected positions for a long time from an RP stand point. ):

What about ascension, is there any honour in that?

EDIT: For non-Blood houses anyway, I guess.

I can actually really see it for influencing far more than hunting, because as you influence you're essentially showing of your house and representing it to whomever you influence. Granted, charity influencing certainly shouldn't make the house more honourable (would you think that a poor house was a well-run one?) but for the others you are essentially making your mark upon your surroundings.

I'm with Arel.


This is a great accommodation which will definitely benefit most lesser houses. Unfortunately, it does not benefit the lesser populated orgs nor the newer orgs, as we have no one to pledge to, and are nowhere near achieving great house. There just aren't enough people to fill the ranks.


It's destroying colossi, not bombarding, for flares, I think - and ship to ship battles do not count for PvP. If it is bombarding, this is not working for unaligned families. No one uses ranked sparring. Flares, revolts, plays, and publishing are not things that happen regularly -- they're not things that will give anyone reprieve from grinding out xp the old fashioned way on a regular basis... and honestly, that's fine. It's cool that we got bashing/influencing as ways to actively improve honour... but let's call a spade a spade and not pretend that Shevats can reliably get by without someone influencing a little.

If you look at this list of exclusions you'll see a theme, which to me reads as, 'anything you can do I can do better,' pertaining to great houses. We all get honor from hunting, but great houses also get honor from offering. We can all get honor from debate/pvp in revolts - but only great houses get it from influencing. And then there are things like holding elected positions and doing the epic quest which in reality bring renown to anyone, regardless of their family's ties, but which don't count for anything if the family is not not mechanically allowed to dedicate to an org.



As far as the complaints go -- don't take them as critiques of the system you've worked on, but just accept the fact that getting the full benefits of it is such a distant prospect for some people that it's hard to not feel resentful. 3/6 orgs do not have great houses and are nowhere near to getting them, and so have been told, straight down the cool list of things, "Oh that doesn't apply to you, and realistically, it probably never will."

Hard-hearted Eventru has no sympathy for lesser houses, that is fine... but if you ever did want to throw an additional bone - perhaps consider allowing a lesser house to pledge to an org OR take a patron at some point. It's a long road from 15 members to 50, and could probably do with a waypoint of achievement.

Idea: Let smaller families get absorbed into larger ones with approval of of the family founders!

(For families too small to be a bannerhouse and no chance of growing)

If I may expand on that a little bit.. Perhaps creating Middle Houses (with a population limit of, say 30), which can pledge to an org AND a patron like a Great House can. However, they cannot appoint to the city/commune-council no matter how much honor they get, nor can they take on liege houses (I think lesser houses cannot either?). They can, however, become banner houses to a Great House. Personally, I think that would create a nice middle point; you get a few more benefits, but not the same kind of powers the Great houses can. It's still double the size of a Lesser house, but at least it's not over three times as much.

Both destroying colossi and aetherbombarding should - there was a minor problem with it this morning, but it's fixed.

There is nothing a Great House does that Banner Houses cannot do as well, with the exception of alignment and patron-appointing gains. Everything else is fully within reach of banner houses, by finding a liege house. As I've said, the system is, indeed, designed to encourage Banner Houses to find a liege house, not to sit on their own.

I recognize that a fully realized family will take some time - I'm quite okay with that! As with the Family System, it is a long-term oriented project, not a short-term oriented one. I also recognize some cities (everyone who isn't Magnagora/Serenwilde) do not really have big families, but do have a couple of decent sized families (Glom/Celest) or a few small ones (Hallifax/Gaudiguch) and it will be a bit before we see them start to catch up. I don't think it's as far off, though, as some think - once you hit 25,000 honour (admittedly, not a small task, and it won't be tomorrow), you gain +10 members. A prestigious work is +15,000, unmodified. Same with producing a play that wins the world stage. Doesn't take much!

That'll put Ysav'rai at 46 members, only 4 people shy of GH status. Stormcrow would be at 43, 7 shy of GH status. La'Saet at 42, 8 shy. You're really not that far off!

And complaints/critiques/what have you do not bother me - I'm a big boy! I simply get frustrated when broad statements like "The great majority of honour gains is only for great houses," when it is simply untrue. I think within a few weeks, maybe a month, we'll see a couple more great houses pop up, bannerhouses and great houses will start coming together, and all will be well.

... which seems to be quite a bit at this point. In fact, most of the big gains.

Especially epic quest gains which are absolutely insane (even after the bug fix).

You can't say "with the exception of these" when it affects offering, epic quests, elected positions, OHs, influencing in revolts...

That's really not "one thing" or "a small number of things," that's almost a third of the ways to get honour in the new system!

PS: Liege house requires a great house to align to.

I don't think it would be outrageous to at least allow the historical houses to be set to their historical city. It doesn't make sense to me that the families have a preset orientation and race and but no alignment to a city or commune. It doesn't make sense to me that Shevat isn't actually affiliated with Hallifax, despite being a Hallifax historical house. City/commune affiliation also seems a lot more important than historical orientation. I think this would solve the problems that Hallifax and Gaudiguch have for being relatively new and not having very many families and smaller orgs like Glom, who just don't have the option of going on an adopting spree, even if they weren't competing against other families in the org. I appreciate the hard work that went into designing this new system, but to me is seems like it is just as playable as the old one was and I think it is understandable for people to feel that way and express their opinion and ideas in the hope that our administration takes it into consideration.

Also, what is the base honour gain for hunting? I'm trying to figure out whether the hunting malus for letter houses is going to be lower than the 100 honour needed to prevent honour loss.

But you don't really expect Hallifax houses to banner to Magnagora or Glomdoring to Cele--


Wait, what? Houses just magically gain members once they're over a certain threshold of honor, or are you saying "once we gain +10 members"?

Editing in:
Good point!

100 points is the base. 12% loss for minor, 15% for moderate, 17% for major.

So you'll get 85 points per tick of hunting.

Yes, 25,000 honour gives a +10 weight to members.

Fair point! I did forget about the epic quest (although the ongoing argument was vs decay, so it doesn't really change mine!).

Historical Houses will be locked into their alignment once they reach Great House - we'll talk about banner houses and give it some consideration. I'd thought about it before but it'd require recoding some things, which just makes room for more bugs (grumble).

Edit: And yes, as we were gearing up for the release, it was suggested that honour should play some part in reaching Great House status. In one of the original designs, achieving GH would require a very heavy chunk of honor, but we decided to toss it - instead we decided, late in the game, to add a +10 member weight for families over 25k honour. Indeed, you don't simply have 10 members 'poof' out of nowhere, but it's a fair representation that with great respect comes great influence, and power.

Thank you!

I don't personally have an issue with the decay end of things, since it's not difficult to address that if a family is in any way active, imo; one person in an entire family of (supposedly) at least 5-10 people who log on each day getting a tick or two seems pretty plausible. It's more of an issue for banner houses with really small member numbers, I guess (not as easy to 'spread the effort').



PS: I would still like to get my little family absorbed into something greater!

Actually, I have a question. Say that a family gets 3 ticks of hunting, for +300 honour.

They also get 3 ticks on wanton mayhem for -300 honour.

Net honour gain/loss: 0.

Do they get decay?

Unfortunately I can tell you right now that it probably won't happen. The family system is simply too rigid for anything plausible/worthwhile that I can think of.

However, feel free to make suggestions, and we'll happily discuss them. I think you've a fair enough grasp of where we want the family system and the house system to go to recognize what is and what is not sympatico with that 'vision'.

And if anyone has suggestions on gaining honour, we're happy to listen!

And yes, Xenthos, they would.

Ok, then maybe I can see some validity to the concerns of people worried about getting hit by the decay.

Maybe it shouldn't be based on net gain but just whether or not they've done anything notable at all; according to the message at least, it's talking about how 'nobody has heard of them recently,' which isn't the case if they are getting positives (even if the positives are counteracted).

Plausibility is not an issue for the first part, I feel; say that I wanted to become part of Stormcrow. I as a founder of my family (and the only active one) realize that I am, say, the brother of Synl (or of Ragniliff, as HoH of Stormcrow).

This would end up merging my little family tree quite neatly into the family tree that already exists, just as if I started out bloodbonded to one of them and then got married / had children / etc as part of the Stormcrow family.

I fully understand that from a technical end this may not be so straightforward, but from an RP / justifiable stance it's not at all far-fetched for different 'families' to realize that there is a long lost connection. That's kind of the point of bloodbonding more people into founder status.

Repeating that statement again. At the very least consider tying a honour bonus to whenever a member of a honour-eligible family gets a new honourline. It would represent the house getting known as a house doing awesome stuff for others. Bringing down the soulforge should reflect positively on your house, while raising it should certainly earn you some notoriety.