Eventru:

We're not merging guilds, heh. Where that idea came from I don't know, but it's pretty out there. I'm pretty sure there's no intention to move from the one-archetype-one-guild setup.

I'm a little skeptical that empty guilds is harming novice retention. If the collegium system isn't working, maybe we should expand it - consider getting rid of the guild administrator/undersecretaries/secretaries abilities to interact with novices and instead give that power to the Ambassador and their aides, to reinforce that novices should be a city-wide responsibility, not a guild-specific one.

That's all well and good, but what role do guilds actually play then? Because if you just push the time for them to enter the guild back, then the problem is just being put off rather than dealing with it.

This almost sounds like you're effectively divorcing the skills except for not actually divorcing the skills. Maybe the players will only join their guild after 50 years have passed?

I'm posting this alongside all this discussion because I feel like it's the most fitting place for it, since it's related. I don't know about any of these ideas about changes to guilds or whatever that are being thrown around. I'm not sure I'd be on board with any of that, and I do not think it is at all necessary.

What I do feel strongly about, however, is my belief that it would be an extremely bad idea to release the monk guilds without the population to support them. Guild population is important. This is something that's been made very apparent to me, playing mainly in Hallifax, where low-population guilds are something of an issue. When people don't have the members of their guild to interact with, or anyone to advance them, they are at much greater risk of getting bored and drifting away. Which means those low population guilds effectively get stuck as low population guilds (and in the vast majority of cases the bored players don't just move to another guild within Hallifax-- they stop playing the character entirely, so the population of the whole city suffers).

And while I might not know how to fix that, I sure as hell know the solution isn't to add another guild into the mix. Please reconsider your stance on this!

IMO, there are only two real problems with small guilds: No one around to answer guild/skill specific questions and no one around to give guildfavors for advancement.

You could say no one to talk or interact with, but there's the city/commune full of people to talk to and interact with. If there isn't then it's not really a small guild issue, it's just a not enough people issue altogether.

Anyway, those two problems are sticklers though. I mean, if RandomGuildie completes all the tasks to get to the next guildrank, but just can't log on when anyone who can check them is around, that sucks. That's frustrating and that would make someone say, "Forget this." pretty quick, I think.

The no one to ask questions problem isn't quite as bad because messages can be used, but having to wait a day (or more) to get an answer to a question you might need to know in order to figure out how to do something or continue something is frustrating too.

I don't really have constructive ideas for these two issues, I just wanted to say that they're the only two real problems I see with tiny guilds. And of the two of them, the guildfavor one is the real bear.

My apologies. I only skinned and scanned through this topic to get a general feel. Although I do agree with certain insights of the guild ghost town, or Lusty being spread too thin (ie would thrive with more players), I'd hate to see the current guilds upended due to both moth mechanical, historical, and RP reasons.

Rather, why not consider how to make orders thrive to emphasize this intra-org tribe feel. I mean, right now... Order identity really hinges on the size of membership and voluntary participation. All of which are heavily correlated with the activity level of the divine patron. I'd personally love to see admin time invested into orders than a Lusty rewrite.

I think a few things could be done to have large effect. For example, upon character creation the newb would pick org/order rather than guild. Let the order be the first point of entry. Use aspects of social interaction and the colleguim that are already in place to guide newbs into guilds. This way a new player would potentially first encounter 1/3 of an org's playerbase rather than that empty guild.

I'm sure more creative minds than mine could brainstorm other ideas... Like repeatable order quests that benefit the org, doing more with the godrealm over guild hall,or offering a few order specific flavor skills through veneration.

I love Lusternia and the admins, but it has to be said that population-wise things are a bit different from when I first started playing Lusternia in 2005 or 2006. I have a vague recollection of bumping into the occasional guildmate back then!

I'm in Europe and mostly play in the mornings and afternoons between lectures during the week, which is decidedly offpeak, but constantly logging in to find that I'm the only member about in both my guild and organisation is getting a bit disheartening. It was particularly difficult when I tried to get into my organisation of choice: I would often hang around for hours before I could find someone to talk to. I stuck with it as I had other things to do, but had I been a complete, true newbie, I doubt I would have. Usually it's so that either I stay up late at night to interact with my organisation, or I don't.

However, I'm not entirely sure if merging guilds would help, and I very much like the RP possibilities of having several distinct organisations within an organisation. I also like the guild representative system in organisational politics. Wouldn't fewer guilds mean a smaller ruling counsil? Just my two cents.

Noola:

IMO, there are only two real problems with small guilds: No one around to answer guild/skill specific questions and no one around to give guildfavors for advancement.

You could say no one to talk or interact with, but there's the city/commune full of people to talk to and interact with. If there isn't then it's not really a small guild issue, it's just a not enough people issue altogether.

Anyway, those two problems are sticklers though. I mean, if RandomGuildie completes all the tasks to get to the next guildrank, but just can't log on when anyone who can check them is around, that sucks. That's frustrating and that would make someone say, "Forget this." pretty quick, I think.

Yes, now of those how many say "forget this" and go to another guild, and what portion say "forget this" and leave the game.

The no one to ask questions problem isn't quite as bad because messages can be used, but having to wait a day (or more) to get an answer to a question you might need to know in order to figure out how to do something or continue something is frustrating too.

I don't really have constructive ideas for these two issues, I just wanted to say that they're the only two real problems I see with tiny guilds. And of the two of them, the guildfavor one is the real bear.

This is actually potentially worse depending on what the question is, also not all true newbies are going to go to message. They may ask around on ct or cgt which isn't terrible but i can see a bit more frustration growing from not being able to get answers. Not getting a guild favour this moment might not impact your ability to play, but some questions could do that.

And again we may be completely wrong but there is an impression that small to dead guilds cost us newbies, which in turn impacts the parent org.

This thread actually gave me an idea that I'm going to try and do. An inter guild clan for RP and contests and things like that. My guild has only a few people in it that it makes trying to do stuff like that exceptionally difficult.

I actively chase away novices and no one is allowed to advance beyond GL 2 so that they can never challenge me for GM. That's just how I roll, yo.

If i can pull this off it means that I can do some cultural stuff with other guilds while I maintain my stranglehold on Caco.

It's a win win situation!

I prefer the way things are right now, for reasons mentioned several times in this thread.

Janalon:


Rather, why not consider how to make orders thrive to emphasize this intra-org tribe feel. I mean, right now... Order identity really hinges on the size of membership and voluntary participation. All of which are heavily correlated with the activity level of the divine patron. I'd personally love to see admin time invested into orders than a Lusty rewrite.

What do you do about orgs that have fewer active orders? Doesn't Gaudiguch only have the one, now?

I'd rather any sort of change be more in the hands of the players, or less centered around worshipping a god. The problem people are describing seems to be rooted around guild numbers, so I think that any solution should be focused directly around the guilds. Making orders more relevant to those who don't really participate in them would be cool (make orderwars work, make godrealms work), but seems like a separate project.

Just to clarify (again), there is not going to be some huge change in the guild or politics system. Also, the new monk guilds will be released when they are released. We are not going to hold back and wait for population to get larger. Sorry! That's the way it is, but keep in mind that it won't occur until next year in any event.

The more I look at the reasons people are posting, the less I think the concern is of the guild rp for most people; rather, it seems the concern is more mechanical in terms of getting guild rank, etc.

Riffing off of shared communication channels, what about letting two guilds BOND together, for either RP reasons or concerns about smaller guilds. This would result in shared GT and Novice chats where you see the chat of both guild channels, i.e., if Hartstone and Serenguard were to join, the GT from cross-guild would appear Hartstone (from Serenguard): or vice versa, etc. They'd also share the GWHO. Perhaps share some novice administration ability as well? GTS would continue to be guild specific and not shared.

If the other concern is the lack of ways to advance in small guilds, perhaps we need more ways to autoadvance? Maybe online activity would gradually give guild advancement and/or doing the city/commune quests would gradually advance people in the guild. Again, just looking for solutions for the perceived problems.

Guild bond sounds like a great idea.

I don't suppose you'd consider allowing bonded guilds to share each skills too?

Per your example, if the Serenguard and Hartstone bond, can a Serenguard learn and use Hartstone skills via the skillflex system?

The guild bonding idea looks like the same thing as guilds merging. I'd be fine with that, it makes a lot of sense.

Sojiro:

Guild bond sounds like a great idea.

I don't suppose you'd consider allowing bonded guilds to share each skills too?

Per your example, if the Serenguard and Hartstone bond, can a Serenguard learn and use Hartstone skills via the skillflex system?

No, this is in no way merging guilds. There's no sharing of skills, they'd each be separate organizations with separate names, elect their own guild leaders, etc. They would simply share some communication across lines with perhaps some shared novice duties (maybe some shared help files?). You'd have to quit one guild and join the other if you want to switch skills (though maybe there could be a special way to move across bonded guilds and only lose half of your guild rank rather than start all over).

Anyway, the above is just brainstorming a general idea that I think may answer some issues raised and something we could conceivably code without massive rewrites. But that's not to say it's something we will do or, if we do it, this would be final form. Feel free to offer ideas and suggestions and I'll respond with what I think would be doable. That's what brainstorming is. However, what probably will not fly is taking the modest idea and expanding it to something extremely complicated. Just saying!

That doesn't sound like it would solve the problem of guild advancement though, or of having people in your guild to talk with. The issue isn't that you don't share enough channels with people to communicate with them, you've got CGT and CT for stuff like that. The issue is that talking to people within your own guild is sketchy when you're only looking at 2-3 people from that particular guild on at the same time. Having a shortcut to talk to people from other guilds wouldn't help that much.

EDIT: And more specifically, I think that the terms 'novice' may be getting muddied here. Personally, I'm not just talking about actual COL or NOV novices here, but GR1 people as well. Having more people available to check off NOV advancement would help, but only so far as it would push the issue back a little. Same with having more auto-advancement. Once the auto-advancement comes to an end, the problem re-asserts itself.

Enyalida:

That doesn't sound like it would solve the problem of guild advancement though, or of having people in your guild to talk with. The issue isn't that you don't share enough channels with people to communicate with them, you've got CGT and CT for stuff like that. The issue is that talking to people within your own guild is sketchy when you're only looking at 2-3 people from that particular guild on at the same time. Having a shortcut to talk to people from other guilds wouldn't help that much.

So some way to auto-advance seems to answer that question. You are strictly talking just about advancing in guild rank? I mean if it really is causing a bunch of angst, we could just get rid of guild rank and have novices, members, leaders.

I'd be fine with that. Guildrank serves little purpose as is, but then the problem still persists in that there will always be some sort of advancement-up-through-levels-of-guild respect present in the game, because that's one of the big things that makes people feel like they are going somewhere with a character. And that at some point, not having anyone around to RP or task your way through that kind of advancement will cause a character to become stale or boring.

How feasible would it be to set up some limited automation when it comes to certain guild tasks? For instance, if a guild says "Get ten of each curative herb", would it be possible to make those checks automated (and customisable by the guilds)? Or would that become a big mess, code-wise? That would solve some of the advancement problems, at least (although there'd still be some human interaction needed when it comes to other advancement tasks such as discussing goals and whatnot).

The idea of having guild bonds is certainly interesting (and I'm not at all opposed to it!), but I don't think it really resolves anything. Granted, it may resolve the complaints ("My GT is too quiet, it's disheartening") but it really strikes me as a placebo. Why not use CT? Or a clan for the same purpose? I understand some people don't like a cluttered CT (especially when they don't like the spam/conversation but want to listen for important things) - maybe a casual, all-encompassing city channel that can be turned off if you simply don't want to engage? Alternately, what do guild bonds offer that the previous notion of Factions wouldn't? More voices on GT? A few more people to push people through the 10 hour novicehood?

After Est went off to ponder the wonders of the Multiverse, a few of us at Havens talked about it and this is my perception of the problem:

• Lack of group identity, people to communicate with in a more intimate manner (someone compared guilds to being like families)
  
• Lack of ability to advance to voting/contesting rank in quiet guilds
  
• Lack of people to help define group identity, group identity restricted by class
  

I talked with a few other admin and we threw around general ideas on Factions. So:

• Every org starts off with 2 base factions with a pre-described 'direction'.
  

1. Examples from brainstorming:
   
2. a faction of artists in Hallifax with a particular opinion about art and how things should be centred around art in its many forms
   
3. a faction of bureaucrats and politicians in Hallifax with a particular opinion about how things should be ordered in direction
   


• Factions have ranks, increased by performing well in favour of your city
  


1. Influencing in revolts
   
2. performing your city quest
   
3. gathering power
   
4. bonus to power gained from squad bashing if your squad is loyal to your faction
   
5. faction rank from faction squad bashing
   


• Factions would be joinable via a simple quest in the collegium, and would be a new Collegium Task.
  
• New factions could be made given a group of players meet certain conditions.
  
• Factions would have the ability to buy a small faction hall, and expand it. Said hall would be in the city, akin to a guild hall.
  


This would also open up the possibility of factions competing for something - particles, power, whatever - for special upgrades just to the faction (could be simple things like faction hall upgrades). Said points could be accrued simply by doing simple tasks, or for competing in larger-scale forms of warfare/competition (Regular coded parallax tournaments? Vengeance tournaments? I don't know). Of course this adds a lot more work to the bill, so I'm not so sure how that would go.

Of course, a lot of this could fall outside the realm of feasible work.

I know the people who were involved in the conversation at Havens felt like this would best address the perceived problems without feeling weak or insufficient. It wouldn't affect the guilds, or take anything away from them, but allow for people of multiple classes to engage as a group with similar ideas.

Thoughts? Would it address your problems/concerns?

Entirely unrelated to factions, we did feel like completing city quests could give guild rank points (an invisible number that counts towards your guild rank) for people below guildrank 3 (so you can get up to a point where you can engage as a full member but not past).

The advancement problem I'm thinking about really isn't necessarily tied to the GR-levels, though those are what we use to make them tangible. The salient point of what I'm trying to bring up is, that small guilds provide for very little interaction with guild mates, and therefore a very poor RP-experience. It's very hard for a novice shofangi (for instance) to truly know what it means to be a shofangi without having a guild leaders about to pass that on to them, and peers to help solidify and sustain that sort of roleplay. In the Serenguard, for example, we try to recognize the things people do and slowly advance them based on tasks and various little optional things they can do. A big part of the significance of these ranks is truly receiving the recognition from your peers and leaders that you're fit for them.
Auto-advancement is actually the worst possible thing you could do, as it takes this away from us and makes guild advancement into another impersonal perfunctory mechanic with absolutely no meaning whatsoever.

The point I'm trying to get across is, making more guilds and spreading the population thinner is overall not a good idea. Small guilds will not and cannot thrive. In fact, by definition a small guild is probably not thriving :P

I understand your desire to see that the commune/city tries to take better care of the novices, so that there is more of an intra-org thing going on rather than individual factions. Truthfully though, beyond little general help, nothing will ever beat having someone from your own guild who can teach you what it means to be in your guild. A spiritsinger won't do very well teaching the history, culture, beliefs, practices and combat style of the Serenguard to a novice, for example..At least not as well as a fellow Serenguard could.

While it's true that at the end of the day Hartstone, Shofangi, Moondancers and Serenguard all share a very vague common goal, they all have very different outlooks on life and put very different emphasis on certain aspects of the organization's culture.



As for the whole guild bonds thing, I'm not really swayed by it. I like how things are now, but I'm only just asking that we try to strengthen what we already have and get a larger playerbase before we release any new guilds.

While a very awesome idea, I don't think that adding factions addresses the actual problem at hand here.

The issue is that guilds have low populations, and it's getting pretty streched. This leads to lower motivation to particpate in guild RP, guild advancement, and guild projects. It also makes it easy for novices to slip through the cracks. While they may be able to find someone to answer their questions and address any factual issues they may have, where are the people to participate in guild-based RP with? Serenguard tribes aren't made of one, after all.

What it sounds like (From the post and talking on Envoys) you're trying to do with factions is simply distract players from the fact that their guild may be a ghost-town. While that may work for a little while, I don't think it's doing anything to actually look at the problem. As long as skills are based entirely on guilds, guilds will be the primary unit of interest to the player. When a player is going to move orgs, it's the guild choice that will determine how much cash or cash stand-ins they will have to chunk out to make the move, not what faction they were in.

I hope that no one will try and deny that at base, game's functional mechanics are based around the guild. The guild is the base unit of Lusternia. The skills your character gets are guild dependent. The leaders that represent them come from the guilds. The envoys that talk to the devteam are based on the guild. Org politics like villages and domoths are based on the guild, in that you need skills to fight, and your political settings are based on the leaders, which are in turn based on the guilds. Adding in another thing won't take away the fact that your character's guild defines a huge portion of what your character can and does do. As such, if there is a problem with guilds (like not having enough population to keep up with ever expanding guilds), it should be addressed at the guild level, or the problem isn't really being fixed, it's only being patched.