How to make clans more appealing?

[Fujikoma]

Ok, just thought I'd weigh in again here. I don't have a lot of experience with clans outside the Byn and a brief stint in the Fist. I am in a non-military clan, which supposedly has a schedule somewhere, but I just do what I want, screw it, the second I can't, I'm leaving. The aggressive push for PCs is really unnecessary because PCs do want to join, it's just a matter of keeping your hunters alive and training long enough to have a decent number of them, and having the patience to wait, and keeping your crafters from getting bored to tears and frustrated with people crying about "Where are my orders? It's been months!". I have seen some approaches to recruiting I don't necessarily agree with, but I will not go into specifics. Someone should WANT to join your clan, because let's face it, you're badass and so are the perks. Just because it doesn't happen now doesn't mean everyone else is a rich, fat-cat indie wearing silks and dining on expensive food, it means you're competing with other clans, you have the local militia, the other GMHs, Noble Houses, and if you're in Nak, you have to compete with the black hole that is the Byn. It's certainly not easy, but it's doable, it just requires patience.

I do think some pay would be nice, but I'm sure if you civilly try to work something out with your employer they will be understanding. If they are not then maybe you shouldn't work for them and they can solo RP being a badass in an empty compound, hey, if that's how you get your jollies, who am I to judge? I do think some privacy would be nice, although mudsex in areas with open clan access is always a thrill. I do think some RPTs would be fun, yes, but first you must have the numbers and not be over-ambitious with what you plan, because you know the admins are going to have the environment respond very much to the movement of your group, and it's just good to consider "ok, at this time, what do we have the resources to -reasonably- do?", or you end up with a bunch of dead clannies and you start over again. Hell, they'll come after you even if you didn't plan an RPT, they're some awesome volunteers out to make sure you have a good time, even if that good time involves a mantis head, lots of cursewords, and a bit of crying.

Just my current thoughts, feel free to ignore, you were probably going to do that without my saying so, but if you are then it really doesn't matter anyway because you skimmed this.

[Quirk]

Not really. In practice, status is attained when you rank up beyond the very first recruit/probation rank. A hump that is actually a challenge for many players to get over, given that this takes at least 6 RL weeks in most clans and the average PC lifespan is probably closer to 2.

Yes, really. Going from indie to entry-level GMH employee is a full jump in the Tuluki caste system. Making enough contacts in game as an indie to effectively overcome this and matter more to the people that matter takes a long time. In that time, the GMH employee can jump another rank without any real need for imagination on their part simply by turning up in accord with the schedule on a fairly regular basis.

Noble Houses have conflict with each other. There is also internal clan conflict between members of the same clan - competition for promotions, the employer's favor, or simple dislike for one another. The Byn is basically paid to have conflicts with other people or things. The militias have conflicts with criminals and the opposite city.

If you want to talk about GMH conflict, yeah, GMHs probably aren't going to duke it out with each other because the monopolies are set. There's still scheming, looking for (and fighting for) new resources, and potentially conflict between GMHs and tribes that believe they own some land and everything that can be found on it.

Yes: the point here is that most of the GMH-level conflict is pretty lackluster compared to what you can foment with a group of PCs who don't have ties to an existing clan. I think I've posted on this topic at length enough already.

The first actual issue on your list that I agree exists. But a clan schedule isn't the root cause of the problem here. It's that a limited playtime means that your interaction with fellow employees and your employer is going to be based largely on how lucky you get. But that's the case if you're independent too, when it comes to finding interaction with other players.

The schedule is absolutely a major cause of the problem here. It's generally going to be easier to find interaction as an indie going to taverns than it is to find it in a clan that isn't booming, and your clan might go from booming to empty in just a few hours of you getting to play in it.

And getting into plots with a city-wide or world-wide scope is faster inside a clan. What is this game actually about for any particular player? A player that prefers to skill up will find the best way to do that, and a player who prefers entry into big plots will find the best way to do that too.

Big plots move slow. If you're roleplay-focused, I think it can be argued strongly that being in some clans will worsen your game experience in the large.

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, clans are recruiting aggressively because these clans are ICly appealing, yet no one is clamoring to get in. If there was more competition to get into a clan, there would be less recruiting, less offering and less announcements.

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, currently my little slice of indie heaven is stuffed full of clanned, and they don't appear to be cutting their recruiting back or recruiting more skilled PCs. Competition's doing nothing. However, the alleged prestige of these roles is meaningless when they tie up such a large proportion of the playerbase. They'd be a lot more prestigious if they had fewer roles and were significantly harder to get into.

If you're of the belief that indies remain indie to skill, then money makes skilling sustainable.

Not while you can get all the food and water you want in the wilds. The complaint isn't that indies can sustain themselves (and arguing that indies shouldn't be able to sustain themselves would be, I submit, crushingly stupid), but that they have too much spare coin going round.

[Quirk]

Of Murder Corruption and Betrayal, all thee can take place and have massive consequences on the game world without more than two or even one PC being in the know.  Tuluk, for example, prides itself on anything of the sort being done behind the scenes/under the table, and even in Allanak, it's not always (I would even say hardly ever)  a good idea to go about causing trouble for all to see.

And that's a problem. If clan-wide conflict involves just two PCs and nobody else finds out about it, it's about as much use as a chocolate teapot as far as providing story hooks to the rest of the playerbase goes.

[Cutthroat]

If you actually play in a clan in Tuluk or Allanak, clan-wide conflict (inter-clan and intra-clan) almost never involves just two PCs and player actions tend to have ripple effects as well as dragging more people into the storyline. Hooks abound - PCs willing to be hooked, not always.

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, currently my little slice of indie heaven is stuffed full of clanned, and they don't appear to be cutting their recruiting back or recruiting more skilled PCs. Competition's doing nothing. However, the alleged prestige of these roles is meaningless when they tie up such a large proportion of the playerbase. They'd be a lot more prestigious if they had fewer roles and were significantly harder to get into.

Well, the player attitude on clans swings back and forth in phases, just like many popular things in the game. It may be that clanned RP is in an upswing right now (it may also be that this thread and the previous indie thread are the reason for it).

Another thing to keep in mind is that PCs are exceptional. They are expected to follow documentation and be fairly normal compared to NPCs and vNPCs, but PCs are the people that special things happen to and special opportunities are available to. If you think of things from that perspective, the phenomenon of PCs being encouraged toward clans ICly through recruitment and such is less of a head-scratcher.

[Morrolan]

Sometimes it seems like players want all of the advantages of belonging to a group, but with none of the social and work costs required for maintaining that group.

To that I say, "Don't take clans for granted! Don't take clannies for granted! And for certain, don't take clan leaders for granted!"

EDIT to add: I've seen significant amounts of this in game, so I'm not pointing fingers around this discussion. And I've seen the game world react appropriately -- eventually.

The solution to some perceived problem with clans is not to join them and then ignore the rules because (for OOC purposes) you can get away with it for a while. If you don't like the way clans are organized on a staff level, don't join. Vote with your boots and be a rich indie.

[Nyr]

I missed a few pages, and since one idle comment I made seems to have spawned two threads, I'll at least jump in here again.

Craftables:  I'm not really grasping why devoting a lot of time to making everything craftable is really worth it (nor am I grasping why this makes clans better).  It really only makes the PC experience for a PC crafter better.  Clans have little to do with that.  While there are clans based heavily around PC crafting, the lion's share of the role is really around interaction and roleplay.  Expanding craftables can be done but a lot of page 4-5 seem to look at this as some kind of magick bullet to make clan roles better.  We don't have a staff role dedicated to doing busy work (and absolutely tedious work, at that) and doing 10 per day would be both unreasonable in terms of time requirements and expectations of staff use of time.  Dropping in 10 approved crafts when you know the onum of each item that is going into it, the name of the craft, the echoes it will produce, the skill that should be required, any difficulty modifiers...easy.  Creating 10 crafts from scratch?  More difficult.  I'd estimate it to be about  two hours of work to make 10 crafts from scratch including all of the creative work in finding things that are actually loaded into the game to be used to CRAFT those things.  2 hours per day makes 14 hours per week.  Would you rather have a storyteller dedicated to animation and dealing with your request responses and bringing the world alive...or making it so you can make stuff?  Yes, this gets easier with players assisting, and perhaps we can do another push to make a dent in some things, but...the way I see it, this is relatively minor and has very little relation to making clan roles better. 

I think the staff don't want any more new tribes or clans that players create.

Not true at all.  We restrict the extent to which players may make their own families because of past abuse.  We have no such restrictions on players making their own clans; we are simply not required to codedly support them and they have no expectation of survivability.

I am pro "Make all merchant House orders come from PC merchant House crafters."

No.  Just no, all the way around.  Having the possibility of things coming from crafter PCs is cool.  Requiring it is not cool.  Not everyone likes playing a role where they grind out crafting.  Now, yes, there's a code project in the works that would be the best of both worlds (PCs can run orders without staff and PC crafters can jump in and do those orders on their own time if they wish).  I think Kurac is the template for trying this out once it is actually ready.  It isn't.  Just the bare bones of it are ready.  However, as it is right now (with no code changes whatsoever), making all orders forced to go through crafters has little to do with making clans more appealing.  It just makes the crafting skill useful.

B) These "rare" gems aren't really rare. I'm not sure why they aren't harder to find, but they need to be harder to find. They either need a lower find rate percentage, or the areas where they can be found need to be pushed out a lot further and be a lot more dangerous.

Perhaps that used to be true.  It is not true anymore as of October 2012.

Weekly Update for week of October 14 to October 20, 2012

News:
More of the documented stones can now be foraged for
Code:
Update to handle rarity in forage with increased granularity -- Tiernan.

If there are issues with this stuff popping up NOW with less rarity than it should, that is likely a bug and should be reviewed.

Man, some of you sound like you are so bad at business.  No wonder you have such a terrible time playing GMH leaders.  Maybe try sticking to the pure politicking roles?

Some of these posts show a -remarkable- lack of understanding of basic principles of human behavior, not to mention the constraints of the gameworld.

I'm not going to expand upon it, because if you suck at playing the game, it makes it that much easier for me to pwn you.

Which is all to say that maybe--just maybe--the game isn't broken.  Maybe you're just bad at it.

If what you think is the problem (i.e. what the discussion should be about) is really only perceived to be a problem because of lack of imagination, hard work, and business acumen of the people playing the roles...then it isn't really a problem.  That's my point.  People are complaining about things that they are 100% in the driver's seat to change, but instead they want Staff to come in and change the rules because they're too stupid, lazy, or unimaginative to figure it out for themselves.

While possibly meant in jest, you've restated this a few times so I'll take it as something you mean to say in truth. Here's a response for you:  If you're not going to apply for or play leadership roles, criticism of such should be kept to a minimum.  It's a shame that you show this kind of intelligence here but won't actually play a leadership role and instead insult people that play them.

The last thing you posted that I quoted does have some merit:  imagination, hard work, and business acumen can make a role better, and no amount of coding or structural change to clans can fix that.  That doesn't mean that we on staff shouldn't occasionally review code or structural change.  It's not an "either/or" scenario.

when I can spend just 1 or 2 hours finding a diamond, and selling it at one of the shops for 1000?

This seems like something we should review.  Certain raw materials being tossed into a shop makes sense.  High-end raw materials probably should not be offloaded to that extent.

Why has this become a discussion about making Houses buy stuff from indies?

Not sure, looks like about 5 pages are about crafting and indies when only three clans subsist on selling crafted or uncrafted materials.

I think the other issue is that not all players are the same. Some players just want RP interaction (relationships, conflict). Others want to be something or another, and RP from a position of power (or realism, whathaveyou). Still others want a coded challenge, something to brag about.

For type 1s, tavern sitting is where it's at. It's where the people are, it's where the interaction is. For these people, clan schedules and low pay are a problem. Freedom not so much.

For type 2s, they have more control over their own destiny outside of a clan. Will most climb as high outside of a clan as they could inside? Probably not, but they can control the climb.

For type 3s, until clans can offer daily challenges or RPTs like hunting/exploring does, their interest is going to remain outside the walls.



I really think you need to pick which group(s) you're trying to attract, and adjust clans accordingly. They can't all be baited with the same carrot.

Hey, back to discussing substantial things!  Agreed, this is largely what goes into "what clans should be open" in a place, and it also is one of the most important considerations for documentation revamps.

[Patuk]

I think a few people are getting "there is no conflict/interaction between clans" confused with "Through my one pair of PC eyes in a world of 300ish PCs, I don't see any conflict/interaction."

Of Murder Corruption and Betrayal, all thee can take place and have massive consequences on the game world without more than two or even one PC being in the know.  Tuluk, for example, prides itself on anything of the sort being done behind the scenes/under the table, and even in Allanak, it's not always (I would even say hardly ever)  a good idea to go about causing trouble for all to see.

You can't run a MUD on behind the scenes things. By all means, let them take place, and encourage them in happening. You just can't let the game rely on that. Not everyone is going to play a noble/merchant, or even a character with an interest in politics. You need to have ways to have fun without politics being involved, since that's inevitably going to be where the majority of the playerbase will be involved - and for good reason, too.

[Lizzie]

I think a few people are getting "there is no conflict/interaction between clans" confused with "Through my one pair of PC eyes in a world of 300ish PCs, I don't see any conflict/interaction."

Of Murder Corruption and Betrayal, all thee can take place and have massive consequences on the game world without more than two or even one PC being in the know.  Tuluk, for example, prides itself on anything of the sort being done behind the scenes/under the table, and even in Allanak, it's not always (I would even say hardly ever)  a good idea to go about causing trouble for all to see.

This is part of the problem. If no one ever sees that clan A is heavily involved in plotline B until the end of the plot, then no one will know how much fun "everyone" (those two players) were having, and how totally worth it that it is to join that clan, until the plot is already ended. And even then, with the typical revisionist history of Tuluk ("magickers in the grasslands? Of course not. there are none, the sun king wouldn't allow that, therefore, it isn't happening, and you aren't talking about it. In fact, I can't hear you talking about it even now."), most of the fun stuff going on, is ONLY known by people in higher ranks of clans. And since most people playing are -not- in those higher ranks, it stands to reason that most players don't know that there is any fun actually occurring.

Since in their minds, plotline-involved fun is not occurring in these clans, the logical conclusion is: If you want plotline-involved fun, don't join those clans. Being a lower rank member of a clan where the higher ranked members are nose-deep in the plotline excitement, and you are left out and being told "Oh no, nothing's the matter, everything's fine, go ahead to sparring." does not make for "reasons to join clans." In fact, it makes for "reasons to avoid clans." It also makes for "reasons to avoid Tuluk" but we're not on that cycle of hate yet.

[Nyr]

1 ). Roleplay opportunities are restricted.
    Clan schedules stop you meeting up with the cool role-players.

There are about 4 clans that have schedules and I think most of them make sense; they all should have caveats in them for when no one is around inside the clan to interact with, though.

2 ). Status is attained without working for it.
    The most boring rags-to-riches tale possible is, "I was sitting in the bar, down to my last three sids, and then a Salarri recruiter made me an offer. Now I'm part of one of the most prestigious clans in the Known!"

Every clan you could join is one of the most prestigious in the Known.  The only exceptions are the ones at the very bottom, socially, and even they are well known.

3 ). Action and excitement are lacking.
    Where's the conflict at? Tip: not Kadius. At least exploring can produce enough danger to make for a cool story. And we're here for cool stories, right? Obligatory Rindan thread link: http://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,15055.0.html

What a clan does is largely a measure of what a clan's leadership is pushing; most clans have a certain amount of self-starter expectation for leaders and those in there.

4 ). Lack of playing time.
    Schedules are killing the joy when you do get to log in, and never getting to make any of the RPTs.

See above on schedules.

5 ). Too much playing time.
    Schedules and other restrictions kill the joy when there's nobody else around. Note also that your perceptions of rich indies may well be coloured by running into the guy avoiding clans for this reason but making sid 12 hours a day.

An excellent point.  Can't do much about that.

6 ). Skilling up is faster outside a clan.
    I can't speak for this myself, but Synthesis seems to speak pretty authoritatively here.

Skills aren't the end-all, be-all for anything, and while Synthesis can speak authoritatively on things, he can still be not entirely correct.  However, even that is being considered in revamps--finding what will reward long-lived PCs in a clan.  It will be trialed soon.

7 ). Many clans make it tricky to stay gritty.
    It's hard to actually experience the tension of struggling to get by when recruiters are battering down your door with offers of free food for life. And grit's hard come by in many clans. The Byn, the Guild and a few others are honourable exceptions.

If you want grit, there are clans for that.  If you want less grit, there are clans for that.

8 ). Meaningless jobs.
    GMH hunters, crafters; see earlier in the thread for a full discussion.

Counter point:  roles are largely what you make them.

9 ). Lack of privacy.
    Clan compounds are decidedly worse than having your own apartment. There's no sense of ownership and no private space to plot in.

There's plenty of other options for privacy, however.  I'm not sure this necessarily needs to be filled by the clan regardless of what the clan is.  To speak to an earlier point, if you truly want grit, you don't need privacy.

10). The money's better outside.
    Nobody yet has claimed this motivates them, but there seems to be a common belief it motivates other people.

Already pointed out above that we can look at this.

Really it seems like there aren't that many things here in your list that are legitimate issues that we can review.  We can make sure schedules take into account exceptions (when needed) and we can review pay.

[Cutthroat]

I think it's a gross exaggeration to say that all the plots are behind the scenes, even in Tuluk. FW's point is obviously that no one is going to see the whole picture, the entirety of what is available. The more you cut yourself off from clans and plots, the less plots you're going to notice, especially since some of the plots are indeed behind the scenes.

[Fujikoma]

Sometimes it seems like players want all of the advantages of belonging to a group, but with none of the social and work costs required for maintaining that group.

To that I say, "Don't take clans for granted! Don't take clannies for granted! And for certain, don't take clan leaders for granted!"

EDIT to add: I've seen significant amounts of this in game, so I'm not pointing fingers around this discussion. And I've seen the game world react appropriately -- eventually.

The solution to some perceived problem with clans is not to join them and then ignore the rules because (for OOC purposes) you can get away with it for a while. If you don't like the way clans are organized on a staff level, don't join. Vote with your boots and be a rich indie.

Most importantly, don't take ME for granted.

EDIT: Just to make absolutely clear, I'm kidding. I know I'm horrible.

[Desertman]

No.  Just no, all the way around.  Having the possibility of things coming from crafter PCs is cool.  Requiring it is not cool.  Not everyone likes playing a role where they grind out crafting.  Now, yes, there's a code project in the works that would be the best of both worlds (PCs can run orders without staff and PC crafters can jump in and do those orders on their own time if they wish).  I think Kurac is the template for trying this out once it is actually ready.  It isn't.  Just the bare bones of it are ready.  However, as it is right now (with no code changes whatsoever), making all orders forced to go through crafters has little to do with making clans more appealing.  It just makes the crafting skill useful.

I'm happy with whatever I get. This sounds cool regardless.  

Perhaps that used to be true.  It is not true anymore as of October 2012.

I believe you, but from a player's perspective who has had a chance to regularly come into contact with these items, they still appear to be not very rare at all. Maybe we could go back and look at these numbers again at a later date?

Maybe I'm just super lucky but on more than one occasion I have been able to get more than one of these an IC day, on accident.

I could possibly be over estimating how rare they SHOULD be in an IC sense as well. I'm not sure how RARE a diamond/emerald/ruby should be in Zalanthas. I am really just stacking that expectation against real life "rareness", which I admit probably isn't the best frame of reference.

[valeria]

As to the consolidating the player base idea, I'd much rather see the outlying settlements go before I'd see one of the cities go.  The two cities have such different flavors and I love them both.  Besides, some people (like me) don't want to be constantly playing around the same other people, and tend to deliberately shift among the starting locations.  And I would be grumpy if I couldn't.

[Nyr]

Not really. In practice, status is attained when you rank up beyond the very first recruit/probation rank. A hump that is actually a challenge for many players to get over, given that this takes at least 6 RL weeks in most clans and the average PC lifespan is probably closer to 2.

Yes, really. Going from indie to entry-level GMH employee is a full jump in the Tuluki caste system. Making enough contacts in game as an indie to effectively overcome this and matter more to the people that matter takes a long time. In that time, the GMH employee can jump another rank without any real need for imagination on their part simply by turning up in accord with the schedule on a fairly regular basis.

It's a jump from "nobody" to "slightly higher nobody."  Let's not be too hasty here!

And even then, with the typical revisionist history of Tuluk ("magickers in the grasslands? Of course not. there are none, the sun king wouldn't allow that, therefore, it isn't happening, and you aren't talking about it. In fact, I can't hear you talking about it even now."), most of the fun stuff going on, is ONLY known by people in higher ranks of clans.  And since most people playing are -not- in those higher ranks, it stands to reason that most players don't know that there is any fun actually occurring.

Spoken like someone that has decided what their opinion will be without actually playing there or asking other players if it's even true.  It's not, but that's cool, keep going down this rabbit hole.

Since in their minds, plotline-involved fun is not occurring in these clans, the logical conclusion is: If you want plotline-involved fun, don't join those clans. Being a lower rank member of a clan where the higher ranked members are nose-deep in the plotline excitement, and you are left out and being told "Oh no, nothing's the matter, everything's fine, go ahead to sparring." does not make for "reasons to join clans." In fact, it makes for "reasons to avoid clans." It also makes for "reasons to avoid Tuluk" but we're not on that cycle of hate yet.

You're right.  If this truly was what had occurred in Tuluk it would be a reason to avoid it.  Here in reality where we're actually doing our best to involve people in a city-state (regardless of rank or even clanning--or even citizenship!) in plots, we worked with the people that were actually there.

[Lizzie]

when I can spend just 1 or 2 hours finding a diamond, and selling it at one of the shops for 1000?

This seems like something we should review.  Certain raw materials being tossed into a shop makes sense.  High-end raw materials probably should not be offloaded to that extent.

Just to point out: The extent is limited to only 5 of each, and ONLY if the NPC has the sids to pay it. Which - he rarely does.  But if he has sids and doesn't have 5, then yeah you can definitely earn your keep by selling a single diamond, once ever RL week or so, and not have to lift a finger to work for the rest of the week. The pathetic thing is, the markup is such that no PC, NPC, or VNPC would ever want to buy these items from that vendor, even if they had max haggle. Why would anyone want to spend 1500 sids on something they can get from a PC for 750? On the other hand, why would anyone pay 750 for it, when your clanned grebbers have to bring in 10 a week? Then again, why would anyone want to play a clanned grebber to bring in diamonds to their boss for no pay, when they can be independent and sell just one diamond per RL week to the NPC?

Vicious circle. I have no solution. But I believe this is definitely one of the issues. I believe that identifying the issues, clarifying them, understanding them, is the first step toward resolution.

[Nyr]

Vicious circle. I have no solution.

If you'd like to help, you can start by idea'ing the NPC(s) in question so that we can review it.

[Lizzie]

Not really. In practice, status is attained when you rank up beyond the very first recruit/probation rank. A hump that is actually a challenge for many players to get over, given that this takes at least 6 RL weeks in most clans and the average PC lifespan is probably closer to 2.

Yes, really. Going from indie to entry-level GMH employee is a full jump in the Tuluki caste system. Making enough contacts in game as an indie to effectively overcome this and matter more to the people that matter takes a long time. In that time, the GMH employee can jump another rank without any real need for imagination on their part simply by turning up in accord with the schedule on a fairly regular basis.

It's a jump from "nobody" to "slightly higher nobody."  Let's not be too hasty here!

And even then, with the typical revisionist history of Tuluk ("magickers in the grasslands? Of course not. there are none, the sun king wouldn't allow that, therefore, it isn't happening, and you aren't talking about it. In fact, I can't hear you talking about it even now."), most of the fun stuff going on, is ONLY known by people in higher ranks of clans.  And since most people playing are -not- in those higher ranks, it stands to reason that most players don't know that there is any fun actually occurring.

Spoken like someone that has decided what their opinion will be without actually playing there or asking other players if it's even true.  It's not, but that's cool, keep going down this rabbit hole.

Since in their minds, plotline-involved fun is not occurring in these clans, the logical conclusion is: If you want plotline-involved fun, don't join those clans. Being a lower rank member of a clan where the higher ranked members are nose-deep in the plotline excitement, and you are left out and being told "Oh no, nothing's the matter, everything's fine, go ahead to sparring." does not make for "reasons to join clans." In fact, it makes for "reasons to avoid clans." It also makes for "reasons to avoid Tuluk" but we're not on that cycle of hate yet.

You're right.  If this truly was what had occurred in Tuluk it would be a reason to avoid it.  Here in reality where we're actually doing our best to involve people in a city-state (regardless of rank or even clanning--or even citizenship!) in plots, we worked with the people that were actually there.

Erm, it sounds to me like you think I'm talking about a specific incident that I apparently wasn't there to experience. I'm not. I'm talking about incidents that I -was- there to experience. I've played in Tuluk many times, for many months, with several long-lived characters, as citizens pre-and-post geographical restrictions to non-citizens. I'm pretty familiar with the IC "no, this never happened, you're imagining things" route that gets taken, both from the one in the clan who has to tell people this, to the one on the receiving end who has to hear it.

[Nyr]

I'm talking about several incidents you weren't there to experience that were actual staff-sponsored plots.  Those are the ones I am talking about.  Based on your account history there's really only one possible staff sponsored event you could have attended and even that one would have allowed those in attendance to get a pretty good idea of what was going on...not just the leaders.  I'm afraid I can't vouch for stuff players are doing in the interim, but even then you can certainly dig and find out what the real story is if you do so cleverly.

[Nyr]

At any rate, though:

If things were perfect in clans then we would never do anything to change them...ever.  Over its lifetime, Armageddon has changed things a lot with the aim towards improvement (very rarely just to "change" things for the sake of changing them).  You can be sure that clans will change in the future.  However, making sudden/wide-ranging/drastic changes is not how we tend to roll on staff.  If you have a list of 10 things you want changed, it is not going to happen anytime soon.  A lot of this is good to hear--we don't hate criticism on what doesn't work, we welcome it.  We tend to welcome it more when we have either time or energy free to work on such things.  It's even more welcome when we are in a position (even if on a small scale, in even one clan) to enact several trial changes that both make IC sense and OOC sense.

Some very basic things to consider that will be rolling through as a trial in a clan that has yet to be named, though it has been hinted at:

-lifeswearing (if it exists) should mean something, but that doesn't mean it should be the only type of role in a clan
-try to match PC group to a PC structure that is largely autonomous within the larger virtual clan (a trial to see what happens when the PCs you play with ARE the members of your group and your success/failure as a "group" depends much less on the virtual clan)
-create opportunities for options within that group allowing for there to be multiple types of players to experience the clan (achievers, all that jazz).  The clan may focus most on one area, but there should be possibilities for specialization
-review the possibility of perks for longer-lived PCs that do NOT want to be in leadership (rewards, training, titles, gear, whatever)
-review the possibility of perks for longer-lived PCS that DO want to be in leadership (can be some of the same as above) without sacrificing the group dynamic

Stuff we've already done:

-apply a schedule but leave it open to be broken by leaders whenever they wish
-create caveats for when there are no PCs in your clan to play with at the moment, giving virtual assignments when that occurs

Once we see how this stuff works in implementation it may be that it will work well enough to be easily applied to other clans.  It may not work that way; what works for one is not necessarily what works for another.

Thank you for the feedback, it is very helpful for what we are doing here specifically.

[Malken]

Vicious circle. I have no solution.

If you'd like to help, you can start by idea'ing the NPC(s) in question so that we can review it.

Done

[Twilight]

Vicious circle. I have no solution.

If you'd like to help, you can start by idea'ing the NPC(s) in question so that we can review it.

The introduction of that set of materials several years ago was done in a slightly different way, as far as I can tell.  Through my own experience, and simply seeing what other folks have, that introduction does not seem to have been done with a set of crafts that spanned multiple crafting disciplines, and had only a very, very limited number of crafting recipes (or perhaps, easily found out recipes) associated with them at all.  My guess is the intent was that folks would write up mastercrafting recipes that would utilize those materials eventually.

Without some relatively easy to find out crafting recipes, that can then drive demand for the raw materials to be crafted, one is left with the best use for the materials being to sell them.  To one particular NPC, as it stands now.  Additionally, it would seem that not only were they intended to be mastercrafted to enable production of finished goods, but that those finished goods were intended to be sold to PC's rather than NPC's.  As all these materials essentially get sold to the same NPC, only that price matters currently.  Certainly the case when you can't even sell something like a ruby to Kadius, because they have too many of them.  And given this high base price for the materials, when you factor in the shop sid caps on shops where you would sell the finished goods to (assuming you mastercraft an item that gets a better price than the raw material), you get some really whacked out economics, and sitting around for the optimal time to be able to sell something.

[Lizzie]

Vicious circle. I have no solution.

If you'd like to help, you can start by idea'ing the NPC(s) in question so that we can review it.

Done

Thanks. For IC reasons - I wasn't able to go to that particular NPC and didn't remember its sdesc

[Delirium]

Popping back in to say that the situation Twilight describes is exactly one of the reasons I would love to see more craftables.

At the very least it would be nice to be able to submit 1-2 objects/recipes for each "uncraftable" item so that they can be used and resold instead of being tossed at NPCs because no PCs want or use them. With a past character I'd hoped to write a few mastercrafts for those items but never got to do it, and relying on PCs to fill that void is problematic anyway.

[manonfire]

All clans should have a wagon/argosy to cavort around in.

[Fujikoma]

All clans should have a wagon/argosy to cavort around in.

Especially elf tribes.