GMH Hunter populations

[Lizzie]

I see the topic from 3 sides: from the POV of a former GMH hunter (several times over) and the POV of an employer (a couple of times) and the POV of an indie hunter.

As a GMH hunter, certain times were great, others were incredibly frustrating and store-worthy. If the crew (mostly) got along AND (most) had overlapping login times AND you were not a recruit forbidden from leaving the city without an officer AND there were actual things needed AND the storeroom had actual room for more stuff THEN it was awesome.

The only time it was somewhat fun, if ALL of the above were checked off as "true" was if the only thing missing from the mix was "actual things needed." Because we could go hunting anyway, or explore, or come up with excuses to get out of the city.

I recall several experiences when it was just too much to deal with. I was a recruit, my PC's boss transferred almost immediately after hiring her to Allanak from Tuluk. Of my three crew-mates, only one was still around, and even then it was barely. She was also not an officer so neither of us could leave the city, ever. Finally a staff member took pity on us and animated a Senior Agent who gave us permission to leave, as long as we were together. My clan mate promptly got herself killed/stored, and I was the one and only member of the entire crew, with no leadership of any kind, and no permission to DO what my character was hired to do. I stored after a few MONTHS of trying.

Another time in the same clan, different crew, we were stockpiled before I was even hired. The crew leader would not allow us to clean up the mess because he said some of it was important and he alone knew what was needed. But he was hardly ever around when we were, and when he was, he was too busy dealing with trade to spend time doing any cleaning or delegating the task. So we had no place to PUT anything we were hunting for.  The room capacities were full. Some of us broke the IC rules and just junked a whole bunch of stuff...

but then it turned out that the room capacity had been increased previously to accommodate a couple of big orders (that were never filled), and the rooms were returned to their proper capacities. Which meant - all that stuff we threw away, didn't do any good at all because the room was now full again, at the correct capacity instead of the increased one.

Then there's the drama that comes with being in a clan. Sometimes it's fun. Sometimes you store out of frustration. If you're a recruit, it's not so bad. You can always leave. But once you're lifesworn, you can't walk way from it just because you don't like how Jimbob is pissing off SandyAnn by sleeping with Sandy's brother while he's supposed to be in love with her and she's having his triplets who will live in a make-shift cradle that is actually the chest used to store all the poisoned daggers. That kind of drama - I don't want to deal with. Ever. Again. I want to be able to continue playing my character - but not in that clan, and not with the result that I am hunted down for leaving while lifesworn.

Another time I was in charge of a crew that I inherited from a previous crew leader. The new crew spent most of their time in the barracks, NOT doing anything they were actually hired to do. Turned out none of them had "ranger vision" and were ALL hired as hunters - in Allanak - and at the time the sandstorm code was usually brutal outside the gates. So I fired the bunch of them, and selected just two employees total; a field aide-type hunter, and an assassin-type hunter. Told them to be busy, spy on the other Agents and Merchants, take care of any significant threat to trade, and don't piss off the templars. It was great for awhile, but eventually they died or stored out of boredom. Now, you couldn't pay me to volunteer to be in charge of a crew. That experience is the main reason but I'd had similar experiences being a crew leader after that, which solidified my decision. Not everyone is cut out to be a babysitter crew leader.

Then there's the "being in charge of a crew you're required to hire for, and having to hire characters of brand new players while being pressured to perform by the local templarate/nobility/clan Agent/merchant.  Sorry but right now we're busy teaching this character's player how to sit at a table, wield a weapon, change hands ep, TALK instead of SAY, and how to not experiment on templars with the "steal" skill just because they're bored and think NPCs won't kill them over it. That's great for the Byn, that is set up to handle this kind of thing. But it's not so great when you're trying to run a USEFUL hunting crew, if some of the crew are already established and some don't even know syntax yet.

[Heade]

My post was to bring logic back into what had otherwise been a mostly emotionally charged and nostalgic discussion that seemed to be headed towards an ask.

My post wasn't emotional; your response seems to be as you augmented my post to add double emphasis to some of my statements [without saying you added emphasis]. That's called a misquote and is not a "logical" or good rhetorical tactic 

Regarding my post saying emotional and nostalgic posts were dominating the discussion, that wasn't directed at you. As you can well see in my quote, it referred to the entirety of the discussion, which is filled with people who miss the good ol' days(nostalgia) of playing in a GMH crew. They miss it because they enjoyed it(emotion). I responded with why the math doesn't work on having that role available with a reduced playerbase.

As for your claim I misquoted you, no, that's not a misquote. I highlighted the parts of what you said that were meant to be in response to th3kaiser, who was saying that no one was trying to make the point that those roles should be brought back(you seem to be), or that they shouldn't have been removed(you also seem to be suggesting they shouldn't have been removed). It was akin to me circling parts of what you said to point them out. That's not a misquote. I could have, quite simply, quoted only the highlighted parts to make my point, and that wouldn't be a misquote either. But I chose to highlight the portions of what you said that were relevant while leaving the surrounding text there because I didn't want to quote you out of context. I was trying to be polite by quoting you in it's entirety. So relax, Ace.

Now, as for the rest of your claims that I'm not going to bother to quote, indie hunters might have been able to sell more to shops, sure. But you completely ignored the bit about indie merchants, who basically couldn't even do business when every hunter worked for the GMH's. And despite the fact that an indie hunter COULD make more money and become rich when all the other hunters worked for GMH's, they mostly didn't. Mostly, they ended up working for a GMH, too. And there were either no indie hunters, or so few that all non-GMH PC concepts that rely on PC hunters to provide materials to the indie economy were made nonviable roles.

Also, I think maybe you haven't spent much time as an indie merchant, based on this comment:

Similarly, more high-value materials now tend to end up on the market, because indies by their lack of clan affiliation necessarily have a stronger incentive to sell it on the market where the markup for rare items is huge than trade it to a merchant. Selling to NPC merchants necessarily results in a huge markup independent merchants cannot afford, ironically further concentrating power with GMH (while also just losing some items to the void due to auto selling, RIP anyone who wanted that kryl shell helmet).

Indie Merchant characters have access to haggle so they can reduce that price by quite a bit, and as an indie merchant, it is far better to have those rare materials for sale in shops than to not have any access to them at all, and not have access to any hunters at all because they all work for the GMH's in exclusive deals.

PC merchants, both GMH and Non-GMH are important to the economy and world of Zalanthas. The amount of RP that arises out of them coexisting rivals, or I daresay exceeds the amount of RP that is derived from competing noble houses existing. Having a role that locks the vast majority of the game's PC hunters into only providing materials for one half of that coin stymies entire plotlines involving numerous characters across many, many more than 3 character concepts. It devalues all non-GMH non-combat classes to the point of them not being worth playing at all in the current system.

If we wanted to make it to where the vNPC hunters routinely filled the shops up with items and materials currently provided by PC hunters, that would make it feasible to open up, but it would also make both GMH and Non-GMH hunters highly irrelevant, since GMH Merchants could get stuff cheap from shops without having to locate a hunter, and so could indie merchants. So, it would make the opposite situation occur. Hunters would basically only be able to be successful by joining a GMH and getting paid regularly to keep the stock room full, because it'd be too hard for them to sell things as an indie, which also wouldn't fit the game world.

This whole problem is very simple, Triste. We just don't have enough players to fill all the hunter roles the game needs to function as intended by the docs. There was a time when GMH crews routinely had 5 hunters each, and there were still plenty of indie hunters to go around. Sadly, that was over a decade ago when Tuluk was still open for play and we had a big enough playerbase to support both major city-states.

This isn't anything personal. I'm not saying you're too emotional, or that I don't like you, or that you're a bad person. It's just simple math. We just don't have the numbers. I would love to have GMH hunting crews in the game, but not without the playerbase to support a functioning economy, is all. And, as someone who obviously doesn't play indie merchant characters, I don't think you understand the impact that allowing GMH hunting crews with the current population has on the availability of what should be simple, common materials.

Ultimately, you're concerning yourself with how that affects your preferred hunting roles. I'm looking at the situation holistically. My comments were designed to draw back the focus from just being on that hunter role to look at how that decision impacted the entirety of the game from a bird's eye view. And hunters are an integral part of the functioning machine that is the armageddon economy. If one side of the PC economy can't access hunters or their materials, people stop playing them, the game stagnates, competition disappears, and it takes potential plotlines with it.

[triste]

And, as someone who obviously doesn't play indie merchant characters

Another disparaging supposition that is patently false.

It's just simple math. We just don't have the numbers.

We had 79 players online recently, numbers last year were good as well, if this math is what your entire thesis hinges on, provide some numbers. Otherwise it is again taking rhetorical highground without the due dilligence of discussing the specifics of your math or economics.


In the end folks, let's just be proactive. I liked the proactive recommendation about how we could potentially cap the number of hunters if this were to reopen, as this would also fully address the points Lizzie feedback.

As a GMH hunter, certain times were great, others were incredibly frustrating and store-worthy.

Exactly this. A statement that can be applied to literally any role in the game. Any role. I just want to recap: a new player read the docs, asked if something was playable, we had to tell him no. Then some other players came in and said they missed those roles. Other players came in to say the roles were crap. No role is perfect 100% of the time, and not all roles work for everyone. House hunter really worked for more than three posters in this thread, and they miss it; House hunter might have been a role OP might of liked, and now he does not even have the option.

[Aruven]

I'm just reading this thread as a guy who stored their last GMH family member out of sheer rage and frustration like

[triste]

I'm just reading this thread as a guy who stored their last GMH family member out of sheer rage and frustration

Not all roles are for everyone. Certainly a lot of people apply for and want the role you decided to store. What matters is you had the option and the chance. Now other people can enjoy that option and probably not store.

Alas, some roles get closed with questionable justification and the players who loved those roles are just in the dust. I don't care about any feelings of vindication people might feel to see this disappointment. I care about people having the roleplay options they want and could enjoy.

[triste]

There has been a lot of negativity and mudslinging in this thread -- I just want OP to know that roles close and will sometimes reopen later. Your thoughtful expression of interest might go some way in opening up more roleplay options some day which is great!

[Aruven]

So anyways.

I put a lot of time into a particular GMH clan, though I played in all of them to some extent usually as a family member. You are probably wearing something IG that I crafted or helped design (And I always had great help) at this very moment.

This track started to go ballistic a long time ago, and it started with the implementations of things like, staff directives about GMH crews stationed north or south had to stay there unless it was a punishment or something. Closing the expansion divisions. There were pros and cons to the choices being slowly implemented depending on who you asked then and now, and in all fairness the staff WANTED to explore different tracks for GMH viability. There were constantly arguments about what 'life oaths' really meant, for instance, and what should be done about them. (This was in all clans it applied too also, not just GMH) The finer details of what really happens is lost. We have GDB threads but we don't know who was putting in what hours, what roles they were playing, what conflicts led to the little changes over time. We get generalized justifications good enough to assuage reason and keep the game going. It would take pages of thread to catch OP up on the history of GMH in this game and the way they were truly and now are truly played. I don't know how to fix it.

I know for sure one clan was looking at having its military faction removed from it for IC REASONS, not player base reasons. The population will always have some effect on clan/player ratio but it's always been way over hyped either way in this community for whatever reason. Players follow good role-players when they find them in clans. Not OOC on discord find them, I'm talking about when they enjoy their role-play. And those leaders moved clans! And clan numbers shifted. Our response was drastic.

I decided to jump into the frying pan and play a role in a GMH again and its absolutely ridiculous. There are innumerable reasons why, but the short version is there is shit happening that just makes absolutely no sense unless you have no idea what finance means or what your job as a clan family member should be. On MASSIVE scales. The other side of absolutely no sense was the political factor from top to bottom, but we kinda just hit reset with consolidation and scrapped most game history to a certain point anyways so I could live with some of that. I just couldn't live with all of that on top of month long plus gaps in staff communication, so I stored. I didn't realize the role had shifted so far into being a dispensary station for Luirs outpost alone. Absolutely wild.

Its been a mess for years. People have asked for and begged for updated documentation that made sense to be fleshed out for YEARS. My amused apathy is because i've had many a GMH let down.

[tortall]

I'm just reading this thread as a guy who stored their last GMH family member out of sheer rage and frustration like

Stored their AWESOME GMH....... If it's the same one I'm thinking of.