Limited job roles and you

[Fragmented]

Team south has a "soft cap" on my clans. It's somewhat flexible, but it has a baseline. There's actual history to support the need for it. You have three clans open in an area, all of which select from the same pool of players in that area for their hirelings. There are maybe 10 of those players available.  There are three sponsored clan leaders in each of three clans.  There are enough potential clannies to share.  But they all congregate toward one.

That means a few things will happen, if we don't say "sorry clan's full":

1. The two other sponsored clan leaders will have no minions, and therefore no one to delegate tasks to. This means their role becomes more of a job, and less of play, for the player. They have to come up with the plotlines, and perform all the tasks themselves to accomplish them, with no interaction within their own clan.

2. The clanned people are all stuck with each other. Little opportunity, and absolutely no reason, to leave their compound and interact with anyone else.

3. The sponsored role leader is now stuck with all of the drama that comes from a clan with 10 people in it, including having to come up with things to do that all his clannies can get involved in, when if he only had 2-4 clannies, that work (yes, it's work) would be less.

The result is storage of sponsored roles due to lack of interest - death/storage of clannies due to not enough things for them to do for this singular sponsored clan leader, an empty city that people complain nothing is happening in, because all the players are in a single clan compound they have no reason to leave.

So that's MY reasoning for the soft caps. If I only have one or two nobles, and a lot of players in the city, then yeah I'd lift that cap. If there are three nobles and a handful of city commoners, then I'd keep the caps. I need my sponsored nobles to have people available to hire. I can't force player of Amos to join House Kasix. But I /can/ tell him the House Fale is full.

I think the baseline assumption here though is that if Fale is full and Amos is advised of this, he will even consider Kasix. What seems to be happening instead, is that Amos, who wants to play with Fale (who has x players to meet the cap) will, instead of considering Kasix, instead head off to the wilderness to die, or store, or shift elsewhere.

I think you've hit the nail on the head, either way, re: caps. In my opinion, there should only be two of the sponsored roles, with the exception being GMH. Per city : two nobles, one templar. Worldwide, one of each GMH with any other power players in the GMH coming up via promotion. Let the nobles plot against each other and/or the Templar. Let the Templar plot against the other City and/or the Nobles or GMHs, let the GMHs plot against each other and/or the Nobles/Templar. But let the common masses (for however common they are) go where they want. This is a source of power for one sponsored role over the other. No doubt easier said than done, but allow the great GMH stuff to be accessed at their shops (and let the commoner npc merchants handle the buying/selling of the non GMH crap). Sponsored GMH roles can then become focused on providing extremely high value custom made stuff, or if they CHOOSE selling some items at a discount (but still a good profit for themselves).

All of the hunters work for Kadius, instead of Salarr or Kurac? Well, Kadius must be doing something - or at least DID something to achieve critical mass.

Just my two 'sid.

[Lutagar]

Team south has a "soft cap" on my clans. It's somewhat flexible, but it has a baseline. There's actual history to support the need for it. You have three clans open in an area, all of which select from the same pool of players in that area for their hirelings. There are maybe 10 of those players available.  There are three sponsored clan leaders in each of three clans.  There are enough potential clannies to share.  But they all congregate toward one.

That means a few things will happen, if we don't say "sorry clan's full":

1. The two other sponsored clan leaders will have no minions, and therefore no one to delegate tasks to. This means their role becomes more of a job, and less of play, for the player. They have to come up with the plotlines, and perform all the tasks themselves to accomplish them, with no interaction within their own clan.

2. The clanned people are all stuck with each other. Little opportunity, and absolutely no reason, to leave their compound and interact with anyone else.

3. The sponsored role leader is now stuck with all of the drama that comes from a clan with 10 people in it, including having to come up with things to do that all his clannies can get involved in, when if he only had 2-4 clannies, that work (yes, it's work) would be less.

The result is storage of sponsored roles due to lack of interest - death/storage of clannies due to not enough things for them to do for this singular sponsored clan leader, an empty city that people complain nothing is happening in, because all the players are in a single clan compound they have no reason to leave.

So that's MY reasoning for the soft caps. If I only have one or two nobles, and a lot of players in the city, then yeah I'd lift that cap. If there are three nobles and a handful of city commoners, then I'd keep the caps. I need my sponsored nobles to have people available to hire. I can't force player of Amos to join House Kasix. But I /can/ tell him the House Fale is full.

You're assuming that the turned away players go on to join one of the other two clans instead of shrugging and playing as an indie instead. Or that the experience doesn't just put them off playing in clans forever. The reason we're seeing this problem to begin with is because no one wants to feel obligated to play because of slots (sponsored leaders are obviously different) and no one wants to be alone and forced to idle in a clan that enforces schedules, which almost all city clans do. You'd also have a much larger pool than 10 players between 3 clans (which means more sponsored leaders) if everyone wasn't playing indies just to not have to put up with this.

So far staff's answer to this has been "make indie's less fun to play" but it's not working. People are just not playing or are doubling down and going full twink mode to get around the new hoops to jump through that keep getting added.

[DesertT]

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I honestly don't care. 

There are IC restrictions on a number of city clans for REALLY good reasons.  I'm talking rules, not caps.

Having played a Jal Foreman, Byn Sergeant, and AoD Sergeant, you WANT to recruit people into your clan.  You WANT to hope that they're smart enough to last a full month before that next Monthly Roll Call you post on the GDB (if they post on the GDB or don't die before they get access).  There's a certain level of responsibility that falls to the player as well, not just the leader.

I don't recall having a limit in the Byn.  Those seem to take care of themselves by either leaving the walls on their own, going into the Rinth, getting recruited by other employers, or whatever else.  So long as the leadership is active and engaged, these issues become less of a problem.  But that's the issue right there.  Active Leadership.  When Runners get bored, they get exceptionally stupid. 

I don't recall having a limit in the AoD either.  It seems these take care of themselves as well.  Between having similar issues as the Byn, they are also just the natural target for those PCs who want to "make a name for themselves" by killing a militia member.  The only improvement I can think of for the AoD would be to push newjoins to the Byn first.  Then those who survive the Byn, instead of having to wait ANOTHER year to become a Private, they have their time reduced to 1 Month as a Recruit instead of 1 Year.  There are some pretty significant bonuses (imho) for Privates in the AoD upon their promotion from Recruit.  Again though, for those Recruits, Active Leadership is especially critical, otherwise, people can only handle so much of the "sparring dummy" and they need someone to tell them how to mingle at the bar, or how to conduct bag checks at the gates, or even patrol the city streets.

When I was Jal Foreman, I did understand that I had a limited number of slots.  There was no "big circle / little circle" that I could really filter them into.  Either you were a Swab or you were an Indie and we had to hunt you down for RP events.  That's annoying.  So even when someone who was off-peak wanted to join House Jal as a Swab, I wouldn't recruit them because I could offer them almost ZERO meaningful interaction, maybe just on weekends.  Maybe.  And if I want at least 3 people to take on a patrol of the Ivory Road, or to go Salting, or whatever RP event, then I just reduced my chances severely by hiring on off-peaker.  So there goes someone's want/desire to House Jal.  Then we see those complaints about how leadership doesn't cater to all timezones.  That burden shouldn't be carried by the leadership.  In my opinion, that burden should be carried by staff and whether or not they want to hire another leader for said organization who can cover down on off-peak times.

If I recall correctly, the hardcap for House Jal Swabs was four and I wasn't about to leave the Walls with only one other PC, my minimum (typically) is three, so if I have two swabs who are peak and one who is off-peak plus one vacancy (or perhaps someone whose dead and we just don't know it yet, or not logging but that one Saturday I met and liked them), then I have to HOPE that the two peak players will have an overlap of playtime that lasts 90 minutes, AND that said overlap starts before dawn the same IC day that I can be on for at least 90 minutes, because there's usually prepwork and decompress time built into a single patrol (if you don't get caught outside the gates).

So yeah, having a hardcap on a clan like House Jal, I think you'd want to raise that to something like 7 or 8.  Maybe strongly consider hiring an off-peak Foreman as well.

As for positions like House Hunters for the GMH's, maybe that cap should be 2 peakers with 1 off-peaker?  I definitely don't feel they should be running as full as the House Jal swabs.  I offer these suggestions as reasonable measures that can be taken.  Could it be that a GMH tries to hire three hunters (1 off-peak) and ends up with 3 players who all have the exact same schedule and really begin to out-perform the other way?  Yes.  Just like there's the possibility to have two leaders in a clan and both of them end up with OOC reasons to not log for over a month and a half.  It's a game of odds (or risk).

I'd love to offer ideas of tracking hours of play for these positions, but that sounds too much like work and not an ideal use of volunteer time.

But I hear you, Tailong.  If you just want to be a Kuraci hunter because it sounds cool, then only log 4-5 hours a month....  Nobody's saying you need to dedicate 4-5 hours per night, but if you're going to move into a leadership role, either tell staff that you can't be the full-time leader this clan needs, so you'd like to CO-lead with someone, or just be happy playing a senior non-leader.

Communication is key, as is adaptability and there are those who count on certain roles to actually perform (hello nobles!!).

[Tuannon]

You only need two decent swabs, you need the other slots for spies, traitors and DersertT alts.

[Kavrick]

I will say, the two hunter limit does really hurt when one of the two, or awfully even both of the hunters are pretty inactive. I agree with others in saying that people who aren't very active shouldn't count towards the slot, because then they're both preventing another player from doing what they wanna do and also not providing for the clan.

[BadSkeelz]

It falls on clan leadership to oversee those roles and ensure they're going to "worthy" hires which... kind of sucks. I'm sure few of us enjoy telling others no because of arbitrary limits set in from above.

It's also difficult to live the indie hunter life if you're not dedicated to living out of your backpack, given the dearth of public housing in parts of the game world.