Approved guilds?

[SerqFeht]

And what standard?

The standard of the settings 

Xillix: I'm sorry, but I don't know how easy it is to enforce naming standards. Is that obviously very easy to enforce, or was it a sarcastic reference to a bitterly debated subject?

I like the idea of every guild fulfilling a purpose to the settings, but there will be some problems. What will set about one guild full of vallient warriors from another guild of vallient warriors?

[Under the moon]

What sets one football team apart from another? They all have identical goals and lifestyles. The only way you can tell them apart is by their colors. The only real difference is their following. Your question has the same answer. It is not unique pasts or grand objectives that make guilds great. It is the people that they consist of.

[Prolix]

Naming standards are currently enforced on a case by case basis, mostly due to reports, I believe. There can be many different ethos or justifications for similar groups that are possible within the settings. For example you could have a volunteer town guard for each town or even several, each named for or by their founders. Their purpose and makeup could be virtually identical with recruits going to the leader whose personal style suits them best. Each town could have a volunteer fire brigade and none need be directly connected with the one in the next town. You could have  a local magic practitioners guild for each town or a global guild dedicated to any particular way of magic.

[Orgonwukh]

And what standard?

The standard of the settings 

I asked, because to my knowledge, there are a lot of different interpretations of the settings.

Example: Some players agree that Hydlaa is so heavily guarded, that every act of violence on the streets would be observed by guards and hence an assassin would be arrested immediately. Others think it is sufficient to step behind Kada-El's to avoid being caught.

[Candy]

There's a little hidden alley right near Kada's. It looks and feels like the kind of place where you can get away with a lot of things. I've seen a couple of other such locations around Hydlaa as well.

Not every place in a city is safe, thus I'm one of those players that thinks if it's hidden from guards, then in most cases you can get away with things in certain places around Hydlaa.

[Keldrena]

The only problem I find with your line of reasoning is that people have different idea of what "hidden from guards" means. I've seen people killed below "empty" guard towers.

[theirah]

well...it is kinda hard to remember to look right below you when you are accustomed to looking far out.

kind of like the missing whats right in front of you thing

[Keldrena]

Hmmm, good point, although I don't think a logical person would kill someone under the guard tower.

[Candy]

You'd think there would be someone close enough to the door to hear what's going on.

[Sangwa]

Heh, what if I took a guild that was approved by

the players

the gms

the dev team

and told that guild they were officially sanctioned to run the faith of laanx

then I gave them:

A guildhouse

A monthly performance based stipend for guild operation.

Well this is quite different then. This is not what I had in mind when you say "approved guilds" which I consider guilds that have been approved because they have a good quality and are compatible with the settings.

Money doesn't have to rain from the sky, Settings governs the Octarchy, the religions, the guards, and in short, the SETTINGS.

However if you're capable of helping these approved guilds while respecting the above condition and applying it to every other guild out there, perfect. If a guild of followers of Laanx gets picked by the Government, everyone should know of that choice and why the government chose it over another guild. I also think that guilds supported by the PS Team should be controlled by the GM's closer than the rest.
I think it would be unfair for every other Laanx guild out there trying to compete with the guild that got picked, but that could happen in real life too, when governments for some reason decide to give benefit to only one religious sect.

It just wouldn't make sense if, for instance, the Dark Empire/Royal House of Purrty/Outlaws got approved and received a fund a Guildhouse for free when it isn't in the Government's interest to provide with such for these initiatives.

This could be a good help to have some government(blackflame, dakkru, rogue)-attached guilds to set up standards. But it would suck if we suddenly got approved guilds like these spawning from everywhere (all sides: government, blackflame, rogues, etc.) and making nomral player-run guilds a joke by comparison. I don't want to be wasting time making a guild about Laanx when there's already one that pwns me in all ways (For isntance the guild about Laanx would only be sided with the government, never with rogues who could get their own Laanx cult thingy. Rogues shouldn't get an approved guild with funds as well [even if it could be explained by the settings], or there would be nothing left for the players to create.)

Concluding: I think that this type of approved guilds should be used by the PS Team as a way of guaranteeing high quality in some major important guilds (Government-Official Laanx and Talad religious sects for example, agendas programed by Blackflame, an underground net managed by some rogues, etc.). For regular guilds (i,e, the rest) a different kind of approval should be installed that merely means the guild is okay towards the setting.

[Tuxide]

Sangwa:  I don't think XilliX means officially sanctioned by the government, I think he means officially sanctioned by the Settings Team.

But it doesn't matter, if there isn't enough support for this "Approved Guilds" idea then he'll just forget this and force mostly every guild to go through a mandatory namechange like I said earlier.

[Sangwa]

Like I said, money doesn't rain from the skies, so it would have to be explained somehow. These guilds would need to be sanctioned by either the government or any other non-played organization. The purpose of the Settings Team is to improve the settings' consistency and quality, and it's easy to understand that a having guilds around that "magically" get guildhouses or "magically" get funds isn't consistent. It's simply silly.


I think the best approach to guarantee guild quality is to require that all guilds are approved. I've said this before, the GM and settings team should work together to make sure guilds are consistent. But the naming isn't the only concern. The structure and history are also very important. But we'll get there eventually. The interest in this topic is already a sign that we're improving. The way I see things, there should be some sort of Guild creation application, rather than the silly 20000 tria fee.
It would demand more of the GM's or Settings Team, but it would be the best approach at assuring guilds don't come out with silly names, histories or impossible structures.

[Waylander]

Demanding more out of the settings and GM teams isn't something to be taken lightly.  They get paid just as much as players do, remember?

Money can come from anywhere, Sharven may devote some temple funds to a guild that is well devoted to Laanx.  Zak may see fit to invest in criminal guild.  The Octarchy might want to increase trade and so give a merchant guild a boost.  There are always ways to explain it.

[Prolix]

While there is a theoretical source of money -- the mints on level 3 or 4, is it -- money really does come from nowhere in the game. There is an inexhaustible supply of critters which drop various loot which is either money or salable or both. Most games are like that. What difference does it make if the game officials decide to do some targeted spending?

[Sangwa]

Exactly. I was just explaining the obvious: the settings team won't be throwing money around without reasons.

And about demanding more from the GM and Settings team, I don't know their level of demand right now, so I can't tell. If they can't handle it, they can always recruit more people. The amount of work required for this isn't inhuman. Guild applications should require:

• tria (hopefully more than 20000...);
• 5 members required;
• The name of the guild (has to be valid or the rest isn't even read);
• 50 words about structure (gets deleted automatic if there's more than 50 words)
• 50 words about history.
• A system that allows to formulate these applications.

Imagine you get 100 guilds application each day. You'd waste a maximum time of 5 minutes (considering you're a really slow reader and thinker and that it takes some time to open the application) with each post, summing into 500 minutes =  8,333 hours. If you have 8 GM's each will only take about an hour to get this done. The day has 24 hours, fortunately and the applications can be taken care of progressively.
I also doubt you'll ever get 100 guild applications in a day. The number of members required + the tria require would make it necessary for almost 500 different people (some people might log with different characters, or make the guild several times until they have no money) to log in a day.
This is the worst case scenario and I don't see it as very demanding. The PS Team probably has more information about the number of guilds usually created in a day and I bet it doesn't get to half of the value I stated here. Of course this wouldn't solve every single problem, but it would exclude right away the most evident mistakes without ever having them out.

EDIT to answer Prolix: I think we have enough inconsistency already :P.