To some extent that would be true. A guild who really did want to take them out wouldn\'t have a problem. There will still be unaligned artisans, and any smart guild will have a few of its own. Plus, if this were the case, guilds will maintain armories as well. I expect more than one craft guild, so I imagine one might even pay a militaristic guild to raze the other and eliminate some competition. A craft guild will never have military of magic prowess to match the others. Instead, it will have economic power. If you want to deny them economic power, I insist you deny mages magic power and warriors physical power. That way, everyone can be a dull grey sludgy existence, where everything is equal.
In a side note: I am pretty certain trade guilds were often quite powerful in reality. Probably the origins of Oligarchies.
Personally, I favor the try it out approach. If we check this out in Alpha or Beta, then we can have everything working well by release. With totally open testing like they plan, along with the extended schedule, this should be a possibility. I prefer to try something unusual and new than something tried over and over again. I have to say that the trade skills in Eq (dunno bout the rest, sorry, this is just my exp. btw) were largely not fun, for one reason or another. A big portion was that with smithing in particular, there was no way to make money with it before level 16 at minimum, which is when you can reliably produce banded armor. Breaking the trade skills is not the answer here. Model them acurately, and the society will duplicate medieval society, to some extent. A large factor ** I think this is the most important, ignore the rest if you must ** will be weather or not people frequent the cities. There is quite literally nothing to draw one to a city in Eq, beyond resupply, spells, and training. If you go to the roleplay server, you will see that there are hundreds (a guess) online at any moment, but they are not in the cities beyond 1% at most. I tried to buy a bind in Qeynos (the central large city on the left of the map) for about 30 minutes, offering 10 pp (alot on the roleplay server, with its crippled economy) and got no answer. Why? Because only about 8 people wandered through the city in that time. And most of those were just passing through to get to an island by boat.
If they can just lay the city out with sufficient distinctness of its parts, so its not a warren, make the roads large enough not to clog, make them straight enough not to frustrate, and make there a point to being there beyond the aforementioned, then the game will surely be a success and its denizens happy. One last thing: the roleplay server\'s economy was crippled in large part by a restriction of one character per player on that particular server. Hense, a normal 1500 + player server would have 4-8 times that in characters, and people would often create new ones. This created a need for lower level items. People are usually more willing to delete a secondary or tertiary character than a primary, so almost no-one ever deletes a characer from the roleplay server. Those who do have friends keep the equipment and money until they recreate and hand it back. This is a closed loop economy. Once every player gets banded armor, no more market will exist. Thats why I bought a forged bastard sword for 1/6 the price on a normal server.
Well, that was enough of a rant.
At der Wolfmann\'s suggestion:
X(:evil:X(:evil:X(:evil:
