City Novicehood Changes Are Live

Oleis

We have now implemented the changes shifting novicehood from guilds to cities. While this is going to be quite the upheaval for our experienced players, my goal is to make the switch as transparent for newbies as possible. You'll notice these changes:

Guilds:
* The guild system code has been essentially rewritten. Guilds now offer ranks 1-5 only, with guildmaster-customizable positions so you can tailor the guild's structure however you like. The other 14 regular guild ranks have been converted to positions so that you can choose what to do about it.
* The Secretary and Head of Novices positions have been removed. Secretaries have been converted into a customizable position.
* Guildmasters can choose to make a position show up on your guild's help file, or choose to let it be contestable through the politics system.
* GUILD PRIVS is rewritten, too, and is hopefully more helpful.
* Guild novicehood no longer exists as a concept. Newbies will not join your guild until they have passed through the introduction and the city's Academy, OR until they have been promoted by an Amassador. At that point, they will enter their class' guild as GR1 members.
* Guild probation no longer exists.

Cities:
* Ambassadors now represent the "Head of Novices" for each city. Ambassadorial aides, therefore, are novice aides.
* Ambassadors and their aides can now CITY PROMOTE to promote someone out of novicehood (and into their guild) without needing to finish the Academy.

I expect there will be a few issues and unforeseen consequences of these changes, which are very difficult to test outside of the live game. We owe Razmael an enormous debt for his willingness to dive in and help me get this thing across the finish line. Please file bug reports for cosmetic or low-priority problems and ISSUEs for immediate, game-breaking concerns. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to contact me directly or post here.

Tenshyo

When does the secondary part of this happen? The Guild/City split?

Kerryn

Thank you Razmael and Oleis and anyone else that helped make this possible. This was a much needed change and I absolutely -love- it. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Lin

Our GM is on vacation so we haven't seen the new system pan out in the Shamans yet, but from what people have been sharing this paradigm shift is pretty great. I love the customizable role system, but the best feature is making roles you can contest for that aren't Guildmaster. Very cool. I saw that the Ascendril already have a "second in command" role, e.g. someone who has nearly all the powers of the GM themselves. I hope this kind of thing becomes a lot more prevalent!

Oleis

Tenshyo said:

When does the secondary part of this happen? The Guild/City split?

New inductees are already subject to the rule that they must be cityless or a member of the allied city. I will be sending messages soon to let active players know if they're going against that alignment and will force the issue in about 2 weeks.

Neoma

@Oleis First let me say I am pleased with the novices being handled by the city and I like the new possibilities we have with the positions in guilds. Kudos for that! Also I am all for the new inductees and even older members who are below a certain rank to be forced to the tethered city, but I am against forcing elders of a guild whom are involved and have invested into a different city to choose between the two. The Indo are already struggling and if we loose some members because of this it will not help.

Aishia

Alright! So here is my big major concern: GR 3 is still voting rank I'm told. I'm not 100% sure but it seems like the FAVORING WEIGHT SCHEME/rank attainment is probably roughly what cities are now if I am correct? The mandate task difficulty to get rank 3. Is that still supposed to be the same? It'll be a bit of a pain churning out big favors for promotions for minor tasks to get people to rank 3 with the ease it's supposed to be attained at now. Solutions?? A promotion priv? Reducing voting rank to 2? IDK! Plz address.

Oleis

Favoring weight has not changed.

Aishia

Alright just to be clear getting to gr 5 takes the same amount of favors as it did before?
Is it that I'm giving a gr5 favor now instead of a gr19 favor?

Kerryn

I think and correct me if I'm wrong, @Aishia, but she's talking about the fact that guilds have to follow a set list of tasks that guilds can ask of novices to get class. Which was GR3 but now they get class from the academy not guilds. Much of what's on that list is now covered in the academy and the city novice system, thus rendering it redundant. I think Aishia's advocating for voting rights to be lowered from gr3 to 2 as now that's the only reason to enforce 'novice/easy' tasks to get voting rights. Having some set tasks is probably good to prevent some guilds from blocking new players from voting/contesting by making the tasks to hard.

Oleis

Aishia said:

Alright just to be clear getting to gr 5 takes the same amount of favors as it did before?
Is it that I'm giving a gr5 favor now instead of a gr19 favor?

I may have unintentionally goofed the weighting because of guild rank changes. I'll check into it.

Kerryn said:

I think and correct me if I'm wrong, @Aishia, but she's talking about the fact that guilds have to follow a set list of tasks that guilds can ask of novices to get class. Which was GR3 but now they get class from the academy not guilds. Much of what's on that list is now covered in the academy and the city novice system, thus rendering it redundant. I think Aishia's advocating for voting rights to be lowered from gr3 to 2 as now that's the only reason to enforce 'novice/easy' tasks to get voting rights. Having some set tasks is probably good to prevent some guilds from blocking new players from voting/contesting by making the tasks to hard.

I'm very comfortable lowering voting rank to GR2.

Aishia

Right. Excuse incoherence. Had some wine with dinner. Up way too late!

Kerryn

Kerryn said:

I think and correct me if I'm wrong, @Aishia, but she's talking about the fact that guilds have to follow a set list of tasks that guilds can ask of novices to get class. Which was GR3 but now they get class from the academy not guilds. Much of what's on that list is now covered in the academy and the city novice system, thus rendering it redundant. I think Aishia's advocating for voting rights to be lowered from gr3 to 2 as now that's the only reason to enforce 'novice/easy' tasks to get voting rights. Having some set tasks is probably good to prevent some guilds from blocking new players from voting/contesting by making the tasks to hard.

I'm very comfortable lowering voting rank to GR2.

Can we have a wee bit more wiggle room in terms of requirements to get to gr2 and voting rights? What those would be, I'm unsure. The current requirements to get to gr2 are:

Novicehood -> GR1
-----------------
Nothing, this is what the GRADUATE FROM NOVICEHOOD command is for.


GR1 -> GR2
----------
- May be advised to find a sponsor within a guild. Not required, but advised.
- Level 35
- Have a description
- Be fully clothed (if you have a guild uniform/armor/weapons, get those)
- Graduate from a city's academy
- Familiarize yourself with the TASKS system and complete as many as you'd like
- Familiarize yourself with HELP LAWS
- Be able to find the post office, bank, and guild hall
- Be prepared to answer an open-ended question such as, "Why are you here/what's your goal/etc."

Which are all pretty much covered by the academy now, save a couple. So being able to have guild aligned tasks that relate to what the guild is actually about would be wonderful.

Aishia

ya usuall when Im testing a newb it's like "Yah you clearly did all this already"

Aishia

Might not hurt to make lastlogin/inventory or whatever count sec as gr6. (Is there a way to do this already?)

Kerryn

Aishia said:

Might not hurt to make lastlogin/inventory or whatever count sec as gr6. (Is there a way to do this already?)

You can assign either of those privs to any position. Depends on how the GM sets it up, what privs for what positions.

Aishia

I mean that like a gr5 can't check other gr5s and since almost everyone is gr5 it sort of limits the power of the ability.
Also: Two of my gr5 sec favors don't bump a gr1 to gr2. So either my favor is much weaker now than before or it takes more favors than before.

Razmael

Secretaries no longer exist mechanically, so they lost mechanical benefit they had of an increased favour strength. I may look at adding a priv for increased favour strength to make up for that though.

This is the same reason why that lastlogin etc behaviour is happening, but in that case it's a bug and we simply missed changing it so those commands can work on anybody in the guild. I'll get that fixed up tonight.

Koda

Alternatively, wouldn't now potentially be a good time to add in a command to bump somebody up to the next rank? Make those for progression through the first basic ranks, which would allow guildfavors to be more of a "Hey you did a good thing and the guild is recognizing you for it."

Teani

@Koda I have asked for a GUILD PROMOTE command that will do just that, but I was told it wouldn't happen. It would make it easier to promote people through ranks, but it would sort of make the guildfavor useless in a sense.

Koda

I think with a limited rank scenario here as we now have, guildfavors will ultimately become more of a pat on the back type thing anyway, which should theoretically alleviate that concern.

If it takes two guildfavors to get somebody from GR1 to GR2, it's not like that extra favor (made with the purpose of bumping up a rank) is going to provide some sort of warm fuzzy feeling to make the guild promote command outweigh it in terms of effect. An extra GF to bump up a rank is just an extra system message to delete, really.

Kerryn

Hey, @Oleis and @Tiur. Could we get the ability for guild tutors to welcome new members joining through the academy back, please? As well as the ability to set what the tutor says, it is a great resource for directing new members to the proper GHELP Scrolls to get started, should no one be awake in the guild at the time of their joining.

Also, when someone joins the guild, could it auto title them with the first rank, like it use to please? Or allow us the option to choose if it does or doesn't?

Daegon

I don't know if it's part of the novice changes or what. But the past week or so I've seen a few novices calling over CT that a quest in the Academy was broken. It's happened enough times that it should be fixed, I don't know if maybe it's them or how they do it or what. But pretty soon someone is going to stop playing Aet cause they can't get past a quest. I would give a list of quests that they said were broken. But frankly I don't remember them, or I came in the after math of one.

Tiur

The entire system has been redone recently (In excess of this post, Academies are actually all new, even if you don't see it). Not sure what would be broken! If you get specifics, have them ISSUE and we'll check.

Teani

The new guildrank system has broken some of the progs that were tied to previous Secretary ranks and they are pretty vital for progression so as not to break RP. I have BUGged them, but really want to get them up and running soon.

In the intro, it makes no sense that the information regarding GRACE comes after the vermin part, since the newbie will have to reject it to be able to complete that step and move to the next one. Better to have the armor/grace/defense information before they go vermin hunting.

With the same person, they speak about learning lessons, but nothing has been added about the guild's recommended distribution of lessons as a start. I think this would be a good addition. That way citizens don't have to learn what each guild recommends, since it can shift or vary.

"Your guild recommends that you learn up to Adept in and # lessons in . It is also a good idea to put # lessons in Survival, so you don't drown when crossing a river. As you continue exploring and questing around the world, you will gain more lessons, which should be put towards becoming Adept in before you graduate. After that you can ask your guild for more guidance on how to spend them."

HELP ACADEMY still shows ACADEMY GUILD. It doesn't show when doing ACADEMY, but if you try to do ACADEMY GUILD it will show the tasks that remain incomplete. I noticed that part of what I had sent in was added to other things, like stoneskin, channeling and using a voidstaff, which is good. It would be nice if something small was added about the guild in general, though. A small introduction if nothing else, right before Hoffam sends them off to actually join their guild.

Tiur

Use orgreq and we'll work our way through progs. I've been doing them as I get informed they exist. And am not doing something else.

Grace was modified to allow the newbie stuff without turning it off, and then we added the grace info. Shouldn't be a problem.

Learning is a good idea, will look at it.

ACADEMY GUILD is off for now, but we might bring it back when we decide how to deal with a few other things.