Re: Klapman - I've said this elsewhere, and I'll say it again here - people who have no active characters and come onto our forums to comment are not welcome, particularly if it appears to be an attempt to troll a situation. You haven't logged a character into game for over a month, and you weren't active then either.
1. That's a stupid decision
2. What are you doing
3. Stop
When you become active, we will deem you a player once more, and you'll be welcome to raise your input.
(EDIT: the responses to this were split to here to keep this thread on topic.)
Now that is out of the way, to address our actual players' concerns:
- We did not discuss this decision with players because we knew the overall player reaction would be negative. Therefore, there was no need to poll for a view of pbase feelings. We felt those negative feelings would only be exasperated when we asked players how they felt, then went against their wishes anyway. Staff were absolutely unanimous on this decision, which says something about how needed we think it is. Staff have to make hard decisions now and again.
- To be clear, there are multiple reasons for this change, which were listed on the OOC channel. It is not just about people joining guilds OOCly to farm skills, though that is *part* of the cultural problem. The other reasons are that the underlying guild code consistently has problems - in fact, I think a recent change to the code that was supposed to block GLs from dual guilding not working properly and being very hard to fix without affecting other things is probably how this topic ended up on Staff Talking Points in the first place.
- The cultural problems relating to dual guilding aren't all about people joining guilds to farm skills, though that is one of the more blatant issues. The other problems are around a lack of focus in character concepts that often make characters feel less meaningful to the world around them, both for the player and for others interacting with the character. Dual guild characters also seem to imply to everyone that the default setting for having a guild role is 'whatever the player wants regardless of how reasonable it is'. Three, people react better and have more appreciation for things that are scarce.
- However, the culture around dual guilding isn't the only issue, there are also serious thematic problems with people having multiple professions. It's extremely unrealistic. I don't know a single practicing doctor/policeman real life. Or a shop owner/priest. Or an actor moonlighting with another full time profession. Heck, most people with full time,
professional jobs do not have other full time, professional jobs. In fact, I don't know *anyone* IRL that fits this description, at best you get hobbists - who are reasonable at rank 36 and 'adept'. And in the extremely unusual cases where one of you does know a person who fits the dual profession description - it'll be less than 5% of the irl population, so it is definitely not usual enough to warrant being "normal" on TI.
- As for the thought that GLs can and are handling this ICly - perhaps there are patches where this is being dealt with, but this change requires a cultural shift that cannot be upheld by one or two GLs standing up for what they believe in on their patches of turf - it's not even fair for staff to ask them to enforce it. The responsibility for decisions like this belongs in Staff space, and it's our responsibility to handle it, even when it's unpopular.
- With regards to GLs fighting over characters - please do. It is far better for the game for seekers to be engaged by multiple people vying for their attention as they're frequently new characters. It helps them build relationships and hurts no one.
- With regards to covert concepts being 'tanked' - firstly, I think that's a wild exaggeration. At worst, they have one less option from a myriad of existing options. We've heard testimony from some players in this thread alone that they're non-covert players and they are adverse to guilding. Further, I think the statistics raised from the census data above stand on their own.
- As for why we grandfathered - that's because we're not heartless. No one in a dual guilding position was doing anything wrong, they were just playing the game as it was presented to them. We recognize it took time and energy to get into multiple guilds. Nor are we keen to change people's existing characters and situation with the wave of a magic wand; that's painful for everyone. Sometimes it cannot be avoided, here it can be. So we did.
Hopefully I've touched on all of the points people raised; if I missed any, my apologies.