EDIT: It effects all of Serenwilde, not just a Serenguard thing.
Doesn't this kind of... stand for the entirereason for the Serenguard's existence? To stand at the lip of the abyss and hold Doom at bay?
I'm not sure how often it has to be repeated, but it does seem like it could be a pretty awesome tool if played up right and not just left to the same few people to repeatedly follow up on.
Edit: And yes, I am considering Grutina and the rogue-Hartstones to be a "Doom" for the purpose of this conversation!
Exactly right. The reason we have to do the quest is pretty awesome. It reminds me of the original purpose of the Serenguard, which was not only to guard the borders of the forest, but to keep an eye on the Hartstone in case another one like Grutina Oakvine arose and to... take care of them. In this quest, the Serenguard are again the only thing that stand between the Serenwilde and doom. The quest gives a sense of "serious business".
The quest has to be repeated every RL day. There are 10 strands on the lock, and 1 decays every RL day. So you can miss a few days here and there, but if you don't catch back up and keep missing days, eventually the lock will break. So if a few days are missed, the quest has to be done a few extra times to make sure it doesn't break.
Everiine is a man, and is very manly. This MAN before you is so manly you might as well just gender bend right now, cause he's the manliest man that you ever did see. His manly shape has spurned many women and girlyer men to boughs of fainting. He stands before you in a manly manerific typical man-like outfit which is covered in his manly motto: "I am a man!"
Daraius said: You gotta risk it for the biscuit.
Pony power all the way, yo. The more Brontaurs the better.
EDIT: It effects all of Serenwilde, not just a Serenguard thing.
Doesn't this kind of... stand for the entirereason for the Serenguard's existence? To stand at the lip of the abyss and hold Doom at bay?
I'm not sure how often it has to be repeated, but it does seem like it could be a pretty awesome tool if played up right and not just left to the same few people to repeatedly follow up on.
Edit: And yes, I am considering Grutina and the rogue-Hartstones to be a "Doom" for the purpose of this conversation!
That was part of the intent behind the original idea, and they definitely expanded that beyond our vague "something" to fill that role. Heh. The roleplay concepts they added to it were pretty awesome.
Also @Everiine is it bad that I've not yet actually done the quest yet? By the time it came out it was a string of crappy net and losing my system (which I've still not replaced)
It seems I'll be following in the footsteps of @Gesiah... sort of. I played Lusternia for several months in 2010, before quitting due to real-life reasons—my father took a turn for the worse and died that year, so I dropped everything to stay with him while he was under hospice care. That's why I drifted away. I'm not fishing for condolences, and please, don't feel obligated to offer any; just know that a powerful life change occurred. A few of you may remember Felicia (Faeling Harbinger) from that time period. I was around long enough to make a few friends, an enemy or two, write a few plays and songs of some sort, buy a system from that one guy with the Ghost in the Shell avatar on the old forums, and get a fundamental feel for the basics of the game. Additionally, I've been playing MUDs on and off since the very late 1990s.
As an outsider now, and with my albeit slightly fuzzy memories of being a newbie in mind, I'm here to opine that Gesiah is absolutely correct. You should probably heed people like him/her if you care at all about new player retention.
First, some numbers: Even before I initially connected to Lusternia, I noted that there were 28 guilds on offer, while MUD Stats listed a "30 Day Avg" (of players online) count somewhere between 60-70. Currently, Lusternia's average is 62 online. Compare that to Aetolia with its 17 guilds and a "30 Day Avg" of 72 players online. That's 16% more players to fill 35% fewer guilds. MUD Stats' numbers may not be perfect, but they're something to go on. Little factoids such as these are noticed by some potential new players.
That's just numbers, though, and not completely reliable, right? Agreed, so here are a few of my opinions for your consideration. Even after three years, I know enough to realize that these will upset some folks, and I apologize for that.
Lusternia can feel awfully quiet a lot of the time to the rank newbie, and that's during peak hours. I believed then (and still do now) that this is due to the guilds being spread so thin, to people conducting their IC business and socializing in clan chat, to the fact that combatants et alia tend to be too busy gallivanting about to spend much time helping newcomers, and—for the non-coms and coms alike—all that time spent performing the large amount of arbitrary busywork necessary to keep orgs up and running, almost certainly more than in any other IRE game. Check that totem, gather that essence, do that ritual, fill that stockroom, and so on and so forth.
When guilds are spread thinly, there's that much less interaction available to new players. When you're in your clan chat interacting with players you've known for years, you're certainly not interacting with new players. When you're running around performing a lot of busywork that, OOCly, doesn't mean anything at all and is largely symbolic ICly, that's less time/focus available to interact with new players. If you're a combatant, well... combatants gonna combatant, I guess. Can't fault them for honing their skill most of the time, it's what they do.
Achaea can afford to have antisocial combatants, people who bash 14 hours a day, elitist clans, and so on. Their houses and class chat are far more populous than Lusternia's. Lusternia, with ONE-THIRD of Achaea's daily average player count, has more guilds than Achaea has houses... and again, more arbitrary busywork to do.
Achaea can also afford to have nasty veterans who insult precocious newbies. Lusternia cannot. As you can see from what happened with @Gesiah, all it takes is one snarly person to send a newbie away forever. I also noticed that this upset most of you, and that's good.
For all I know, Lusternia's population will grow in the future, or perhaps you'll continue averaging 60-70 players online for next 5-10 real-life years. Given that MUDs are a dying breed (dying glacially, but still declining), and given Lusternia's particular challenges, I think instead that 62 average will drop to 60... then to 58... then to 56... you get the idea. Though I'm not playing Lusternia anymore (I might, which is of course why I'm sniffing around), I care immensely about this genre and I'd save every MUD and MUSH I could from declining if I were able. I'm taking the time to write all of this because Lusternia is one I played personally.
Thanks for reading!
Edit: I left out a bit. I stuck with Lusternia for months despite feeling lonely much of the time as a newbie. I tried my absolute best to get involved whenever and wherever I could, try some combat (heh), get on aetherships, worm my way into a city clan, pester combatants, whatever. I'm motivated and persistent. Yet even then, the game felt spread thin. Food for thought.
Just to play devil's advocate for a bit: Taking care of newbies is not a player's responsibility. The people who take on newbie helper positions do so at their own discretion, and for the good of the game, but primarily, they do so for their own enjoyment. Because when more newbies (and players) stay, the game becomes more fun, for themselves. This is a game, this is not a job.
That's the natural state of things, and a state everyone, including newbies, should want to maintain and encourage.
However, taking for granted the established players' kindness is nothing but gross arrogance. To phrase things in a way that implies that the newbie retention is important because newbies are god is a mis-interpretation of the social nature of this game. No player is beholden to any newbie for any reason. If, as a newbie, you cannot accept the hard work that players put in for your sake with grace and gratitude, then you have no right to join in our social game and reap the benefits of our solidarity. I'm referring specifically to the newbie who Llandros chased away, whatever his name was. Good riddance, basically, is what I am saying.
No one, including these "nasty veterans", wants to see newbies trolled away. But neither do we appreciate getting our work thrown in our face like we are servants who should cater to the whims of a spoiled brat. Even "anti-social combatants" put in effort to help newbies sometimes. I see no reason why I should bend over backward to retain newbies who would group people up on an arbitrary genre and throw them in a box like so much discarded chaff, because these are the very kinds of newbies who would end up being nothing but a pest in the future. I will bend over backwards and give my firstborn to retain a newbie who knows humility and works hard instead.
The woes faced by newbies during off-peak are aplenty. This is when players are not around to help. This thread seeks ideas and brainstorms to find ways to alleviate this problem, and I believe both the admin and the players are all trying their very best to do so. The woes faced by newbies during peak hours are far less common, but when such problems crop up, they need to be fixed. When there are players around who are ignoring hardworking newbies, then yes, we need to look at population spread issues and find ways to fix it, or add mechanics to improve it, like Covenants. Whether these measures are succeeding or not is up for debate, and if they are not, I'm sure the admin will consider further measures as well.
I don't see a need for players to do even more than what they are already doing, however. The established norms of our newbie helping volunteers are top-grade.
The only thing I'm specifically "blaming" anyone for is unnecessary snarkiness. I know all too well how tempting it is for an elder geek to snap at a brazen and seemingly ungrateful new player, but at the same time, harsh vitriol and defensiveness accomplish nothing except to push people away. That player's first post was, in essence, this: "There was never anyone online to teach me the ropes, so I left. I came sniffing around again, found this thread, and was encouraged—until I read that Estarra doesn't seem interested in resolving the titular problems I perceive with the game. I've therefore decided not to play."
None of that post was throwing anything in anyone's face, except perhaps for a dose of reality. It's certainly a tough nugget to swallow if you love this game, but in my view, he or she wasn't saying anything that hadn't already been said... though perhaps with less tact than one might wish for. As for the person's second response, it was a knee-jerk angry reaction to a rude and curt dismissal. They were provoked. Is that all it takes to convince you that someone's a terrible player, will never improve, and good riddance? You can't always expect to hear only what you want to hear, and as much as veteran players shouldn't be expected to mollycoddle new players and devote all their time to their care and feeding (you're right about that), neither however should new players be expected to worship you and kiss your feet as gods, especially if they're lonely all the time. Unless it's in-game and you actually play a god, of course, then naturally their character should worship you.
Corollary to the above, yes, it's the right of long-time players (and any players, really) to play however they wish within the rules of the game and/or their orgs. I know I may have seemed to imply otherwise, but that's not my intent. You're entitled to spend a lot of time on your clan chats. You're entitled to go off and do combatant things for days and weeks at a time. You're entitled to bash, you're entitled to go aether hunting, you're entitled to be antisocial, you needn't play at all, for that matter. But the effects of those choices (on newbies) are real, however justifiably entitled you are to them. The newbie helpers certainly are devoted, I don't doubt, and the guildmasters too, but is it enough?
All THAT aside, and even if I'm totally mistaken about the above, the main push is really the spread-thinness of the player base. About that, I am near-totally convinced I'm correct. In my view, three orgs and twelve guilds (four per org) would do absolute wonders for this game, bringing people together into active, nuanced groups with more than twice their current memberships. Org "maintenance" (running around doing those little tasks) would be much easier, there would (appear to be) more people online, each guild and org would be easier to manage due to increased delegation, and newbies would be more likely to stay.
Except... the way the game's designed, you can't get rid of anything. No one wants to give up their city, or their guild. I understand that better than you might give me credit for. But in my view, the spread-thinness is a problem and something should be done about it. I can't offer solutions because every single person here knows this game better than I do. I can only say, "I was new once, I'm an outsider now, and I can tell you from out here looking in that the problem is real." You are free to disagree, of course.
Well, I'm just gonna say that consolidating guilds/prgs together has been brought up repeatedly given the issues of population spread, etc., but it's simply not within the....plans of the admin to do so. Personally speaking, at this point, I don't think it's ever gonna happen.
So we have covenants.
Might as well try and do our best with those and see if they help. So far, I'm not seeing much change, but maybe I'm not around enough.
I've been playing Lusternia the day it opened, I'd been playing IRE games two or three years before that. What initially enthralled me completely was the differentness from the other games - skillchoices especially. The histories and lore later really grabbed me, but my most distinct memory of the first weeks was the awe of something really groundbreaking.
I love the individual guilds' concepts and always have, their histories all being very detailed and the cohesiveness of the entire story is really quite remarkable. I still, as a player, feel a bit of sadness when a guild I love is faltering. As much as I hate to admit it, I do feel that consolidation of guilds is the best hope for solving the population issues. That being said, I don't have any hope of that actually happening, and I think that speaks of an overly cautious conservatism. So, in the interest of realism, I'll ignore what I think is necessary to address and make a significant positive impact on the population spread.
Since we can't really take care of the population, the only thing that's going to flesh out our organizations (albeit slowly) is new player retention. The biggest problem I can identify here that we can do something about is how novices get treated. I can not count the number of times I've seen novices have polite requests for help or clarification go unanswered on CGT, despite their being college professors, undersecretaries, secretaries and/or GA's online. The difference between silence and informing them you're busy is huge, in my opinion.
Complete inattentiveness on the part of players who have chosen to take on positions which involve the training and assistance of novices is near inexcusable, in my opinion. Yes, each player has a right to play the game in a manner that brings enjoyment to them (within certain boundaries, obviously). However, in any appointed or elected position relating to the care of novices, a choice has been made - that should be a willingness to go out of your way to help new players. I have no problem with people who want to spend all their time lurking in manses or hunting, that's their business - I have a huge problem with those people occupying and subsequently ignoring the responsibilities of certain positions.
The problem becomes cyclical because advancement to a certain guild rank is often a requirement to take on these positions. If the GA or (under)secretaries are inattentive, someone that actually wants to fulfill the duties of the position is going to have a very difficult time getting to the necessary guildrank and appointed.
Since we can't really take care of the population, the only thing that's going to flesh out our organizations (albeit slowly) is new player retention. The biggest problem I can identify here that we can do something about is how novices get treated. I can not count the number of times I've seen novices have polite requests for help or clarification go unanswered on CGT, despite their being college professors, undersecretaries, secretaries and/or GA's online. The difference between silence and informing them you're busy is huge, in my opinion.
It's not always just a lack of answers, either. There is a sense (or was for me) that everyone is busy most of the time, and so, generally, I'd try to locate my own answers via the help system or some other research method. While that may be considered praiseworthy, it's not an interactive experience. You're interacting with a static database. A new player who finds most of her own answers therefore isn't receiving player interaction through that avenue. A channel that's meant to be used only when help is required isn't a stimulating outlet.
The citywide chat channels, if I remember correctly, are to be used for official business, announcements, maybe a bit of appropriate large-scale RP, and so on. Again, it's not a channel new players can interact with regularly from hour to hour. It's there for when it's needed, but it must be kept free of unnecessary chatter for obvious reasons. New players won't even know about the city defense/raid clans often reserved for combatants until a few weeks in, which is of course appropriate, but again, they don't know there are people talking on them. All they hear is silence.
Then there are family aetherweaves (I had to look that up, heh), private player-owned clans, private manses, and so on and so forth. New players don't hear what goes on in these unless invited, and in my experience, that doesn't tend to happen within the first week or month... particularly the more exclusive clans frequented by longtime, well respected players. Quite understandable, but again, what's the result? The newbie doesn't see any of the interaction that goes on through these vectors, and may not participate. Silence.
To top it all off, new players don't know much about anything other than what they've been able to cram from the help files, from which they're likely experiencing sensory overload. They don't quite "get" their city, they don't know that many people, they don't know the lore, and so they don't know how to RP properly. That's easily endured by a veteran MUDder, but how about someone totally new to MUDs? It's best to play conservatively until one gets a feel for how the game works. Again, silence. Still, direct "in the same room" interaction is probably, by far, the most interaction a new player will get for quite some time. And that is catch-as-catch-can for newbies, I think.
The theme I'm driving at is silence, silence, silence, silence, and a sense that you shouldn't chatter or bother anyone with questions you could find the answer to on your own. Now add one more ingredient to that: a guild that's nearly always empty. Do you reasonably expect anyone to put up with that? I wouldn't. I'd log out, feeling badly that such a cool game seems so dead. What kind of rarefied individual must exist in this year of 2013 who not only is interested in MUDs, but in Lusternia, and furthermore is able to endure that much silence?
I suspect that many veterans are comfortably settled into clans, families and so on, and/or have hunting partners and regular RP partners, and don't see this. That, or they enjoy being antisocial, which is fine and their choice, obviously (though perhaps not helping the issue). Not only are there a bunch of orgs and guilds in Lusternia, but MANY categories of chat channels that newbies don't know much about and/or can't participate in.
I've been playing Lusternia the day it opened, I'd been playing IRE games two or three years before that. What initially enthralled me completely was the differentness from the other games - skillchoices especially. The histories and lore later really grabbed me, but my most distinct memory of the first weeks was the awe of something really groundbreaking.
I love the individual guilds' concepts and always have, their histories all being very detailed and the cohesiveness of the entire story is really quite remarkable. I still, as a player, feel a bit of sadness when a guild I love is faltering. As much as I hate to admit it, I do feel that consolidation of guilds is the best hope for solving the population issues. That being said, I don't have any hope of that actually happening, and I think that speaks of an overly cautious conservatism. So, in the interest of realism, I'll ignore what I think is necessary to address and make a significant positive impact on the population spread.
Since we can't really take care of the population, the only thing that's going to flesh out our organizations (albeit slowly) is new player retention. The biggest problem I can identify here that we can do something about is how novices get treated. I can not count the number of times I've seen novices have polite requests for help or clarification go unanswered on CGT, despite their being college professors, undersecretaries, secretaries and/or GA's online. The difference between silence and informing them you're busy is huge, in my opinion.
Complete inattentiveness on the part of players who have chosen to take on positions which involve the training and assistance of novices is near inexcusable, in my opinion. Yes, each player has a right to play the game in a manner that brings enjoyment to them (within certain boundaries, obviously). However, in any appointed or elected position relating to the care of novices, a choice has been made - that should be a willingness to go out of your way to help new players. I have no problem with people who want to spend all their time lurking in manses or hunting, that's their business - I have a huge problem with those people occupying and subsequently ignoring the responsibilities of certain positions.
The problem becomes cyclical because advancement to a certain guild rank is often a requirement to take on these positions. If the GA or (under)secretaries are inattentive, someone that actually wants to fulfill the duties of the position is going to have a very difficult time getting to the necessary guildrank and appointed.
I feel that you've blamed a lot on the players here which really... is entirely unfair because it seems that you have failed to understand the position that, at the very least, some are currently in.
There are ninety positions in the game that must be held by an individual. Without someone even just occupying that position, many things in the relevant guild or org can simply stop and cannot be done. That's ninety people who are expected to drop anything in the game immediately to attend to newbies should they need anything, even though at least two thirds of them aren't necessarily elected because they're good with newbies. And, sadly, often because of the low population and sheer number of positions that must be held by someone, they are held by someone who shouldn't hold it or who is only holding it because no one else will.
Also, currently there is a pressure on older players to sit around idling waiting to answer new players questions, because the guilds are spread so thin and some are so undesirable in terms of skills, so in some guilds you have maybe two or three people who effectively need to cover 24 hours of possible novices/low rank guild members turning up(yes people from the parent org might be able to help, often they couldn't even in a covenant). That pressure does lead to cracking.
I will also note that if someone is more qualified for the positions than the people holding them, then their rank really isn't an issue. As useless as they ultimately are beyond rank three, pretty much every guild has a method for raising to that rank and if you're truly going to be effective as a leader then you should be active enough to either catch people who can raise your rank, or be contacting them to work around that difficulty.
What I find ultimately very interesting is that the answer to population spread issues seems to be revolving around the players putting in a lot of time and effort to make the game functional.
What I find ultimately very interesting is that the answer to population spread issues seems to be revolving around the players putting in a lot of time and effort to make the game functional.
It's simply the only option remaining if the administration declines to consolidate guilds/orgs in any way. A sudden influx of new players would be an interesting case of a problem miraculously solving itself, but I think that that can be safely discounted. The hidden fourth option is chat channel consolidation to some degree or another, which has been suggested before in this thread... yet there are already Covenants (implemented two years after I played), and I can't speak to them one way or another, other than to say that they don't seem to have caused a population explosion.
This is clearly a problem that affects everyone, and isn't particularly anyone's "fault". It's not fair to experienced players that they're so stressed and stretched thin due to a problem that they're well aware of. It's not fair to newbies that those same experienced players are stretched so thin. And really, it's not fair to Estarra that her excellent (and that's why I'm here—I think the guilds, cities, and indeed the entire game are extremely interesting) game isn't a populous as she perhaps had planned for it to be.
Although, allowing the founding of a new city probably didn't help, no matter how awesome it is for those involved with it. And the amount of "org maintenance chores" only serves to exacerbate the issue even further.
I have no idea how many people are miffed at me for my little mini-dissertations, but regardless, I really hope someone figures out a way to de-stress Lusternia.
Estarra actually mentioned in her 2012 year in review that IRE was going to focus on advertising this year, so more new players isn't out of the question.
I do think that in the long run, Bards and Monks were a good idea at the wrong time. They are cool archetypes, but the population has never supported them very well. I think the game was better and more fun when there were 3 guilds per org. That was a good number. There was more activity per guild, and the organizations felt more tight knit and cohesive, and the politics between guilds was more interesting because you had more focus and depth.
Now the social aspect of Lusternia has definitely taken on a breadth over depth approach.
One thing that I think really makes the game more fun to play is OOC channels shared between multiple orgs. It lets you freely talk about the game while you're playing it, and you can use it to set up IC moments for RP. Also makes things feel less lonely, and makes it feel like you are actually playing with other people instead of just their characters. That might be immersion breaking for some, but I've always enjoyed playing multiplayer games with a group of people I could talk to.
I don't know how you could guide newbies into getting into one of these clans from an IC perspective, though. Just have to hope that they fall in with the right people and get invited.
The citywide chat channels, if I remember correctly, are to be used for official business, announcements, maybe a bit of appropriate large-scale RP, and so on. Again, it's not a channel new players can interact with regularly from hour to hour. It's there for when it's needed, but it must be kept free of unnecessary chatter for obvious reasons. New players won't even know about the city defense/raid clans often reserved for combatants until a few weeks in, which is of course appropriate, but again, they don't know there are people talking on them. All they hear is silence.
Then there are family aetherweaves (I had to look that up, heh), private player-owned clans, private manses, and so on and so forth. New players don't hear what goes on in these unless invited, and in my experience, that doesn't tend to happen within the first week or month... particularly the more exclusive clans frequented by longtime, well respected players. Quite understandable, but again, what's the result? The newbie doesn't see any of the interaction that goes on through these vectors, and may not participate. Silence.
It won't let me out of the quotes, gah. I think that the rules about city aethers, at least in Hallifax, are more assumed than actually the case. Because there is a clan for combat conversation, there's no reason for the city channel to be kept empty, and sometimes chatter does break out. But even when it does, it feels like new people are often too intimidated to join in, which is sad.
There are people who try to encourage conversation, whether over the city channel, or with people at the matrix, but so often the novices seem to simply want to be left alone to continue about their novice business, that it gets a bit discouraging trying to engage them. As a member of the Symphonium and an off peak player (although Hallifax seems to have a slightly different version of "peak" than the rest of the game sometimes), I'm very familiar with the difficulties posed by an empty guild (for a while after I joined, the Symphonium had no active guild administrator, and of the secretaries/undersecretaries only one of them was active) So I've done my best to be encouraging and talkative with novices that I see, regardless of the guild, when I play, but even novices that you think you've engaged, ones you've invested a lot of time in, can suddenly disappear for no reason whatsoever, or they turn out to be alts and go back to playing their main and it gets incredibly discouraging. I've mostly stopped asking over CT or CGT if any of the novices want to go hunting with me due to the crickets I get when I do, although I will extend the offer to someone I'm interacting with.
My own experience and frustrations led me to go "Well, fine. I need things answered, so I'm just going to ask the first person I find who seems to not be afk" and that started me doing things, and that started increasing my interactions, and being proactive has really helped my immersion in the game.
I realise that's not everyone's experience, I realise that it would be nice if overwhelmed novices didn't have to put themselves out there to get the attention they needed. But just like it's not the students' responsibility to work the new student out of their shell and make sure they're invited to everything with no encouragement from that newcomer at all, it's unrealistic to expect people to go out of their way to bend over backwards to get a novice integrated into the game when they have a lot of other duties and probably enjoy the game for their own reasons as well.
That said, I really really really really hate people afking on prime. But just because no one answered a question doesn't mean it got ignored, as, particularly when hunting or influencing, it can be sadly easy to miss the question in the spam. A lot of people (myself included) are hesitant to answer with "I don't know" thinking that someone will give a better response anyway, but I'm realising that I'd rather hear "I don't know" than silence, so that's something I've been trying to work on. But ofttentimes, novices just don't want to ask.
Essentially the problem as I see it is: There are too many guilds for the number of people playing, but at this point it is impossible to combine, or disband some guilds without alienating a great many players. Newcomers are sometimes turned off by the lack of interaction they receive. There, honestly, is no way to increase that interaction obviously. Most people already do try their best, or simply aren't cut out for it. Maybe some help scroll somewhere should mention that the best way to get interaction is to put yourself out there, but, woo more reading?
I do think the players have some personal responsibility towards trying to engage others in the game they clearly enjoy. I do think it's incredibly unfair to say that people need to be doing more than they already are. And I'd like to encourage @Felicia to keep trying to interact with people. Send tells to the Ambassador, Ambassador aides, or undersecretaries, secretaries with questions. Or try to start something yourself. Allyrianne's big break was getting people's opinions on an article on the art of Hallifax's lower wards that she was writing. I realised that I didn't really understand the distinctions in the caste system, so I asked and got Irillia and Morbo to discuss it with me. I realised I didn't understand whether beauty was a function, or more than a function, or if something needed a function to be beautiful according to Hallifax, so I asked, and ended up joining Lady Isune's order. It can help to have a specific something you want an opinion on, or a nuance of a tenet, because people can be silly and point you to a help file instead because they're so used to novices who just want to check things off instead of actually engage. Because those novices exist. And often it seems like they are in the majority. And if the undersecretaries or secretaries etc don't respond, report them. Most GAs have no way of knowing if their undersecretaries are doing their job, and if informed of a problem through message or what have you, will certainly see about getting rid of the people who took up the position because they wanted more credits from the credit sale.
Maybe I should write a list of conversation starters/how to get involved. Although yay one more thing for people to read >>
I will also note that if someone is more qualified for the positions than the people holding them, then their rank really isn't an issue. As useless as they ultimately are beyond rank three, pretty much every guild has a method for raising to that rank and if you're truly going to be effective as a leader then you should be active enough to either catch people who can raise your rank, or be contacting them to work around that difficulty.
I find this very interesting given your role in-game and the situation I was presented with recently. The week I re-joined the Hartstone recently was my finals week, so I was on Lusternia 12+ hours a day. It still took me the entire week to find someone to grade my Rites and Initiations to get to GR3, and ultimately the two people who did all of it were neither guild leaders nor under/secretaries. While I might have been able to contact you and Gabriella via message to set up a time specifically, that is a big hurdle to put true newbies through and I suspect most would be much more likely to sit at GR1 or leave the guild.
You are saying that those more suited to the position will bubble up and take over, but I'm not convinced that is the case. When I then started an election for the vacant GC slot, I was greeted with a half hour lecture by Gabriella on how I was doing my job wrong before I had even won. Had I been a fresh but qualified lowbie who was running for a position, being met with politics like that would have probably ended with me leaving the game (but instead I've just alted out and am having a great time in another guild while the Hartstone gets another vacant leader).
Am I the only one that has noticed the number of new people coming through the portal lately? Not just alts, but people either coming back for another stab at Lusternia or totally new players. SOMETHING is working right. Magnagora has gone from no more than 10 people online during peak time, to upward of 25, and yes, quite a few of these people have been new.
Covenants are still relatively new. You can't expect anything to be an instant fix that will result in 50 newbies logging in the next day, but I believe they are helpful to novice retention in the quieter guilds - they have more people to talk to when their guild is quiet, they mechanically have the ability to have their guild rank increased even if they can't find a leader in their own guild...it's not perfect, but it's an improvement. All the newbie changes to curing and hints and the like are aimed at encouraging the people who give Lusternia a try to stay around, by making those early days more palatable. I think the recent accusations thrown at Estarra saying she doesn't care/refuses to fix the problem are grossly unfair. Just because she hasn't given in to -your- belief (by your I mean the people suggesting it) that the only option is to cull guilds doesn't mean she is refusing to address the problem.
A large part of why people stay is because of character interaction, absolutely. Coming to the forums and saying 'Estarra refuses to do anything, all the players are lazy, I'm never playing again' really doesn't inspire people to go out and hug a novice, in my humble opinion. Instead of pointing fingers at which absent guild leader's fault it is that novices leave, how about we return to the purpose of this thread, to find possible ways to make population spread less of an issue. Delete guilds/should never have made guilds/new cities etc isn't exactly constructive, regardless how true the statement might be. Let's get back to some practical, likely to be implemented ideas!
I will also note that if someone is more qualified for the positions than the people holding them, then their rank really isn't an issue. As useless as they ultimately are beyond rank three, pretty much every guild has a method for raising to that rank and if you're truly going to be effective as a leader then you should be active enough to either catch people who can raise your rank, or be contacting them to work around that difficulty.
I find this very interesting given your role in-game and the situation I was presented with recently. The week I re-joined the Hartstone recently was my finals week, so I was on Lusternia 12+ hours a day. It still took me the entire week to find someone to grade my Rites and Initiations to get to GR3, and ultimately the two people who did all of it were neither guild leaders nor under/secretaries. While I might have been able to contact you and Gabriella via message to set up a time specifically, that is a big hurdle to put true newbies through and I suspect most would be much more likely to sit at GR1 or leave the guild.
You are saying that those more suited to the position will bubble up and take over, but I'm not convinced that is the case. When I then started an election for the vacant GC slot, I was greeted with a half hour lecture by Gabriella on how I was doing my job wrong before I had even won. Had I been a fresh but qualified lowbie who was running for a position, being met with politics like that would have probably ended with me leaving the game (but instead I've just alted out and am having a great time in another guild while the Hartstone gets another vacant leader).
Currently, I'm in my final semester. I have had times during my holidays and even during semester where I have sat with lusternia on one half of my screen purely so that I can catch people because that are coming through. I've had times where I dropped whatever I'm doing to perform rites or the like. I'd be interested in who performed your rites and initiations, primarily because it'd be interesting to see who is actually around with the appropriate privileges but doesn't have the positions required.
Now if you want to use your experience then I guess I'll highlight, per your post you didn't actually contact me regarding advancement at all. Even after you were successful at passing them, you didn't offer to become an undersecretary and help out with the novices at all (I know this because if you had you would be one). I don't know what Gabriella lectured you about, but it can't have been too bad because you've apparently stuck around long enough afterwards to start unenemying people. Now we could get into a discussion just from what I can observe right now but that would be off-topic, what I will say is that if you're going to blame a single person for you giving up on a leadership position then you've probably just proven that you aren't suited to it because that is pretty much the job description.
Guild leaders are blamed for everything, they're very rarely, if ever, rewarded for the work that they do. Generally at best they might get the guild honour for their service, sometimes only to have it stripped away later, or maybe some credits which comes at the cost of their guild gaining money for expansions and the like from credit sales. So in the end, you sit around working for the guild, trying to make the game a better place or at the least just ensure that your guild keeps functioning, and all the while getting yelled at for anything that goes wrong while anything that goes right is just expected as part of the job.
And I'd like to encourage @Felicia to keep trying to interact with people.
Bear in mind, I didn't get discouraged and quit after the first day/week. As I mentioned earlier, real life forced me to leave Lusternia. I played for months, enjoyed participating in Glomdoring-related activities, became a secretary of some kind in the Harbingers (I feel awful for dropping that responsibility, but family illness > MUDs), wrote a play and some songs, designed some clothing and jewelry, visited my friends in Hallifax frequently, enjoyed bashing some sort of cloud/lightning creatures on what I suppose was an air elemental plane, bought a bunch of credits and spent a bunch of lessons, bought a curing system and tried (and failed badly, of course) at combat, and so on. I believe I was working on building an aethermanse when I left.
I overcame the difficulties. The only other "newbie perspective" in this thread was from someone who gave up early on, and I figured my words might carry a little more weight. That doesn't make me the be-all, end-all authority of course; I just wanted to weigh in.
I'm not here to say "The game's dying, it's terrible!" because that's silly. The population is about the same as it was when I last played. However, the very existence of this thread is an indicator that there's an issue. The other two top IRE games don't have these sorts of threads, and I know because I've been reading the help files and forums of the top three IRE game for the past week or so, deciding on where I want to play. I may yet return to Lusternia.
Comments
The quest has to be repeated every RL day. There are 10 strands on the lock, and 1 decays every RL day. So you can miss a few days here and there, but if you don't catch back up and keep missing days, eventually the lock will break. So if a few days are missed, the quest has to be done a few extra times to make sure it doesn't break.
That's the natural state of things, and a state everyone, including newbies, should want to maintain and encourage.
However, taking for granted the established players' kindness is nothing but gross arrogance. To phrase things in a way that implies that the newbie retention is important because newbies are god is a mis-interpretation of the social nature of this game. No player is beholden to any newbie for any reason. If, as a newbie, you cannot accept the hard work that players put in for your sake with grace and gratitude, then you have no right to join in our social game and reap the benefits of our solidarity. I'm referring specifically to the newbie who Llandros chased away, whatever his name was. Good riddance, basically, is what I am saying.
No one, including these "nasty veterans", wants to see newbies trolled away. But neither do we appreciate getting our work thrown in our face like we are servants who should cater to the whims of a spoiled brat. Even "anti-social combatants" put in effort to help newbies sometimes. I see no reason why I should bend over backward to retain newbies who would group people up on an arbitrary genre and throw them in a box like so much discarded chaff, because these are the very kinds of newbies who would end up being nothing but a pest in the future. I will bend over backwards and give my firstborn to retain a newbie who knows humility and works hard instead.
The woes faced by newbies during off-peak are aplenty. This is when players are not around to help. This thread seeks ideas and brainstorms to find ways to alleviate this problem, and I believe both the admin and the players are all trying their very best to do so. The woes faced by newbies during peak hours are far less common, but when such problems crop up, they need to be fixed. When there are players around who are ignoring hardworking newbies, then yes, we need to look at population spread issues and find ways to fix it, or add mechanics to improve it, like Covenants. Whether these measures are succeeding or not is up for debate, and if they are not, I'm sure the admin will consider further measures as well.
I don't see a need for players to do even more than what they are already doing, however. The established norms of our newbie helping volunteers are top-grade.
I love the individual guilds' concepts and always have, their histories all being very detailed and the cohesiveness of the entire story is really quite remarkable. I still, as a player, feel a bit of sadness when a guild I love is faltering. As much as I hate to admit it, I do feel that consolidation of guilds is the best hope for solving the population issues. That being said, I don't have any hope of that actually happening, and I think that speaks of an overly cautious conservatism. So, in the interest of realism, I'll ignore what I think is necessary to address and make a significant positive impact on the population spread.
Since we can't really take care of the population, the only thing that's going to flesh out our organizations (albeit slowly) is new player retention. The biggest problem I can identify here that we can do something about is how novices get treated. I can not count the number of times I've seen novices have polite requests for help or clarification go unanswered on CGT, despite their being college professors, undersecretaries, secretaries and/or GA's online. The difference between silence and informing them you're busy is huge, in my opinion.
Complete inattentiveness on the part of players who have chosen to take on positions which involve the training and assistance of novices is near inexcusable, in my opinion. Yes, each player has a right to play the game in a manner that brings enjoyment to them (within certain boundaries, obviously). However, in any appointed or elected position relating to the care of novices, a choice has been made - that should be a willingness to go out of your way to help new players. I have no problem with people who want to spend all their time lurking in manses or hunting, that's their business - I have a huge problem with those people occupying and subsequently ignoring the responsibilities of certain positions.
The problem becomes cyclical because advancement to a certain guild rank is often a requirement to take on these positions. If the GA or (under)secretaries are inattentive, someone that actually wants to fulfill the duties of the position is going to have a very difficult time getting to the necessary guildrank and appointed.
It's simply the only option remaining if the administration declines to consolidate guilds/orgs in any way. A sudden influx of new players would be an interesting case of a problem miraculously solving itself, but I think that that can be safely discounted. The hidden fourth option is chat channel consolidation to some degree or another, which has been suggested before in this thread... yet there are already Covenants (implemented two years after I played), and I can't speak to them one way or another, other than to say that they don't seem to have caused a population explosion.
I find this very interesting given your role in-game and the situation I was presented with recently. The week I re-joined the Hartstone recently was my finals week, so I was on Lusternia 12+ hours a day. It still took me the entire week to find someone to grade my Rites and Initiations to get to GR3, and ultimately the two people who did all of it were neither guild leaders nor under/secretaries. While I might have been able to contact you and Gabriella via message to set up a time specifically, that is a big hurdle to put true newbies through and I suspect most would be much more likely to sit at GR1 or leave the guild.
You are saying that those more suited to the position will bubble up and take over, but I'm not convinced that is the case. When I then started an election for the vacant GC slot, I was greeted with a half hour lecture by Gabriella on how I was doing my job wrong before I had even won. Had I been a fresh but qualified lowbie who was running for a position, being met with politics like that would have probably ended with me leaving the game (but instead I've just alted out and am having a great time in another guild while the Hartstone gets another vacant leader).
Covenants are still relatively new. You can't expect anything to be an instant fix that will result in 50 newbies logging in the next day, but I believe they are helpful to novice retention in the quieter guilds - they have more people to talk to when their guild is quiet, they mechanically have the ability to have their guild rank increased even if they can't find a leader in their own guild...it's not perfect, but it's an improvement. All the newbie changes to curing and hints and the like are aimed at encouraging the people who give Lusternia a try to stay around, by making those early days more palatable. I think the recent accusations thrown at Estarra saying she doesn't care/refuses to fix the problem are grossly unfair. Just because she hasn't given in to -your- belief (by your I mean the people suggesting it) that the only option is to cull guilds doesn't mean she is refusing to address the problem.
A large part of why people stay is because of character interaction, absolutely. Coming to the forums and saying 'Estarra refuses to do anything, all the players are lazy, I'm never playing again' really doesn't inspire people to go out and hug a novice, in my humble opinion. Instead of pointing fingers at which absent guild leader's fault it is that novices leave, how about we return to the purpose of this thread, to find possible ways to make population spread less of an issue. Delete guilds/should never have made guilds/new cities etc isn't exactly constructive, regardless how true the statement might be. Let's get back to some practical, likely to be implemented ideas!