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<DIV>I am surprised no one has commented on ongoing costs for guilds. I
think this is a good idea, not so much for taking money out of the game as for
building community. The need for a shared semi-permanent space is obvious
by the rousing commentary about castles - and as in real life every one wants to
carve out their own place and show it off. Guilds are nice but I expect
they are a bit too communal to satisfy that territory urge. I think
if you have castles people will forgo the guilds pretty quickly. Especially if
the castles have all sorts of perks like charging rooms and banks and
smithies. I would like to see this sort of thing avoided for castles and
have them stick to more homey kind of perks to obtain like display cases and
servants and extra levels (perhaps even a random dungeon below?) and
portals. I can invision a variety of houses from a small keep to a large
castle with creators for things like servants and guards, display cases,
additional levels, guardian beasts (for show), portals and other permanent
furniture.</DIV>
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<DIV>I am not too keen on having these structures available to thieves - it
seems like that idea might look good but I expect it would be pretty unpopular
in practice, not to mention throw the game out. I suspect that some
thieving will occur at any rate as people are always looking for exploitable
'features' in the game.</DIV>
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<DIV>Now guilds with the charging room and other perks such as discount
smithies, private money exhange, discount item repair shops they do/could become
more like a private club. Of course for these things it would be good to
have an ongoing costs to belong. The best way to do this AND grow a guild
mentality is to have ongoing costs for the founders. Leave it up to them
to come up with the cash - and they will organize membership drives and chase
down debtors. The current price for a guild is not enough to make it
more than an exclusive club. If the costs had to be defrayed however there
would be incentive to get more members. Perhaps a guild bank account
could be created and guild founders could have some way to add or remove players
from the member list and allow or bar access. You could also skim off the
top for services so that the more people use them the less the overall cost
becomes.</DIV>
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<DIV>I have almost finished a template for a mid sized keep and look forward to
making some other similar structures and improvements to the guild houses (some
of those names are a bit fluffy for my taste). Finding the java
editor was fantastic - and humbling when I found out how long it took to build
something that worked properly (not just looked nice) - even with this powerful
tool. One of the first things I made on my server was a 'club house' -
before guilds were available - so I know it is a popular idea. I just
think it would be simpler and faster to use the tools already available for
designing these structures and perhaps spend the effort on other system
enhancements to make them work well in the game (like guild banks and castle
taxes).</DIV>
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<DIV>I can see the attraction for building (I was enthralled by the Post Modern
MOO a long time ago) but think it a bit excessive for crossfire when there is
such a good tool for creating maps and such a derth of new maps being made and
submitted. Also, there is a huge need for cataloging and automating the
documentation of the existing items in the game, that an ingame editor would
just make huge problems right now. I think that improvements to the arch
collection and the documentation (in game as books and out game as
documentation) would be a good first step in the direction (I mean dm's can
create lots of stuff, but you still need to know how specify what to
create.) I can even see a 'deed' that will create a pre-made structure
somewhere on the map - but to have people digging out maps all over seems to be
somewhere way way way over the horizon.</DIV>
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<DIV>I seem to have exceeded my two cents here...</DIV>
<DIV>-tm</DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>