What should happen to seeking?

[Kinaed]

This thread made us question if seeking is really okay, or if it should change - and if so, how:

viewtopic.php?f=28&t=1228

Sadly, we're not entirely sure we like the ideas in the thread and have some ideas of our own. Please vote and reply with what you like!

[Tremere]

I know that there have been times I've wished for kind of the opposite of sponsorship. A quiet command of anti-support to let the GL know why I am against someone, if I don't think they are the right fit. But really overall I think that GL's should be solely responsible ultimately. Perhaps when someone is seeking it posts to the guild and the guild can respond in some way, visible only to the GL's their opinion on the sponsorship, whether they are okay with it, neutral or against it for whatever reason. Then the GL can interview, base their decision based upon what the little poll said in part and on the interview.

[chronodbu]

I don't really feel like members of the guild should make or break someone being able to join. If the GL feels strongly one way or the other, then the GL should have the authority to make that decision.

Think of it this way. If the head of your department at work wanted to let someone have a job but one of his management under him said no, who has the final say? He does. GL's are in a position of authority and should have the right to exercise it.

[Annalesa]

I don't know that leaving it up to just GLs is realistic given the time period.

However, there being certain basic roles available to be applied to directly in chargen for certain guilds that maybe don't have enough players in them or at the want of the GL, I do like a great deal.

I'd personally be much more inclined to play certain roles if the process of joining their guilds wasn't such a pain. Knight, for example, can be difficult to get sponsors for, at least in my experience.

[Kinaed]

The reason this poll came to be is because staff discussed this topic a bit and had several questions come up that we couldn't really answer clearly:

- Are people prepared to have people purchasing into roles? If yes, under what circumstances?
- To what degree is guilding essential for a character's identity? How much does it affect people not to be guilded, etc? Is guilding very central to the game, and what role do guilds play? Is this the role that they ought to?
- Do we want GLs to be solely responsible? On the forum post we linked to above, a GL said they didn't want to have sole responsibility, but also we had a problem back in the day with GLs guilding and promoting their buddies whilst everyone else in the guild languished.
- Is the seeking RP at all beneficial? A lot of people seem to not enjoy it at all, particularly guild members who vette people that just disappear (and probably disappear because it can be too hard to get into a guild to play a character they want to), but equally we have seen people say it helps them get established and they love the system.
- Should seeking be partly OOC or can the sponsorship approvals be partly OOC? We get the sense that for some people, the whole seeking process has been hijacked by an OOC philosophy that everyone who wants to join a guild has a right to play that kind of character, so why are we bothering with sponsorships at all if it's just a rubber stamp that Joe Bloggs doesn't have an issue with Jane Doe?
- Should we flip seeking to rather be a vote to keep someone out that's thrown up to a GL to be vetted rather than a consensus approach to getting someone in?
- If we get rid of seeking because the bulk of players believe RP is 95% a crappy speedbump to becoming established, what do we have in its place?
- Can guilds get too big and should controls be put into place regarding how large they are? Or maybe cleansing out inactives? What ought to be done then?

Staff had a bad experience where GLs could just app people into roles they needed - we found that people who joined the guild and worked their way up were overshadowed by people who just got apped in over the long-term guild members, and we're not keen to return to that because people who didn't work for the roles seem to be less inclined to be proactive leaders. This is how the GL-centric model we used to have evolved into a minimum number of sponsors.

In juggling these issues, though - where does the best system fall? The staff didn't really have a clear answer that we held in agreement, just high level brush strokes, hence the poll!

[Voxumo]

Alright, here's my thought views on this.

The majority of people who complain that the seeking is boring, or some other such nonsense, are those also often don't stay around. Like it or not, you don't get into a company just by showing up. You often have to first find the job even exists, speak to someone in the company to find out when an interview could be done, and then you actually have to do an interview. Since this is medieval times, I like to think that the sponsoring fills the role of everything that goes on before the actual interview with the 'head honcho'.

Is seeking rp beneficial at all? It's rp is it not? In a game where on a daily basis you hear people complain about not being able to find rp, you would think ways to create rp would be welcomed... and in the end you still get xp, regardless of what type of rp it was.

I think a seeker requiring a reason to be added onto their seeking is a smart idea, but I feel it would also require some notification to GL's, to make it apparent they are seeking. When playing Earl Marshall as Misune, there were several times I did not know anyone was seeking until they sent a letter, or something of that sort. Adding a reason to the seeking would in a way negate any need for a letter to be sent.

I do not think GLs should be solely responsible for guilding people. I agree with the reasons stated above, it just allows people to automatically let their friends in, but also it helps to deter those who wouldn't guild anyone. I'll be honest, if I had real full control without having to take into consideration the rp my guildmembers had with seekers, 40 percent of seekers would not make it into the guild. At least by requiring sponsors, I can see that my fellow guildmembers saw something good in this seeker.

Entry-level roles being available in chargen? I hope to god that never happens, With the way people come and go, or just bloody disappear in guilds, inviting more of that would just be annoying for a gl. On top of that if a GL has to remove a bad apple that purchased said role, you know it will be turned against them with some logic like 'If they were so bad, why did you let them in in the first place?" you can't very well icly go "I had no control over their initial joining.' On top of all this as I stated earlier, it negates any of that seeking rp, which is valuable to getting established in the guild, meeting the people you may one day work alongside. It helps to promote that sense of bond that so many guilds don't have.

So yeah, in summary, Seeking should remain the way it is. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with it, just people want instant gratification. They don't want to work for that role, thinking it is owed to them. As I've said in the Order/Knight chat many times, I would prefer quality over quantity. I'd rather have 4 people I know will take the role and job seriously versus 10 who I can't depend on.

we found that people who joined the guild and worked their way up were overshadowed by people who just got apped in over the long-term guild members,

This right here... Oh my god this. There is one thing I've hated for the longest time, and that is when characters join a guild, and because they make up their backstory as having many many years prior experience in the guild, it ends up overshadowing those who have actually spent real time in the guild with that character. I only recently realized this after misune hit 2 years of being in the Knights, 8 years icly... Being overshadowed by someone who just joined the guild, but have an expansive backstory is frustrating as all hell.

[The_Last_Good_Dragon]

As the author of the linked thread, my answer remains allowing sponsorship with reasons, even potentially OOC ones so long as a scene did in fact take place.

Is seeking rp beneficial at all? It's rp is it not? In a game where on a daily basis you hear people complain about not being able to find rp, you would think ways to create rp would be welcomed... and in the end you still get xp, regardless of what type of rp it was.

Required RP is rarely fun; telling someone they must do something a specific way is no fun.

[Voxumo]

As the author of the linked thread, my answer remains allowing sponsorship with reasons, even potentially OOC ones so long as a scene did in fact take place.

Is seeking rp beneficial at all? It's rp is it not? In a game where on a daily basis you hear people complain about not being able to find rp, you would think ways to create rp would be welcomed... and in the end you still get xp, regardless of what type of rp it was.

Required RP is rarely fun; telling someone they must do something a specific way is no fun.

No one is telling them they have to seek a specific way, afterall the seeking process is undefined for a reason. Some sponsors like to have interviews, others like to spar if it's a more combat oriented guild, and required rp can be fun if you go into with a positive mindset. Having played for 3 years now, I don't think I have ever ran into a seeking scene, Being the seeker and sponsor, that I would consider particularly bad. It may not have gone the way I expected, but it was still rp.

And if you want to consider it required rp, you could consider all the rp in the game as required. You have to rp to progress in the game. This is the exact same thing. You want to progress into the guild, you've got to rp about it. This is a game about rp.

And as an afterthought, there are some guilds where seeker rp is an absolute must. Such as the Covert guilds, though the brotherhood is the only covert guild currently. Do you expect the tenebrae to just meet with every seeker without sending one of their grunts first to check them out? I sure as hell wouldn't.

[chronodbu]

we found that people who joined the guild and worked their way up were overshadowed by people who just got apped in over the long-term guild members,

This right here... Oh my god this. There is one thing I've hated for the longest time, and that is when characters join a guild, and because they make up their backstory as having many many years prior experience in the guild, it ends up overshadowing those who have actually spent real time in the guild with that character. I only recently realized this after misune hit 2 years of being in the Knights, 8 years icly... Being overshadowed by someone who just joined the guild, but have an expansive backstory is frustrating as all hell.

The app process is there for a reason. Frustrating as it may be, seniority and an expansive backstory don't help when a guild lacks leadership in needed roles to make it function properly.

[BattleJenkins]

One idea I was a fan of was the waiting period with the possibility of 'anti-sponsoring' in the middle of that time, coupled with a minimum RP hour requirement before you could be guilded (to insure that your character has a chance to develop some sort of reputation one way or another). All in all, I'm definitely for anything that reduces a bit of the workload on the GL - being a GL feels a lot like a second job sometimes, and I know that the Merchants definitely don't get the worst of it in that regard! Even though a lot of the materials involved in the literature around seeking seems to imply that the seeker should be very proactive, I find that there's a whole lot of expectation on the GL to help organize sponsorships and to play a fairly active role in getting people guilded, even if that person ends up falling off the face of the Earth before they stop being cyan.

I do think that it'd be a shame to take away one of the opportunities for new players to get into RP, but I do think that the seeking system as it is has enough problems that it's worth it to re-calibrate it at the very least.